All is not well with the fundamentalist*1 project to solve their self-inflicted
star-light problem; they are in a mother of a muddle over it and they are arguing between themselves.
The contention of the fundamentalist ministry
Answers in Genesis is that the cosmos is a mere 6000 years old.
This creates an immediate and obvious issue if one is to accept that the
majority of stars are far more than 6000 light years in distant. Few people
today would question this finding of astronomy any more than they would
question that the Earth is a globe. For we are not dealing here with an abstruse question of mathematical astrophysics such as the precise details of the Big Bang
(or even if it is in fact a distant reality), or how the Moon was formed long ago, or how cometary statistics can be explained
with
the
hypothesized Oort cloud. Rather, we
are dealing with something that is relatively elementary; in fact the experimental data can be gathered
by anyone who walks into their garden at night, perhaps armed with a telescope
or binoculars, and looks up at the sky and observes the Milky Way: You don’t
need a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator or state of the art telescope
to gather this very elementary data and you don’t need a PhD in mathematical
astro-physics to interpret this data: This data can be gathered and interpreted
by any intelligent layman. On the assumption that the Milky Way is composed of
stars then a few calculations will confirm that these stars are a lot further
than 6000 light years. This is about what you can
observe and interpret in your garden and not about tentative & abstruse theoretical
astro-physics. Everyone agrees that here we have strong evidence of a cosmos whose age runs into billions of years.; everyone, that is, except Christian fundamentalists.
Cue the fundamentalist star-light problem: How does that light get to us in less than 6000 years?*
2
In this second part to my series on the latest developments in
fundamentalist attempts to address this issue, I will be looking at John
Hartnet’s criticsm of fellow fundamentalist Danny Faulkner; as I related in part 1 Faulkner has proposed his own “solution” to
the Genesis literalist’s star-light conundrum (See
here for part 1). However, since my post on Faulkner’s
“solution” a year ago other articles have popped on the AiG starlight page; in
particular the latest article, written by Faulkner himself, is for lay readers.
In this article Faulkner summarises his thinking (my emphases):
We need to recognize that God
used many processes during Creation Week that are different from processes
today. He didn’t make Adam instantaneously out of nothing, but instead formed
him from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7). God used a similar process to
make the land and flying animals (Genesis 2:19). And he caused the plants to
grow rapidly out of the ground on Day Three (Genesis 1:11–12). In other words,
God rapidly and miraculously matured many things during Creation Week. It seems
both logical and theologically consistent that, in a similar manner, God could
have rapidly “matured” the universe, bringing the light from distant objects to
the earth in a way similar to trees instantly sprouting and rising to full
height.
In addition to creating the
physical universe during Creation Week, God also created the laws that govern
it. What if these laws were not in full effect until the end of that week, as
we see when God created mature plants, land animals, and the first two humans?
Instead of bringing starlight to
earth according to physical laws, God could have miraculously solved the light
travel time problem on Day Four, before putting the laws that govern light
travel into effect. After all, nearly everything about creation was miraculous.
This is an essentially layman’s summary of what Faulkner has already
proposed: Viz:
Star light problem? No
problem! God “matured” everything miraculously during the “creation week” so
that by the end of that week the cosmos was all but indistinguishable to the
one we see. In Faulkner’s model star-light was, during the “creation week",
miraculously rushed to its destinations all over the cosmos (including the
Earth). Faulkner’s model is only a tad more honest than Whitcomb and Morris’s
in-transit creation of photons, a suggestion they made in their 1961 book
The Genesis Flood. Since then some fundamentalists
(including AiG, - but not fundamentalist John Byl; see
here)
have become uncomfortable with this doctrine because it blatantly cuts across
the integrity of the creation, a creation Christians see as the work of a God who does not lie: Signals created in transit would effectively have been created to
“lie” about their origins and deliver a false report about the events in the distant
cosmos.
Unlike Whitcomb and Morris, Faulkner is saying that star-light has truly
traversed its way across billions of light years of space, albeit miraculously
hurried along by God himself during the creation week. But…and this is the big “but”….
as we saw in my first part Faulkner’s
model, nevertheless, also has built into it bogus histories: Distant cosmic events like
supernovae, which have been observed by humans over hundreds if not thousands
of years, either would have to be all
crammed into the creation week or deceptively pre-embedded in the light rays that God
“shoots” across the universe: So, we're back to light beams which at best create
false impressions and at worst deliver false reports and fake news! Faulkner
can claim that in his “solution” light signals are telling the truth as to
where they are from, but his model would involve so much “creation week” special
pleading and contrivance that he’s almost back to square one and forced to posit a model which employs bogus histories.
But in the final analysis Faulkner can just sweep all these concerns away;
he can claim God is God and divine fiat means that God can do what He wants
even if his activity effectively tells lies creates a false impression
and deceives us about the way the cosmos works. And yet it seems that Faulkner’s model is the (currently)
preferred "solution" at AiG. Evidence for this is indicated by the fact that Faulkner’s
boss, Ken Ham, promoted Faulkner’s work in a blog post (see part 1). Moreover, since part 1 there has been another article posted on AiG’s star light page by a
fundamentalist called Lee Anderson. This article, as we shall see, also suggests
that Faulkner’s ideas go down well at AiG. The abstract of this article reads as
follows (my emphases):
The purpose of this paper is to
evaluate such cosmological models from a biblical (exegetical and theological)
perspective, seeking to determine if they are consistent with Scripture. The
specific interpretive claims of these models will be examined, as well as their
overarching implications concerning the principal focus of the Genesis creation
narrative and the intent of the biblical author in light of his understanding
of the text’s original readers. This paper concludes that these cosmological
models are dependent on strained exegesis and that they introduce
interpretations dependent on modern scientific ideas that would have been
foreign to the original readers.
I’ve only dipped into this paper but the general impression is that this
fundamentalist theologian isn’t too impressed with the efforts made so far by
fundamentalist anti-scientists to solve the star-light problem and that they kowtow too much to modern science. In Anderson’s view fundamentalist astronomers
should spend more time interpreting the Bible according to fundamentalist hermeneutic rules
before they move onto the science. Anderson has at least got one thing right: Viz:
Modern scientific ideas would have been
foreign to the original readers. But it never occurs to this kind of writer
that perhaps that is why the ancients generated a mythical creation account rather than a
literal account; a literal account would have been well beyond their concept range. All they needed to know was the essential theology of creation; i.e. the order and purpose of creation and that it
was God who made it and organised it, contrary to many of the pagan ideas at the time.
Anderson is very critical of Russ Humphreys’ time dilation “solution”
which in the final analysis admits to the existence of billions of years of time
in the universe at large, although gravitational time dilation is supposed to
slow time in the vicinity of the Earth so much that only 6000 years have
passed on Earth since creation. Russ Humphreys' efforts represent another failed fundamentalist attempt to solve their star-light problem. Near the end of the article Anderson
comes out in favour of Faulkner’s model:
It is critical to foster a
commitment to a sound grammatical-historical hermeneutic and to a robust
theological method (moving from biblical theology, to systematic theology, to
worldview development, to interaction with scientific data) so as to avoid
inadvertently imposing on the biblical text models that are foreign to the
Scriptures. Faulkner’s proposal for a new solution to the light travel time
problem does this (albeit in a basic fashion; see Faulkner 2013b; Faulkner with
Anderson 2016, 199–220). It would be encouraging to see more works that take a
similar approach.
This, I think summarises where things are at with AiG: Namely, a fall-back
on the cop-out of
Creation Weekism. Problems? All the problems were miraculously solved during the creation week! As an
aside: The quote above tells us how clueless Anderson is about Biblical
hermeneutics. The connotational nature of natural language means that the
resources of translation form a huge hinterland of information and processing
power, a hinterland which exists well beyond the Biblical text: Scriptural interpretation
accesses the resources of history, current cultural knowledge and common understandings
of human nature. Therefore determining what is foreign to the Biblical writers must necessarily access the modern historian’s view of those ancient writers.
Thus our interpretations of Biblical texts are necessarily a function of our
own culture and knowledge; we cannot escape our world view and therefore we are
epistemically responsible for getting that world view right, thus enabling us
to deliver correct interpretations of scripture. Fundamentalist Jason Lisle
also gets this wrong; see
here.
Fundamentalists read scripture with the motive of seeking absolute certainties, certainties which give them a pretext to condemn
outsiders in the strongest possible terms (especially “apostate” Christians!).
Therefore fundamentalists much prefer a model of Scripture whereby they believe
they can bypass epistemic doubts & difficulties thus justifying in their
minds their highly authoritarian pronouncements.
***
So, after that long preamble I now wish to turn to Hartnett’s criticism
of Faulkner’s star-light “solution”, the current favourite at AiG. Mercifully, Hartnett’s
article is short: I have to confess that there’s a side of me which begrudges
having to untangle the complex mental knots that fundamentalists tie themselves
into with their anti-science! There are other more constructive things I could
be doing with my time.
However, I feel sorry for Hartnett. As with Russ Humphreys Hartnett doesn’t
want to patch in miracles willy-nilly to make it all work; rather he wants to
do a bit of genuine science, something that fundamentalist culture with its
emphasis on a God who “speaks stars into existence”
does not favour. Of Faulkner’s proposal Hartnett writes the following (my
emphases):
Firstly, this is not a new
proposal. In my book Starlight Time and the New Physics, first published 2007,
I mentioned this very proposal as a possibility, which I discounted
immediately. I excerpt the relevant text here:
“There is a way around this
issue, a really complex and ad hoc miracle that would enable the creation of a
beam of light from source to observer so that the observer appears to see
current information. For example, when the supernova named 1987a occurred in
the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is about 170,000 light-years distant, God
could have miraculously translated the light across 170,000 light-years’
distance of space instantly (as if the photons had passed through a wormhole)
and then just outside the solar system let it move at the usual speed of light.
This hypothesis is untestable and,
though not impossible, seems implausible, to put it mildly. Miracles in the Bible are rare and special
events, the purpose of which is clearly understood and/or revealed. This does
not fit that category; it looks more like a convenient set of miracles invented
ad hoc to overcome a difficulty”. (Hartnett 2010, p. 27)
Faulkner’s concept is that God miraculously did it, so it is
exactly as I envisaged there. The most serious problem with his proposal can be
broken down this way. If you say that while God did this He also
suspended all the other laws of physics necessary to translate the light
(the photons), from the source to the receiver, but only when it arrives in the
solar system those laws again all apply, then
the proposal is untestable. (There is nothing else to do.)
Hartnett then goes on to consider what he thinks might be the observable
effects of Faulkner’s proposal: After all, Hartnett’s article is entitled:
Critique: Faulkner’s Miraculous
Translation of Light Model Would Leave Evidence
Hartnett looks at the kind of mechanisms God might have used to carry
out the miracle: If God miraculously accelerated the photons then we would
expect that the light from across the inverse would show “massive blue shifts”. Alternatively, if
God did it by stretching space then we would see massive redshifts. At one point Hartnett is
reminded of Setterfield’s failed light-speed-decay hypothesis where, he says, an unholy collection of improbable coincidences
are needed. Presumably Harnett sees Faulkner's work as just as unholy!
But why should Hartnett’s otherwise reasonable call on the logic of
physics carry any weight at all among fellow fundies when they are apt to use
arbitrary divine magic fiat to contrive anything? (cf “God spoke the stars into existence!” - a variant on "hey presto!"). Why in the miraculous creation week should
stretching or accelerating light result in spectral shifts if the laws of
physics don’t apply during that week? Surely extrapolating physical logic into
that week is a hazardous exercise; at what point do the laws of physics as a
reliable guide to what has happened end and the inscrutably miraculous start?
Faulkner has the freedom to rig up anything and he can simply wave it all away
with a “God did it!”, end of story, no science is needed! Hartnett, however, is aware that Faulkner’s
thesis does provide a bottomless supply of ad hoc miraculous resorts waiting in
the wings to bail out his “theory”, although clearly Hartnett doesn’t like it
one little bit:
I am sorry to say that Faulkner’s
proposal here is not new and it does not have any substance at present.
Currently, therefore, it fails in what it sets out to do. Unless these
objections are answered it is not a solution to the problem.
If you contain the substance of the model to the totally miraculous, in
the sense that you postulate that none of the obvious observations are possible
due to God suspending all relevant laws so that these known aspects of physics
do not apply in this instance, it is an ad hoc proposal which can never be
refuted. I included the idea in my book, along with
several others, because I cannot be certain that God did not act that way, but
in my opinion it is highly unlikely.
The science starved Hartnett craves a coherent comprehensible creation
where light signals don’t deliver a set of unholy lies and where an underlying physical logic makes
the cosmos comprehensible:
I expect a creationist solution
to include the fact that everything we see in the universe obeys the current
testable laws of physics, which are the creation of God (Hartnett 2011b). That
does not mean He did not suspend laws while creating, but that what we observe can be relied upon using known physics.
Hartnett is making a forlorn call to physics but it’s not going to wash
with the literalist ultras who so thoroughly enamored of divine magic.
In part 3 I will look at Faulkner’s reply to Hartnett, but we might have
to wait another year: Fundamentalist anti-science is just not worth spending too
much time with.
Footnotes
*1 I use the term
fundamentalist to designate an attitude rather than
plain Biblical literalism. Although Biblical literalism is often a condition of
fundamentalism it is not a sufficient condition. For example Christians like
Paul Nelson and
Sal Cordova believe in a young earth but their willingness to
form constructive relations with Christians who don’t agree with them makes
them amenable parties and excludes them from a fundamentalist classification.
The Wiki definition of "fundamentalism" sums
it up well:
Fundamentalism usually has a religious connotation that indicates
unwavering attachment to a set of irreducible beliefs. However,
fundamentalism has come to be applied to a tendency among certain
groups—mainly, though not exclusively, in religion—that is characterized by a
markedly strict literalism as it is applied to certain specific scriptures,
dogmas, or ideologies, and a strong sense of the importance of maintaining
ingroup and outgroup distinctions, leading to an emphasis on purity
and the desire to return to a previous ideal from which advocates believe
members have strayed. Rejection of diversity of opinion as applied to these
established "fundamentals" and their accepted interpretation within
the group is often the result of this tendency.
We can see this cultic insider vs outsider ethos well developed
in Ken Ham.
*2 As has been pointed out by Faulkner himself, the fundamentalist star-light conundrum starts as soon as Adam sees the stars!
Relevant links
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html
The AiG Star-light page can be found here:
https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/
