Faulkner on Young Earthism's Biggest Problem

Biblical literalist organisation Answers in Genesis' tame  astronomer Danny Faulkner has recently put together an article  entitled "Seeing Stars in a Young Universe".  The article is written for a lay audience and promotes Faulkner's "solution" to the problem of how stars millions of light years away can be seen in the night sky given the literalist's 6000 year old universe. Faulkner's solution simply amounts to the assertion that God gave light signals a miraculously fast travel time during the creation week and that this miraculous speed allowed the signals to arrive at their destinations. This solution at least acknowledges the problem of creative integrity; namely, that those signals we get from distant stars weren't deceptively created en route to give us false information about a ghost cosmos that never really existed. I'll hand it to Faulkner that he is making a gallant attempt to address an  important question: Does God value integrity of creation?  But alas, there are big problems with his solution which I discuss in my three part series entitled "YOUNG EARTHISM'S BIGGEST PROBLEM". In particular there is a problem with super novae. See these links:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/07/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2020/02/no-progress-on-young-earthisms-biggest.html

This series was going to have a forth part where I was to consider John Hartnett's work that tries to build on Jason Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention(ASC) model. I have to confess that nowadays I'm rather under-motivated in this respect as I have already spent far too much time studying the popularist articles that young earthist gurus put out largely aimed at their lay following. Even the so-called technical articles are there to reassure their patrons that young earthist gurus have the situation under control. But after giving young earthism much consideration, frankly I feel that further effort on Hartnett's work is not the most profitable way to spend my time. Moreover, it seems that at "Answers in Genesis" Faulkner's ideas are preferred to Lisle's can of worms. (See also links above).

Faulkner strikes me as a nice bloke, unlike his boss Ken Ham who is a raving authoritarian, Trump voting, simple minded, QAnon courting, spiritual bully. (See here, here and here for a small sample of this fundamentalist's behavior, and my own experience of being bullied by Ken here). Faulkner has worked hard to refute the outbreak of flat earthism among Biblical literalists (...what one might call the logic of late fundamentalism!). He also has a way of taking the astronomical problems of young earthism seriously rather than writing them off by cliche-surfing the canned canard's of fundamentalist thinking (See here). 

But let me finish this post by referencing and criticizing something I've criticized before. In his recent star-light article Faulkner writes:

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.

Faulkner has left us with a major paradox here: If one accepts for the sake of argument that many of the processes during the creation "week" are different from the processes of today and that the laws governing creation were not in full effect until the end of that "week" then the upshot is a conundrum. Viz: The definition of physical time is defined by those laws. So if those laws were in the process of being settled during the creation "week" how then do we measure that week in terms of days? Can we then be so dogmatic about that the creation "day" of Genesis 1 being 86,400 seconds given that the second is defined in terms of physical law? Or is Faulkner trying to tell us that the measure of time is transcendent to the universe? Genesis 1:3 talks of the creation of light, so that could, I suppose, be the standard by which time is measured during the "week". But then Faulkner ruins it for himself by refuting it as a possible standard with his talk of miraculously fast light signals during the creation "week". But "fast" with respect to what standard? If God "rapidly" matured the universe during the creation week and we use, say, light speed as the standard to define the tick of the cosmic clock then we are back to a universe billions of years old!

But having said all that let me at least concede that if all young earthists were either a Faulkner or a Paul Nelson or a Sal Cordover I wouldn't have half the problems I do with abrasive bigots like Ken Ham (and Kent Hovind). But then it seems that the literalist movement needs personalities like Ham and Hovind to bully people into line.