Young-Earth Creationism VS. Astronomical Phenomena

Continuing on with our examination of modern Christian folk-science: here is just one example of the mind-numbing effect of Young-Earth Creationism (YEC) on the science of astronomy. Excluding the modern-day geocentricists, most creationists will openly admit that the universe stretches billions of light-years in every direction. This apparent vastness of the cosmos provides a physical context in which the finite speed of light, the far-reaching effects of gravity, and the incredible masses of celestial objects require astronomers to assume many billions of years of cosmic time in order to even begin to make sense of the heavens.

The assumption of cosmic antiquity is especially true when studying the natural life-cycle of stars, a very well-known physics-based process that can take anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of billions of years to complete, depending on the mass of the star. The higher mass stars end their lives with tremendous explosions of light and heat, called supernova, which provide the additional energy required to fuse elements heavier than iron. These cosmic explosions are critical to our understanding of the heavens.

Unfortunately, one of the non-negotiable faith-assumptions of YEC is that there can be no death whatsoever prior to the fall, which is estimated to have occurred about 6,000 years ago. Now why does this qualify as Christian folk-science? Well, just as medieval Christians tried to manipulate the doctrine of the fall to answer a question of physical geography (remember the antipodes), some modern Christians use this same doctrine to explain scientific concepts like entropy, death, and decay in terms of historic Christian orthodoxy. So how well does this work? Here are a few excerpts from chapters 9 and 10 of my daughter’s 5th grade astronomy textbook.

“God only creates perfect heavenly bodies.”

“Because of the Fall, all stars are dying.”

Sin is ultimately responsible for cosmic catastrophes, such as exploding stars.”

“No such thing as star-death occurred prior to the fall.”

These statements are contrary to everything that is known about modern astronomy. In case you are wondering how somebody with a PhD in astronomy can make such bold claims, you might be surprised to know that the good “doctor” here is actually a chemical engineer with zero professional training in the astronomical sciences. Of course you don’t see that little piece of trivia advertised on the front cover. Just the title of “doctor” on a scientific-looking book about astronomy.

It is quite an arrogant thing to publish a scientific textbook containing multiple unsupported claims that contract the established scientific consensus without ever having studied or conducted any original research on the issues in question. In the real world where correct science actually matters, a chemical engineer with no formal training in astronomy would never be allowed to write an astronomy textbook unless it was carefully researched and accurately reflected the scientific consensus established by those professionals who devote their lives to the study of the heavens. But professional credibility is of no concern when doing Christian folk-science. All you really need is a scientific-sounding paradigm that raises no challenging theological questions – it doesn’t have to work.

For instance, there is absolutely no way a professional astronomer could effectively study supernova using this paradigm. It either places all observed supernovae within 6,000 light years of earth – any one of which would have bombarded the planet with deadly radiation – or it requires the speed of light to have been much greater in the past – which destroys the fundamental relationship between time, mass, energy according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. But if we are willing to step outside of our theological comfort zones, and accept the possibility that billions of stars had already burned through their nuclear fuel before Adam and Eve ever walked with God in the Garden, dying stars can actually tell us quite a bit about the created order.

For instance, the nearest SN in modern times is SN1987a in the Large Magallanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy to the Milky Way roughly 160,000 ly away. About a year after the explosion, light from the blast struck a ring of gas surrounding the star. Using the known speed of light and the time it took the light to reach the ring, the diameter of the gas ring can be calculated, which also allows you to calculate the distance from earth to the star using simple geometry; and if the measurement shows that we’re not in the LMC, then one of our assumptions about the universe is wrong: either the speed of light is not constant, or our methods for measuring astronomical distance are flawed.

Using simple trigonometry, the distance to SN1987a is calculated to be 168,000 ly away, which places it right in the LMC, confirming both the astronomical distance to the LMC and the constancy of the speed of light over at least past 170,000 years. Now since the good engineer here is kind enough to agree with the astronomical distances measured by those with advanced degrees in the subject, he simply concludes that the speed of light must have been much faster in the past. Problem solved? Not really.

What Dr. Henry seems to forget is that this speed-of-light-decay hypothesis is actually quite an easy thing to test. In fact, a simple calculation using a logarithmic decay equation, the most common type of decay found in nature, shows that the light leaving SN1987a needed to have been 487 times faster than its current measurement in order to have decayed enough to reach its present value and still make the 168,000 ly journey in less than 6,000 years. So if our astronomical distance measurements are correct, and trigonometry works the same in space as it does on earth, then the super-fast light from the blast should have hit the gas ring in only a few hours when it actually took about a year.

Not only is there absolutely no evidence that the speed of light has been decaying over the past 6,000 years, but there are several easy tests just like this one that demonstrate the exact opposite: that the speed of light has been constant over the entire course of cosmic history. And since we can observe objects over 10 billion light-years away, the assumption of a 6,000 year-old universe is of no use when looking towards the heavens.

In the natural sciences, when a hypothesis is contradicted by simple observation, this is known as falsification, and it happens all the time. But when our scientific assumptions are loosely held, proponents of discredited ideas eventually abandon them, return to the drawing board and start over. Unfortunately, this is not the case with folk-science. Even though the vastness of the cosmos and the constancy of the speed of light have been repeatedly confirmed by direct observation, these speed-of-light-decay theories are still alive in creationist circles committed to a young earth. While the scientific community thrives on novelty and everybody wants to discover something new, only those scientists who are committed to the young-earth doctrine entertain these speed-of-light-decay theories.

Some of them actually sound very convincing. In fact, if you make enough untestable assumptions, it is possible to concoct a complicated scenario in which these things could be possible. I have no doubt that somehow, somewhere, there is a YEC who has contrived a scenario to explain SN1987a, millisecond pulsars, and the radiometric decay of interstellar isotopes all in terms of a young universe, but practicing scientists prefer those paradigms that assume as little as possible and that make no assumptions incapable of adding anything non-trivial to our systematic study of the cosmos. Unfortunately, YECs will usually pile up as many immaterial assumptions required to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. This is why ideas about speed-of-light-decay are only entertained by those convinced that the Bible demands a recently-created universe.

Now what about this idea that the universe is really young, but God simply created it to look old?  This is known as the “appearance of age” doctrine. The reason I call it a doctrine and not a hypothesis is because there is no way to test it. If the universe was created overnight to look like it does right now, and all of our memories were implanted, we wouldn’t know the difference, and we couldn’t disprove it. Anything used to demonstrate age would be part of the apparent reality and not the authentic reality. A scientific hypothesis, on the other hand, makes testable predictions and is always at risk of being disproved.

For this very reason, appearance-of-age doctrines are trivial doctrines that add nothing to our systematic study of the created order. In other words, if the entire cosmos was created with 13.7 billion years of cosmic history built into it, then guess what we’re going to have to study in the science classroom? We’re still going to have to sort through the data as it appears to us now and draw non-trivial conclusions according to what we find. And since an apparently-old universe would look no different than an authentically-old universe, this “appearance-of-age” doctrine is completely useless for adding anything to our material knowledge of the universe – and hence it is not laboratory science, but folk-science.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 9:32 am and is filed under Christian Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.