Hyper velocity stars like LMC runaways ...

[oxmixmudd]

Saw this review of a paper today ( https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...-fsi062817.php )

NOTE: the link in the article to to the paper is invalid, use https://academic.oup.com/mnras/artic...3/mnras/stx848

Summary: Data analysis of hypervelocity stars correlated with the orbit of the Large Magellenic Cloud (LMC) indicate this stars are more likely to have originated with the cloud and inherited a large component of their velocity as observed in the Milky Way from that satellite galaxy's orbit. This offers a more plausible explanation of their origin (previous explanations implied what appeared to be somewhat rare sources and conditions) and is consistent with a locality which appears to be isolated to a few constellations.

While the study itself is interesting in and of itself, in terms of the debates that tend to rage here on TWEB, it is significant in that:

1) This is an example of the DATA driving the conclusion. Nobody made up the fact these stars have a velocity that is hard to explain, nobody forced the stars to tend to be found in certain constellations, nobody made the physics of alternative explanations unlikely.

2) This is an example of a state with implications for a history of the universe that must be measured in millions of years, not thousands. The LMC is hundreds of thousands of light years away. Even at the hyper velocity of these stars (>500km/s = .0016c), this implies around 96 million years for these stars to cross from the LMC into the Milky way assuming its current distance of ~160,000 ly.

3) to explain this sort of thing in a young universe (i.e. YEC's 6 to 10,000 years) requires the theologically troublesome assumption God created the universe with a 'pretend' history* - one that didn't actually happen, but one for which the current state of the universe is 100% consistent.


Jim

*or the introduction of 'special physics' a la Humphrey's WHC

[TheLurch]

See, i already knew this, because i kept seeing their photos on milk cartons.

[Just Passing Through]

I apologize for the length of this post, but it's going to take a while to explain. I think God has a lot more leeway in making our world and universe look natural than people are willing to accept. It’s not a “pretend” universe. It’s a universe and world that have been given as much of a natural appearance as it needs to serve all of God’s purposes. And he has many righteous purposes to do so:

One: To leave room for faith by leaving room for doubt. How could we say “by faith we understand that the worlds were formed at God’s command,” if we had proof? Any proof. If there was a single thing in all of creation that could not at least potentially be explained naturally (or simply ignored as a minor anomaly), there would be no room for doubt. Yet how could he possibly make this universe look even vaguely natural without also looking old? And I don’t just mean “old” as in mature or adult like Adam, but naturally old, with all the scars and wrinkles of natural age. I expect the heavens to declare the glory of God, but not to provide me with proof, any proof; that way my worship is free and trusting, not the only alternative I’ve been given.

Second: To not only leave room for faith but to nurture it. God tells us plainly that miracles do not create faith. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham said people would not believe even if someone came back from the dead. Both miracles and proof tend to get in the way of the true essence of faith, simple trust and utter reliance on God for wisdom. When God gave the Israelites proof in the wilderness, it tended to make them proud, self-entitled, and apt to complain whenever God didn’t do what they thought he should. That’s what his people would be like today if we were surrounded by the kind of pillar-of-fire proof that God is real which the Israelites had in the wilderness. (That’s what some of us are like even without such manifestations, but arrogance would be the norm, not the regrettable exception). So God has good reason to hide his miracles, why his angels stay invisible, why irrefutable faith-healings don’t come along every time one of God’s children pray. He hides his most incredible works behind the curtains of natural laws and natural history to keep us humble and trusting. But what other way could he possibly have hidden his biggest and greatest miracle of creation, except by the perfectly natural appearances of our world and universe?

Third: Even though God cannot lie, he is capable of doing things that not only will be misinterpreted, but which he intended to be, to obscure the truth, to withhold the truth from people who were not entitled to it, or even to mislead, in judgment on unbelief. He once commanded Israel to lay an ambush against Ai. But an ambush is deceptive; it tricks the enemy into thinking a small feint is the main attack. It was deceptive, but not a lie, for an army has no obligation to do what the enemy expects. (Just as God has no obligation to share his works and ways with the world). God himself used righteous deception when he created the sound of a mighty army, where none was coming, to scare away the Arameans (2 Kings 7), and made water look like blood to trick the Moabites into making a rash advance (2 Kings 3). I could add the instances when lying prophets served God’s purposes, although he himself did not do the lying. In general, the only miracles unbelievers are allowed to witness, as an unmistakable miracle, are miracles of judgment. Even when God spoke directly out of heaven at times, the unbelievers present only heard the sound of thunder. Whether the lack of evidence for a miraculous origin is judgment against unbelief or merely patience, giving his Word time to convert without miracles getting in the way, is an individual matter.

Fourth: Even for believers the obscuring of the truth serves a purpose, as a test and exercise of faith. God told Abraham to kill his son. Abraham could have said, “Well, that contradicts what I know about God’s character, therefore this cannot be from God.” No, the hardest test was also the best way to build Abraham’s faith. The hardest test of faith, to believe God is our creator even when the smartest and most respected scientists and the evidence of our own eyes may say, “No, he’s not,” serves God’s righteous purposes in a most gracious way.

Consider Job, who thought God was unjust to make a righteous man suffer. It contradicted Job’s sense of fairness and rightness and what he thought he knew of God’s character. When God says one thing in his Word, and the evidence of our eyes says something else, to say that God would be unrighteous or deceptive if he did what we don’t think a righteous God should have done, we’re being just like Job. God didn’t answer the accusation or explain why he did what he did; he just said, “Were you there when I created the world? Then you have no right to judge me or question how I do things you can’t understand.” We should expect the same answer if we make ourselves God’s judge and jury when we question what he tells us and what he has done in creation.

God could easily have given us a world that left no room for doubt. Instead of a sun, he could have put his own throne in the sky (and that would have been easier than designing stars from scratch). He could have given us a world that is capable of sustaining itself but impossible to develop naturally. He didn’t. He chose to give us a natural looking world. Whether he chose to do that by natural means or miraculous ones doesn't change the fact that he chose to give us a natural looking world. That wasn’t easy to do. No matter which theory of origins you hold to, that in itself should tell us he has a strong desire to lead us to trust in him as our creator by faith, not by sight, not by constant miracles or objectively provable miraculous origins, simply because he says so and not because the scientists say so.

The question is, if a perfect God chooses to make a natural-looking world, how natural will it look? If God has any righteous reasons at all to make the world look natural, then, as he is the perfect artist, he is also the perfect reproduction-artist; it wouldn’t just look natural when you look at it from a distance and see birds and trees and stars, but also up close. If he wanted to paint a Mona Lisa for us, in the natural style of da Vinci, and there was a single brush stroke that was unlike da Vinci’s pattern or if the canvas and paint were too new to be original, that would be a flaw in the reproduction. And God is flawless. It’s not deception, it is perfection of reproduction to serve all of God’s purposes simultaneously, to leave room for both faith and doubt, to give believers the opportunity to look like fools for God, cherishing his call to trust and follow him more than they care about the respect of the wise of this world, to pass judgment on those who doubt God’s Word, and to declare the glories of God in his wisdom, power, and goodness displayed in creation in a way that avoids taking away from us a kind of freedom of worship by giving us no alternative but to see God’s glory in creation.

[stfoskey15]

3) to explain this sort of thing in a young universe (i.e. YEC's 6 to 10,000 years) requires the theologically troublesome assumption God created the universe with a 'pretend' history* - one that didn't actually happen, but one for which the current state of the universe is 100% consistent.

We already have things like radioactive dating and measurements of distances to stars and galaxies more than 6,000 light years away. If none of that convinces YECs, why would this be any different?

[oxmixmudd]

We already have things like radioactive dating and measurements of distances to stars and galaxies more than 6,000 light years away. If none of that convinces YECs, why would this be any different?

One never knows what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. For me it was most notably first Stellar distances and ice layers, then paleo-rivers and Lake Suigetsu -but by no means was it just those. Eventually it all became just too much. Many YECs only read AIG/ICR etc and they have no idea the amount of evidence and its consiliency. Each random encounter with that data builds one after the other until perhaps it breaks through.


Jim

[rogue06]

I apologize for the length of this post, but it's going to take a while to explain. I think God has a lot more leeway in making our world and universe look natural than people are willing to accept. It’s not a “pretend” universe. It’s a universe and world that have been given as much of a natural appearance as it needs to serve all of God’s purposes. And he has many righteous purposes to do so:

One: To leave room for faith by leaving room for doubt. How could we say “by faith we understand that the worlds were formed at God’s command,” if we had proof? Any proof. If there was a single thing in all of creation that could not at least potentially be explained naturally (or simply ignored as a minor anomaly), there would be no room for doubt. Yet how could he possibly make this universe look even vaguely natural without also looking old? And I don’t just mean “old” as in mature or adult like Adam, but naturally old, with all the scars and wrinkles of natural age. I expect the heavens to declare the glory of God, but not to provide me with proof, any proof; that way my worship is free and trusting, not the only alternative I’ve been given.

Second: To not only leave room for faith but to nurture it. God tells us plainly that miracles do not create faith. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham said people would not believe even if someone came back from the dead. Both miracles and proof tend to get in the way of the true essence of faith, simple trust and utter reliance on God for wisdom. When God gave the Israelites proof in the wilderness, it tended to make them proud, self-entitled, and apt to complain whenever God didn’t do what they thought he should. That’s what his people would be like today if we were surrounded by the kind of pillar-of-fire proof that God is real which the Israelites had in the wilderness. (That’s what some of us are like even without such manifestations, but arrogance would be the norm, not the regrettable exception). So God has good reason to hide his miracles, why his angels stay invisible, why irrefutable faith-healings don’t come along every time one of God’s children pray. He hides his most incredible works behind the curtains of natural laws and natural history to keep us humble and trusting. But what other way could he possibly have hidden his biggest and greatest miracle of creation, except by the perfectly natural appearances of our world and universe?

Third: Even though God cannot lie, he is capable of doing things that not only will be misinterpreted, but which he intended to be, to obscure the truth, to withhold the truth from people who were not entitled to it, or even to mislead, in judgment on unbelief. He once commanded Israel to lay an ambush against Ai. But an ambush is deceptive; it tricks the enemy into thinking a small feint is the main attack. It was deceptive, but not a lie, for an army has no obligation to do what the enemy expects. (Just as God has no obligation to share his works and ways with the world). God himself used righteous deception when he created the sound of a mighty army, where none was coming, to scare away the Arameans (2 Kings 7), and made water look like blood to trick the Moabites into making a rash advance (2 Kings 3). I could add the instances when lying prophets served God’s purposes, although he himself did not do the lying. In general, the only miracles unbelievers are allowed to witness, as an unmistakable miracle, are miracles of judgment. Even when God spoke directly out of heaven at times, the unbelievers present only heard the sound of thunder. Whether the lack of evidence for a miraculous origin is judgment against unbelief or merely patience, giving his Word time to convert without miracles getting in the way, is an individual matter.

Fourth: Even for believers the obscuring of the truth serves a purpose, as a test and exercise of faith. God told Abraham to kill his son. Abraham could have said, “Well, that contradicts what I know about God’s character, therefore this cannot be from God.” No, the hardest test was also the best way to build Abraham’s faith. The hardest test of faith, to believe God is our creator even when the smartest and most respected scientists and the evidence of our own eyes may say, “No, he’s not,” serves God’s righteous purposes in a most gracious way.

Consider Job, who thought God was unjust to make a righteous man suffer. It contradicted Job’s sense of fairness and rightness and what he thought he knew of God’s character. When God says one thing in his Word, and the evidence of our eyes says something else, to say that God would be unrighteous or deceptive if he did what we don’t think a righteous God should have done, we’re being just like Job. God didn’t answer the accusation or explain why he did what he did; he just said, “Were you there when I created the world? Then you have no right to judge me or question how I do things you can’t understand.” We should expect the same answer if we make ourselves God’s judge and jury when we question what he tells us and what he has done in creation.

God could easily have given us a world that left no room for doubt. Instead of a sun, he could have put his own throne in the sky (and that would have been easier than designing stars from scratch). He could have given us a world that is capable of sustaining itself but impossible to develop naturally. He didn’t. He chose to give us a natural looking world. Whether he chose to do that by natural means or miraculous ones doesn't change the fact that he chose to give us a natural looking world. That wasn’t easy to do. No matter which theory of origins you hold to, that in itself should tell us he has a strong desire to lead us to trust in him as our creator by faith, not by sight, not by constant miracles or objectively provable miraculous origins, simply because he says so and not because the scientists say so.

The question is, if a perfect God chooses to make a natural-looking world, how natural will it look? If God has any righteous reasons at all to make the world look natural, then, as he is the perfect artist, he is also the perfect reproduction-artist; it wouldn’t just look natural when you look at it from a distance and see birds and trees and stars, but also up close. If he wanted to paint a Mona Lisa for us, in the natural style of da Vinci, and there was a single brush stroke that was unlike da Vinci’s pattern or if the canvas and paint were too new to be original, that would be a flaw in the reproduction. And God is flawless. It’s not deception, it is perfection of reproduction to serve all of God’s purposes simultaneously, to leave room for both faith and doubt, to give believers the opportunity to look like fools for God, cherishing his call to trust and follow him more than they care about the respect of the wise of this world, to pass judgment on those who doubt God’s Word, and to declare the glories of God in his wisdom, power, and goodness displayed in creation in a way that avoids taking away from us a kind of freedom of worship by giving us no alternative but to see God’s glory in creation.

Hi. When you brought up some of these points a couple years ago in a similar discussion I wrote a response that if you don't mind I'm going to re-post here:

This brings up a problem which is there is a difference between a world created with an appearance of age and one created with an appearance of history. In the former case these would include things necessary to function while in the latter they are unnecessary features that give a false indication of great age.

An appearance of age, as noted, may be necessary. A oak tree, to be fully mature, has to at least be fairly tall with a full spread of branches. An appearance of history, however, is not necessary and this is where creationists who propose it makes God out to be a deceiver. That tree would have no need of such things as annual growth rings, woody knots (which exist at the site where a limb had previously broken off and was grown over) or signs of healed damage. They are not necessary for the functioning of the tree and only serve as a record of the history of the tree's existence^[1].

Another example is a river. Today, the water gets to the mouth of the river by having flowed down from upstream. Now, if God were to create a river instantaneously, it would have water at its mouth (because it would by necessity have to be there for the river to be complete and fully functional), which suggests an age at least equal to the length of time it takes for the water to reach that point. That is a necessary appearance of age. However, and this is the part where YECs again make God a deceiver, there would be absolutely no need for the river mouth to have any sediment that appears to have eroded from the headwater region of the river. That would be appearance of history.

There are other examples.

For instance, a deeply buried impact crater from a meteor strike that displays all the signs of having lithified and later eroded doesn't have an ecological function or purpose but it unerringly leads to conclusions that for all of this to have taken place implies a great deal of time – far more than a few thousand years.

The same thing goes for things like buried river channels, valleys, signs of prolonged extensive volcanic activity, the erosion of high mountains and even the appearance of billions of years of radioactive decay in rocks. They have no function and serve no purpose other than to provide false testimony concerning the age of the planet if it is indeed only a few thousand of years old.

Until YECs can explain why God would created the world with a false appearance of history, the only conclusion is that God must have lied to us in the fingerprints He left in the real world. To me, as a Christian, that is an untenable position.

And that is why I reject the concept that God created a young creation that bears the marks of an ancient one in that this would be deceptive and God does not deceive those who believe in Him. To the contrary, God invites us to know Him and seek Him out through the natural world^[2], and this invitation makes no sense if we would arrive at the wrong conclusions doing so. Why would God tell us to go look at natural history to learn about His Godly nature and power if natural history didn't record real history? To put it another way, if God is a god of truth, then the creation should reflect this.

As I already noted, in Romans 1 we find that we are held accountable by the evidence of nature:

Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse --Romans 1:20

God has shown himself to all men through His creation so that men are without excuse in rejecting God. Had an artificially dated planet been palmed off on us by a clever bit of sleight-of-hand, we would not be "without excuse" – instead we’d have a great excuse! How ironic it would have been for God to have commanded us, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," and then have expected us to adhere to a criterion that He would have violated from the very beginning.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.”(Psalm 19:1-2). Job says that the creatures of the earth, and the earth itself, declares that all creation is the work of God (12:7-10). The psalmist also declares that, “truth springs from the earth.” (85:11), and that “the word of the Lord is upright; and all his work is done in faithfulness” (33:4). Finally, the Psalmist tells us that the universe declares God’s righteousness (Psalm 50:6; 97:6). The Bible says that God does not lie to us (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18). Therefore, from the Bible, we can conclude that God does not lie or deceive, either from His word or from His record in nature. A false appearance of history must therefore be rejected.










1. Bruce Waltke, the renowned Reformed evangelical professor of the Old Testament and Hebrew served on the translation committee of both the New American Standard Bible and New International Version, wrote that "God could have created the Garden of Eden with apparent age or miraculously, even as Christ instantly turned water into wine, but the statement that God “caused the trees to grow” argues against these notions."

2. Romans 1:20 says that God is to be “understood from what has been made.” The appearance of age claim says that we can’t trust what he made!

Thanks.

[oxmixmudd]

This one is a good bit to try to address it all. But I do applaud you attempting to engage and not just going off in some tangent. I have always said that the only self-consistent YEC position is 'appearance' of age. So from my perspective - the only way to approach the issue is not through science, which can only support the 13.7 billion years universe and the remaining conclusions, but rather to find some sort of sound theological reasoning that can approach these issues:

Why would God create such an appearance of age and more importantly such a record of false history?
How can God do so without violating fundamental principles of truth and trustworthiness?

I apologize for the length of this post, but it's going to take a while to explain. I think God has a lot more leeway in making our world and universe look natural than people are willing to accept. It’s not a “pretend” universe. It’s a universe and world that have been given as much of a natural appearance as it needs to serve all of God’s purposes. And he has many righteous purposes to do so:

One: To leave room for faith by leaving room for doubt. How could we say “by faith we understand that the worlds were formed at God’s command,” if we had proof? Any proof. If there was a single thing in all of creation that could not at least potentially be explained naturally (or simply ignored as a minor anomaly), there would be no room for doubt. Yet how could he possibly make this universe look even vaguely natural without also looking old? And I don’t just mean “old” as in mature or adult like Adam, but naturally old, with all the scars and wrinkles of natural age. I expect the heavens to declare the glory of God, but not to provide me with proof, any proof; that way my worship is free and trusting, not the only alternative I’ve been given.

Ah, but a universe that evolved over time also leaves room for doubt without introducing the issue of deceptions. The universe looks old because it really is old, not just because it appears to be. Secondarily, consider the difference between Adam created with a mature body (appearance of age) and Adam created with false memories of a lifetime from child to his current adult stature, complete with parents and grandparents. The first one could perhaps justify. The second - very, very hard to justify. Does it really make sense for God to ask Adam to just 'believe' he was created yesterday in spite of all those memories? The state of the universe is far more like the second state than the first. All those animals fossilized, many with forensic evidence of injuries from the events surrounding their death. Yet that is all false. Stars that explode and give us full information about their makeup and the products of their explosions - yet they never really existed. Light that - past 6000 or so light years is completely fictitious. And, as in the op, stars (some of whom which may not exist) that came from an object that itself does not really exist.

Second: To not only leave room for faith but to nurture it. God tells us plainly that miracles do not create faith. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham said people would not believe even if someone came back from the dead. Both miracles and proof tend to get in the way of the true essence of faith, simple trust and utter reliance on God for wisdom. When God gave the Israelites proof in the wilderness, it tended to make them proud, self-entitled, and apt to complain whenever God didn’t do what they thought he should. That’s what his people would be like today if we were surrounded by the kind of pillar-of-fire proof that God is real which the Israelites had in the wilderness. (That’s what some of us are like even without such manifestations, but arrogance would be the norm, not the regrettable exception). So God has good reason to hide his miracles, why his angels stay invisible, why irrefutable faith-healings don’t come along every time one of God’s children pray. He hides his most incredible works behind the curtains of natural laws and natural history to keep us humble and trusting. But what other way could he possibly have hidden his biggest and greatest miracle of creation, except by the perfectly natural appearances of our world and universe?

Same response for the most part. God is not a liar. If God lies, if He tricks us to test us, then we actually have just reason NOT to trust Him. Only if His character is true and pure, only if He has never been show to lie, or trick, or deceive can we have reason to trust Him. The issue in the Garden was that Satan tried to convince Adam and Eve God WAS deceiving them, He WAS tricking them. Their sin was in believing God would do those things. What appearance of age and history does is turn that on its head and say God DOES do that, but we are supposed to trust Him anyway?? That is not the message of scripture. Sometimes it may appear God has somehow not told us the truth, but our faith drives us to believe He has not really ever done that. And in the end we discover that is in fact the case - he was ALWAYS faithful and true. Appearance of age and history means that He actually did create a false universe, one that isn't what it appears to be. This is a real problem.

Third: Even though God cannot lie, he is capable of doing things that not only will be misinterpreted, but which he intended to be, to obscure the truth, to withhold the truth from people who were not entitled to it, or even to mislead, in judgment on unbelief. He once commanded Israel to lay an ambush against Ai. But an ambush is deceptive; it tricks the enemy into thinking a small feint is the main attack. It was deceptive, but not a lie, for an army has no obligation to do what the enemy expects. (Just as God has no obligation to share his works and ways with the world). God himself used righteous deception when he created the sound of a mighty army, where none was coming, to scare away the Arameans (2 Kings 7), and made water look like blood to trick the Moabites into making a rash advance (2 Kings 3). I could add the instances when lying prophets served God’s purposes, although he himself did not do the lying. In general, the only miracles unbelievers are allowed to witness, as an unmistakable miracle, are miracles of judgment. Even when God spoke directly out of heaven at times, the unbelievers present only heard the sound of thunder. Whether the lack of evidence for a miraculous origin is judgment against unbelief or merely patience, giving his Word time to convert without miracles getting in the way, is an individual matter.

So here you are saying mankind's sin justifies being tricked into thinking the universe is one thing when it is in fact something else? And yet the Bible itself tells us that the heavens Declare His Glory. But how can that be if they are in reality a fiction, something not at all real? Then they declare something else. So the same scripture that by a certain interpretation can yield a 6000 year result tells us the heavens are not a fiction but rather a creation that declares His glory. For me I find it a more self-consistent realization of the text to recognize the elements of Genesis that make clear its purpose is not and has never been to allow for a derivation of the age of the universe.

Fourth: Even for believers the obscuring of the truth serves a purpose, as a test and exercise of faith. God told Abraham to kill his son. Abraham could have said, “Well, that contradicts what I know about God’s character, therefore this cannot be from God.” No, the hardest test was also the best way to build Abraham’s faith. The hardest test of faith, to believe God is our creator even when the smartest and most respected scientists and the evidence of our own eyes may say, “No, he’s not,” serves God’s righteous purposes in a most gracious way.

Consider Job, who thought God was unjust to make a righteous man suffer. It contradicted Job’s sense of fairness and rightness and what he thought he knew of God’s character. When God says one thing in his Word, and the evidence of our eyes says something else, to say that God would be unrighteous or deceptive if he did what we don’t think a righteous God should have done, we’re being just like Job. God didn’t answer the accusation or explain why he did what he did; he just said, “Were you there when I created the world? Then you have no right to judge me or question how I do things you can’t understand.” We should expect the same answer if we make ourselves God’s judge and jury when we question what he tells us and what he has done in creation.

God could easily have given us a world that left no room for doubt. Instead of a sun, he could have put his own throne in the sky (and that would have been easier than designing stars from scratch). He could have given us a world that is capable of sustaining itself but impossible to develop naturally. He didn’t. He chose to give us a natural looking world. Whether he chose to do that by natural means or miraculous ones doesn't change the fact that he chose to give us a natural looking world. That wasn’t easy to do. No matter which theory of origins you hold to, that in itself should tell us he has a strong desire to lead us to trust in him as our creator by faith, not by sight, not by constant miracles or objectively provable miraculous origins, simply because he says so and not because the scientists say so.

The question is, if a perfect God chooses to make a natural-looking world, how natural will it look? If God has any righteous reasons at all to make the world look natural, then, as he is the perfect artist, he is also the perfect reproduction-artist; it wouldn’t just look natural when you look at it from a distance and see birds and trees and stars, but also up close. If he wanted to paint a Mona Lisa for us, in the natural style of da Vinci, and there was a single brush stroke that was unlike da Vinci’s pattern or if the canvas and paint were too new to be original, that would be a flaw in the reproduction. And God is flawless. It’s not deception, it is perfection of reproduction to serve all of God’s purposes simultaneously, to leave room for both faith and doubt, to give believers the opportunity to look like fools for God, cherishing his call to trust and follow him more than they care about the respect of the wise of this world, to pass judgment on those who doubt God’s Word, and to declare the glories of God in his wisdom, power, and goodness displayed in creation in a way that avoids taking away from us a kind of freedom of worship by giving us no alternative but to see God’s glory in creation.

... to be continued (wife needs my help :) )

Jim

[rogue06]

Ah, but a universe that evolved over time also leaves room for doubt without introducing the issue of deceptions. The universe looks old because it really is old, not just because it appears to be. Secondarily, consider the difference between Adam created with a mature body (appearance of age) and Adam created with false memories of a lifetime from child to his current adult stature, complete with parents and grandparents. The first one could perhaps justify. The second - very, very hard to justify. Does it really make sense for God to ask Adam to just 'believe' he was created yesterday in spite of all those memories? The state of the universe is far more like the second state than the first. All those animals fossilized, many with forensic evidence of injuries from the events surrounding their death. Yet that is all false. Stars that explode and give us full information about their makeup and the products of their explosions - yet they never really existed. Light that - past 6000 or so light years is completely fictitious. And, as in the op, stars (some of whom which may not exist) that came from an object that itself does not really exist.

Further, if Adam were indeed created as a fully mature human and he possessed things like worn teeth, calluses or scars, these things are not necessary for Adam to exist but only serve to indicate a history that he never experienced.

Likewise if Adam had a navel (which is a remnant of where a person was attached to his or her mother by an umbilical cord while they were in their mother's womb), this does not serve any real purpose to an adult, but instead only suggests a history he never experienced^[1].

They aren't features necessary for something to function but rather features that merely convey the impression of a history that never happened. Essentially a false history designed to deceive.









1. As an aside, there has actually been a great deal of debate throughout the centuries over the question of whether Adam and Eve had bellybuttons.

[Just Passing Through]

I forgot that I’d addressed this before. Have I really been just passing through that long?
A lot to respond to, and it’s going to make my response another lengthy tome, I’m afraid.

Anyway, first, the distinction is made between an appearance of age or maturity and an appearance of history or process, but I believe any appearance of age is going to entail appearance of process. Adam was not only made an adult, but he probably had short fingernails and a haircut, that are processes. Maybe the fingernails had to be short enough to serve their practical purpose, but isn’t any particular short length an arbitrary cut off to how much process God was allowed to imply? The sun was giving off photons on the fourth day that implied a process of thousands of years of tunneling from its fusing core. That may have been a practical consideration, but it wouldn’t have been purely practical to make those photons exactly the same temperature and with the same patterns of energy flow as if it really was natural. Was there a line he couldn’t cross, where he wasn’t allowed to make it more natural than practically necessary?

The focus is all on the practical or lack of practical purposes for various features, but I believe the spiritual purposes dominate. So I might ask, if God used billions of years and theistic evolution or old earth creationism, what was his spiritual purpose? Would not any such origins also deceive people into thinking our origins were natural and god-free? Would people not have an excuse not to believe God is our Creator?

The heavens declare the glory of God. But the stars all look natural. Okay, you say they are natural. How does that very naturalness (ancient or young) not deceive people and give them an excuse not to believe in God? How does giving us a big bang that scientists explain as a natural origin, and a long development of stars that scientists explain happened purely by the laws of nature without any divine intervention, and billions of years of evolution that scientists explain as random and survival of the fittest, a dog-eat-dog world, declare the glory of God and proclaim the works of his hands? Did God do it the long, slow way because it was easier, or did he wait billions of years for the spiritual ascent of man to come along to hide his role in this special creation to, what, deceive people into thinking it was all natural? Because that’s the way it all looks. You can plug God’s active part in creation into the deep distant past and into the unseen directing of evolution, but he’s still hiding his role. He’s still giving us a world that keeps God’s activity a secret, but now it’s both a secret in nature and a contradiction to what he declares explicitly in his Word.

As I said, God could easily have given us proof that he is God the Creator. He could have written his name in the stars or encoded the book of Genesis in our DNA. He didn’t. I suggested several reasons why I believe it was to our spiritual benefit that he didn’t. Whether he took the long road or the short road, his purposes would be the same and the resulting appearance of the earth would be the same, for in a young earth creation, he could not have achieved his purpose any other way.

He wanted our home to look natural. Can we agree on that? If God wants this world to look natural, how natural will it look? Just enough to fool people until the scientists come along and start digging up the past? Just enough to serve the practical purposes of a full grown Adam?
If there were no ancient river deltas or a single radiometric date that goes back more than ten thousand years or fossil layers that can be arranged in an evolutionary order, how could we not say, God’s biggest miracle is right there, proof positive, for all to see? But miracles don’t create faith or nurture faith, they become a crutch. Believers are not benefitted and unbelievers are not entitled to miraculous proof. If God did create all things exactly as he says in Genesis, then what other option did he have but to make the world fully natural-looking, both age and process? God has said in his Word that he created all things in six days. Why should I doubt?

Ah, but a universe that evolved over time also leaves room for doubt without introducing the issue of deceptions.

Does it? Would not the deceptions merely be of a more spiritual nature? Such as having creation itself teach us that death is natural, that suffering has nothing to do with sin and therefore there is nothing in life that suggests we are under God’s wrath, that a dog-eat-dog existence is what we were evolved to adapt to.

Stars that explode and give us full information about their makeup and the products of their explosions - yet they never really existed. Light that - past 6000 or so light years is completely fictitious. And, as in the op, stars (some of whom which may not exist) that came from an object that itself does not really exist.

Actually, that’s something I could write a whole ‘nother tome about (and I’m not sure I haven’t). I believe God created the stars in temporal position along earth’s light-cone so that they could be seen immediately, as they are. No fictitious light, no fictitious events that are actually witnessed, but they were created with an appearance of both age and process. I also believe that if time is a dimension just like space, then God could create a vast dimension of deep time, a past that could have existed but never elapsed (though I don’t know that he did, or how far back he would have reached if that was part of his bag of tricks). I’d better leave that for another day and another thread.

God is not a liar. If God lies, if He tricks us to test us, then we actually have just reason NOT to trust Him. Only if His character is true and pure, only if He has never been show to lie, or trick, or deceive can we have reason to trust Him.

Did he not trick the Arameans and Moabites? Did he not make use of lying prophets to serve his purposes of judgment? Did Jesus not act as if he didn’t care when the Syro-Phoenician woman asked him to cure her daughter? He said he wasn’t sent for her. He called her a dog. And the whole time he was using such a disguise to test, train, and strengthen her faith, before revealing a miracle to her. I just read the Old Testament lesson for this coming Sunday, and the first verse is Jeremiah 20:7, “O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived.” I know exegetes have wrestled with the meaning of that verse for millennia, (and my own interpretation would not be for “deception” in that context), but it raises the warning, are we going to use our own limited and sin-affected reasoning to judge what God must have meant, because unless we can fit this verse into our image of God we cannot have any reason to trust him about anything.

The issue in the Garden was that Satan tried to convince Adam and Eve God WAS deceiving them, He WAS tricking them. Their sin was in believing God would do those things.

No, Satan tried to convince Eve to trust her reason (being like God would be good) and her eyesight (the fruit looked good to eat), instead of taking God at his word. Their sin was not in believing God would kill them for eating any fruit in the garden. Their sin was not believing God meant exactly what he said.
It’s still Satan’s temptation. “Did God really say he created the world in six days? You don’t believe that, do you? Think for yourself. Make up your own mind.”

So here you are saying mankind's sin justifies being tricked into thinking the universe is one thing when it is in fact something else?

No, I’m saying the universe is what God’s Word says it is, and the shapes and positioning of rocks and radioactive particles and stars and whatever else God created, are what they are. They may not mean what we a natural interpretation would make of them. They are a test (not nearly as hard as the one he gave Abraham) and a way to humble our presumptuous attitude that we know God well enough to be his judge (as he humbled Job), and sometimes a judgment, “so that seeing they will not see and hearing they will not hear.”

[oxmixmudd]

...

Fourth: Even for believers the obscuring of the truth serves a purpose, as a test and exercise of faith. God told Abraham to kill his son. Abraham could have said, “Well, that contradicts what I know about God’s character, therefore this cannot be from God.” No, the hardest test was also the best way to build Abraham’s faith. The hardest test of faith, to believe God is our creator even when the smartest and most respected scientists and the evidence of our own eyes may say, “No, he’s not,” serves God’s righteous purposes in a most gracious way.

But again, this thing gets turned a bit on its head here. If the universe itself is a fiction, then what happens is that it's not that God appears to be lying, he IS lying. There is a big difference between the two. We trust Him even if it seems he has abandoned us because we KNOW he has not. The inverse case simply isn't the same. If we trust Him but in the end He has abandoned us ... that is not good at all. The Universe is 100% consistent with 13.7 billion years of history. Only God could make such an illusion to be so precisely accurate. And yet ... if It is all just an illusion ... why? How is God glorified by the creation of something that appears to be what it is not? I say let the lack of understanding be OURs. Let the scriptures be true, the universe real, and the apparent contradiction be simply our own misunderstanding and presumption in assuming we can derive the age of the universe from it.

To be fair, in a sense, that is what the YEC claim is as well, only the target of misunderstanding is reversed. They think we must be wrong in our understanding of nature. But Jesus indicates in His own words when he rebukes us for understanding nature but not God's word that it is the more likely case our hardness of heart keeps us from understanding the text much more often that it keeps us from understanding what nature is telling us.

Where we get tied up is in thinking that IF Genesis is not technically accurate, it isn't God's word anymore. But there are a lot of texts in the scripture that are not technically accurate in their description of nature. They use idioms and reflect the thinking of the people of the day. And the reason is simple. The truth being communicated in those texts have nothing to do with science. The references to nature are simply the 'language' being used to communicate the truth of the text. We don't think the Bible is not God's word because it has examples in it of poor Greek or Hebrew grammar. And why should we - those elements simply reflect the vessel used to create the prophecy, to write the message. The message itself remains perfect, God inspired.

Consider Job, who thought God was unjust to make a righteous man suffer. It contradicted Job’s sense of fairness and rightness and what he thought he knew of God’s character. When God says one thing in his Word, and the evidence of our eyes says something else, to say that God would be unrighteous or deceptive if he did what we don’t think a righteous God should have done, we’re being just like Job. God didn’t answer the accusation or explain why he did what he did; he just said, “Were you there when I created the world? Then you have no right to judge me or question how I do things you can’t understand.” We should expect the same answer if we make ourselves God’s judge and jury when we question what he tells us and what he has done in creation.

Don't mix up Job's thinking and his friend's thinking. Job is written to help us understand this common misconception - that those that follow God do not suffer - is false. And to show us an example of a man that never denied his faith in God through a truly great trial. And you are right - I can not claim to know all and so I must allow it is possible that there is some way God might be justified in creating a false universe that I simply can't fathom. Likewise - however - so must the YEC then admit God could be justified in revealing Genesis in such a way that it is technically inaccurate while still His inspired word. In this case, the potential reversal of the application of faith is symmetric. In Both cases one trusts that in the end the scripture is exactly what God intended, and any apparent contradiction is found due to our limited understanding.

This is why I do not generally try to dissuade one who takes the 'apparent age' position. It is, as I said at first, probably the only self-consistent position that is YE. But the difficulty lies then in making sure one understands the theological problem and one has some what of reconciling the contradiction that involves faith and not some compromise of His truth. When YEC's try to say that science support the idea - they are compromising the truth. There is no proper application of science that yields the YEC position.

In a similar way the OE and TE positions must also reconcile the potential theological issues with death before the Fall and the Scriptural teachings on the fall and on sin. Both sides can be tempted to compromise or distort in trying to deal with the apparent contradictions.

God could easily have given us a world that left no room for doubt. Instead of a sun, he could have put his own throne in the sky (and that would have been easier than designing stars from scratch). He could have given us a world that is capable of sustaining itself but impossible to develop naturally. He didn’t. He chose to give us a natural looking world. Whether he chose to do that by natural means or miraculous ones doesn't change the fact that he chose to give us a natural looking world. That wasn’t easy to do. No matter which theory of origins you hold to, that in itself should tell us he has a strong desire to lead us to trust in him as our creator by faith, not by sight, not by constant miracles or objectively provable miraculous origins, simply because he says so and not because the scientists say so.

The question is, if a perfect God chooses to make a natural-looking world, how natural will it look? If God has any righteous reasons at all to make the world look natural, then, as he is the perfect artist, he is also the perfect reproduction-artist; it wouldn’t just look natural when you look at it from a distance and see birds and trees and stars, but also up close. If he wanted to paint a Mona Lisa for us, in the natural style of da Vinci, and there was a single brush stroke that was unlike da Vinci’s pattern or if the canvas and paint were too new to be original, that would be a flaw in the reproduction. And God is flawless. It’s not deception, it is perfection of reproduction to serve all of God’s purposes simultaneously, to leave room for both faith and doubt, to give believers the opportunity to look like fools for God, cherishing his call to trust and follow him more than they care about the respect of the wise of this world, to pass judgment on those who doubt God’s Word, and to declare the glories of God in his wisdom, power, and goodness displayed in creation in a way that avoids taking away from us a kind of freedom of worship by giving us no alternative but to see God’s glory in creation.

We don't disagree in principle here - except that for me, for my conscience to be clear - it is our understanding of Genesis that needs correcting, and through that our understanding of what it means for the scripture to be inspired and true. I see clearly in Genesis that the description of the world is wrapped up in A.N.E. conceptualizations of the world that are simply not scientifically accurate. The dome of the sky, the floodgates of heaven, the birds flying before the face of the sky, the separation of light from darkness in the sky itself. Over and over again, the scriptures reflect this ancient view of the world. And so my faith becomes focused on recognizing God's 'right' as it were to reveal the truth of His sovereignty, the truth that the things worshiped by pagans are simply things He made, through the language and culture of that period of time - which includes conceptualizations of the world that are not scientifically accurate. This is consistent with His revelation in that He works through us in spite of our weaknesses, our limitations. And so what I see is that we should drop the expectation that God is trying to tell us scientifically accurate things about how he Created in Genesis. It is clear to me that if that was the intent, it simply would have been written very differently than it is.

Jim

[Just Passing Through]

If God created the world in an instant, then every single rock, every single lake, every single landform had to have both appearance of age and appearance of process. Those who would limit God to just creating age and not process or history put him in a real bind. He’s not allowed to make metamorphic or sedimentary rock because it implies history. If you do grant him permission to make any kind of rock for practical reasons, as soon as he arranges that rock in a layer consistently or has it show up in locations where its formation would be consistent with all the other geological forms in the area, it implies a history in how those rocks were laid down. He can make an old lake, I suppose, but apparently he’s only allowed to have it filling a depression like a puddle after the rain. He’s not allowed to make it natural by giving it a shape consistent with erosion or glaciation or plate techtonics. Rivers aren’t allowed to sit in the kind of streambeds we have now. No channels that eroded into shape. No bends that show up where a river would naturally bend over time. From the largest continental plates to the smallest grain of sand, everything in the planet implies not just age but processes of planetary formation, large and small scale. Where do you draw the line between age and history?

Adam knew the world was only a week old. He would not have dreamed of interpreting it any other way, no matter what shape it took. But his children would only know about creation by what God revealed through Adam. Already in the second generation, creation was known only by faith, not by sight. How long was it before they started inventing other creation myths or devising a natural origins theory that left God out of the picture? How long before God might have concluded that Cain’s unbelieving descendants were not entitled to proof of his miracle? Could he not have created the original trees with tree rings in judgment against Cain’s family, not to deceive them that it was old, but to withhold from them that it was young?

But believers would see the same tree rings or the same river beds or the same layered rocks (whether sedimentary or igneous, makes no difference, it’s all a lengthy process), and they’d be deceived, you say. Not if they trusted that the earth had a beginning, and that it was never God’s intent that we’d try to look back beyond the beginning.

People keep saying it would be a lie, it would be deceptive, and not just to the unbelievers who reject God’s truth and maybe deserve to be given enough rope to hang themselves, but to believers who don’t deserve to be treated that way. But it’s only by grace and through the gift of faith, trust without sight, that we are believers. We do deserve to be left in the dark. Any evidence at all that we are more than just detritus of an uncaring universe is by grace, and we have no right to judge how much grace we deserve or how much grace a righteous God had to give us.

People keep saying it would be a lie. But that gets into the matter of communication which is a very complex subject of its own right. A communicator has an obligation to communicate something truthful if he chooses or is obliged to communicate anything at all. But he’s also entitled to withhold the truth and not communicate. And the communicatee is not entitled to interpret his non-communication as communication. Even if you think you can logically deduce a mountain of information from the fact that someone keeps his mouth shut, you’re not entitled to call him a liar if your logical deductions do not lead you to the truth. Communication is a two-way street, and the communicatee also has an obligation to truth: to honestly, fairly, and charitably get inside the communicator’s head to ascertain what is in his head, his purposes and intent, and his will to communicate or not. We can only get inside God’s head by his Word. That is the only ground for deciding whether rocks are communication at all. If they are not communication, it doesn’t matter what story they tell. It doesn’t matter what shape they take. There’s nothing to interpret, even if we think we can, even if we think we’ve discerned a story. If they are not communication, if God was not trying to tell us something about world history, if God wants us to be like Adam and know there is no past there beyond six days so it would be silly interpreting what we see as telling us anything about what happened before that, the fault and the responsibility for interpreting the rocks as communication would be ours. Oh, but the rocks are so detailed, and every detail fits the story.
Every single grain is detail, and it’s impossible to remove all “story” from every grain. They can’t possibly tell the story of “miracle;” by its very nature miracle is outside of science and outside the range of tellable stories. So they must tell the story of the laws of nature and of natural history, and so every story they could possibly tell is going to be a lie, whether it adds up to a story of evolution or a story so nonsensical that we can’t make heads or tails out of it (without appealing to that taboo miracle); the story itself is still a lie because it’s still natural details. Every picture tells a story; they can’t not tell a story. If the truth is miracle, then science can not go there, period. But we call God a liar because all the grains seem consistent in the story they tell. I say, if nothing existed before ten thousand years ago, then the rocks are Rorschach ink blots. They mean nothing. They communicate nothing. Any story comes from us, not from the ink blots, and if they seem consistent in the story they tell, it doesn’t make the story real, it just means God had some consistent way of choosing which grain to lay up against which other grain. The grains had to be consistent in some way and to some extent for the world to be sensible; we fault God for how sensible it is, how natural and ordinary and consistent.

I'm going to be out of town for a couple days, so don't interpret my silence as meaning anything about our discussion. Please don't derive an entire history I must be experiencing as the logical inference to my non-communication, and then call me deceptive when I get back if my story doesn't match the very detailed and consistent tales you've told about me.

[Just Passing Through]

We don't disagree in principle here - except that for me, for my conscience to be clear - it is our understanding of Genesis that needs correcting, and through that our understanding of what it means for the scripture to be inspired and true.

For my conscience to be clear, the spiritual lessons must dominate, not the rocks or the science. Lessons about faith and trust without seeing. Lessons about death as a consequence of sin, and therefore Christ’s death as the solution. Lessons about making sense of suffering in the world without making God the author of evil. Lessons about mankind as special creation as the crown of all of God’s works. Lessons about humility: I know creation must have been far more complex than Moses could possibly have put down on paper, even if he’d been a modern scientist. But that just leads me to bow my head and say, “I neither know everything nor need to understand everything. And I hope I stay aware of my ignorance, foolishness, and lack of the level of intellect that would let me say, ‘No, I wasn’t there when you created the world, Lord, but I’m smart enough to figure out what really happened.”

[rogue06]

If God created the world in an instant, then every single rock, every single lake, every single landform had to have both appearance of age and appearance of process.

No it would not. Trees could be created without any growth rings which serve no purpose in the tree. In fact, IIRC, there are a few species that don't have them. The only thing they are useful for is enabling us to make a determination of their age.

Rivers could be created instantaneously but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why it would already contain dirt from its headwaters at its estuary. All that would do is give a misleading appearance of a history that it didn't have.

Likewise there is utterly reason for things like buried river channels, cosmic impact craters, ancient long extinct volcanoes... to be found deep underground and showing signs of having experienced erosion.

Multiple more examples can be provided but I'll stick with just one more -- starlight.

Source: The Distant Starlight Problem

The claim that God created the universe with an appearance of age with light already in transit to the earth from distant stars cannot technically be proved or disproved, so it is not scientific. However, it has some serious theological problems. Although God being omnipotent could conjure up a giant hoax to fool us all, including creating light from stars that appear to have exploded, but in fact never existed, and superimposed the signature of the absorption due to gas and dust on the starlight in the space between the distant stars and us to make it look as if the light really passed through the intervening space, when in fact the beams were created 6000 light years away. This is a god of deception, and contradicts Romans 1:20. If God is a god of truth, then the creation should reflect this in some way. Why would God lie?

In a number of cases we can see light from very distant quasars and galaxies affected by gravitational bending after passing an intervening galaxy, exactly as predicted by general relativity. This proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the light really passed the intervening galaxy, and the laws of physics, including the velocity of light, have not changed.

In agreement with this we have this extract from Jonathan Safarti [a YEC]: “What about Distant Starlight? Fallacious Distant Starlight Solution: ‘Light Created in Transit’ After presenting an alternative cosmology that provides a plausible solution to the ‘distant starlight’ problem, it is worth showing why another idea is unsound. Some older creationist works propose that God may have created the light in transit, and Ross harps on at this as if it is still mainstream creationist thinking (for example C&T:96-97). But AiG long ago pointed out the problems with this idea. It would entail that we would be seeing light from heavenly bodies that don’t really exist; and even light that seems to indicate precise sequences of events predicable by the laws of physics, but which never actually happened. This, in effect, suggests that God is a deceiver.”^[4] The text in red indicates emphasis.

...

For various reasons some stars explode at the end of their lives, known as supernova explosions, when they can be as bright as a whole galaxy containing several hundred billion stars. Fortunately our sun is unlikely to do that. Every year many explosions are seen in distant galaxies, more rarely in nearer galaxies, and even more rarely in our own Milky Way. The last such explosion was seen in the Milky Way was in 1604.

If a supernova went off more than 6000 light years away, as all of them in other galaxies do, why would God create light beams from an exploding star that in fact never existed? In 1987 a star was seen to explode in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and is very close by cosmic standards. Nevertheless, it was still about 169,000 light years away. This puts it well outside the “biblical” distance of 6000 light years, but so close by cosmic standards that arguments about the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe are irrelevant.

The beauty with SN 1987A, as it is called, is that before the explosion the star was identified, and the distance to the star was determined by several independent methods that all broadly agreed to observational uncertainty. Moreover, after the explosion we could see the light echo being reflected off the surrounding dust and gas, and from the expansion of the light echo, the distance to the star could be determined directly by geometry completely independent of the other methods, and yielded a figure in broad agreement with the other measurements.

The picture on the right was made by taking one picture after the star had faded after the explosion, and subtracting from it another picture taken before the explosion. The two rings are caused by light reflected off two sheets of interstellar dust at different distances, and are seen to expand with time.

Not only that, but we could see the decay of radioactive isotopes produced in the explosion, whose decay rates matched exactly those seen in the lab. This refutes by direct observation claims that some creationists make that decay rates were much higher in the past to make the isotopic abundances of a 6000 year old earth look as if the earth were 4.5 billion years old. Not only do the creationists have no evidence that the decay rates were much higher in the past, they apparently have no theory to explain this, other than invoking miracles, but these are miracles of deception. According to Humphreys: “If God weakened the strong nuclear force (greatly speeding up alpha decay), the nucleus would increase in size and restructure itself. The lower the decay constant (that is, the higher the half-life), the more the decay rate would be accelerated.” The text in red is my emphasis. If you are going to throw miracles into any scientific argument, you explain anything and everything you like, thus you explain nothing.

Neutrinos are ghostlike particles related to electrons, but carry no electric charge, have a very small mass, and travel at almost the speed of light, but they are very difficult to detect. Theory predicted that the kind of explosion seen with SN 1987A should produce a large number of neutrinos, and indeed for the first time ever such particles were detected from a supernova. Not only do creationists have to explain how light traveled 169,000 light years in a 6000 year old universe, they also have to explain how neutrinos also crossed the same expanse of space in about the same time.





4) Jonathan Safarti: Refuting Compromise – A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of Progressive Creationism (Billions of Years), As Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross, page 189, Master Books, Inc., P.O. Box 726, Green Forest, AR 72639 (2004), ISBN: 0-89051-411-9.


Source

© Copyright Original Source

Norman Geisler also addresses this issue briefly in his When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook of Christian Evidence

One of the biggest problems for the young earth view is in astronomy. We can see light from stars that took 15 billion years to get here. To say that God created them with the appearance of age does not satisfy the question of how their light reached us. We have watched star explosions that happened billions of years ago, but if the universe is not billions of years old, then we are seeing light from stars that never existed because they would have died before Creation. Why would God deceive us with the evidence? The old earth view seems to fit the evidence better and causes no problem with the Bible.

To pick a nit with what he wrote, current indications are that the Big Bang took place approximately 13.7 billion ago, but the number varies to approximately 15 billion. Most stars in existence are 1-10 billion years old, though some are over 13 billion years old. Still his point remains valid.

And just for kicks, here is an article about a supernova (SN1997ff) spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope some 10 billion light years away.

[Just Passing Through]

I haven’t hit the road yet, so I’ll give an answer to your final big point, distant starlight. I hinted earlier that I have my own theory about starlight. You can get the gist of it by googling anisotropic synchrony convention. My own theory is a bit different from Dr. Jason Lisle’s, (and I developed the seed of the idea before I ever heard of his theory) in that I combine the freedom to choose alternative conventions of synchrony with the idea that time is a dimension like space. If God can stretch out space and fill it with all the appropriate matter and energy, and time is just one more dimension, he could stretch out time and fill it with matter and energy the same way as necessary. It would be real time, but not elapsed time. That may be necessary in the theory to allow gravity to function properly, unless you allow for gravity to have been created in flight (a pre-molded space-time), just as people suggest starlight was created in flight. And he did all this, not to deceive, but because it was the most reasonable and practical way to allow real stars to be really seen and serve their created purpose as soon as they were created and to have them function and move properly from the first moment.
It works the same way at the end of history. If the stars are destroyed (or perhaps renewed or glorified) on judgment day, God is going to want us to see it as it happens, not for us to be seeing stars disappear one by one billions of years after we get to heaven. He will destroy them along earth’s light cone, just as he created them along earth’s light cone, that their transformation will be seen immediately.

[oxmixmudd]

For my conscience to be clear, the spiritual lessons must dominate, not the rocks or the science. Lessons about faith and trust without seeing. Lessons about death as a consequence of sin, and therefore Christ’s death as the solution. Lessons about making sense of suffering in the world without making God the author of evil. Lessons about mankind as special creation as the crown of all of God’s works. Lessons about humility: I know creation must have been far more complex than Moses could possibly have put down on paper, even if he’d been a modern scientist. But that just leads me to bow my head and say, “I neither know everything nor need to understand everything. And I hope I stay aware of my ignorance, foolishness, and lack of the level of intellect that would let me say, ‘No, I wasn’t there when you created the world, Lord, but I’m smart enough to figure out what really happened.”

Again - the issue here is that to be where you are and remain truthful, one must accept some form of deceptiveness in the creation itself. As long as you are good with that, then there isn't much that I would say - except that I don't believe the case you find acceptable for justifying that deception is convincing. There is also a bit of a problem here in that in scripture God requires of those who follow Him what was required of the Nazi soldiers at their war crimes trials. That is, we are not excused by "I was just following orders" in that if we KNOW what we think we are 'supposed' to believe is wrong, we are held accountable to make the effort to yield to that and be responsible with that. Over and over again Jesus rebuked the pharisees for just going along with dogma when the consequences of doing the produced injustice or additional evil. Having faith isn't just about unquestioned, blind obedience to some dogma, it is about struggling with and finding a faith based solution to known paradoxes and conflicts. The fellow that takes his talent a buries it because he knows the master would be angry if he lost it is NOT the fellow that gets rewarded.

Jim