Creationist cosmologies
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Creationist cosmologies are arguments by creationists that a significant portion of the observable universe is only a few thousand years old. These beliefs, considered pseudoscientific by the general scientific community, run contrary to the Big Bang Theory, which states that the universe is billions of years old. Creationist cosmologies, along with other creation sciences, were introduced by Young Earth Creationists as a direct result of scientific studies suggesting that the Earth was much older than anyone had previously thought.
Proponents of creationist cosmologies believe that creation according to the Book of Genesis is historically accurate and inerrant, and that the observable physical evidence is more fully consistent with the account of Genesis than with generally accepted theories such as the Big Bang theory. As such, they interpret physical evidence within the framework of a literal and historical interpretation of creation according to Genesis and reject well-established science that is at odds with their views.
Some of the galaxies which are visible from Earth are observed to be billions of light years away, which implies that the light emitted from them has been in transit for billions of years. This fact is sometimes called the starlight problem and is the major impetus behind many of the alternative cosmologies proposed by creationists. Creationist cosmologies try to posit alternative explanations for the observed data to avoid such timescales which conflict with their belief in a relatively young universe.
Old Earth creationists do not object to the standard model of cosmology in astrophysics and are known to debate their fellow creationists over the issue.
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[edit] Older theories
[edit] Inaccurate astronomy
The current cosmological paradigm (the Big Bang) is built on careful observations and the rejection of scientific theories (for example steady-state theory) which do not fit the observed data. Distances to cosmological objects are obtained through a variety of techniques that serve as links in the distance ladder of cosmology.
Distances to supernovae can be obtained by means of standard candle techniques. Early responses by Young Earth Creationists tended to challenge these astronomical measurements and assert that distant objects were not as far away as thought. For example, creationists would challenge the assumption that redshift and distance were necessarily correlated (Hubble's law). The increased number, precision, and accuracy of independent authentications of distances has caused this approach to fall into disfavour. However, many creationists continue to question science results they believe run counter to their worldview.
Advocates of creationist cosmologies continue to highlight what they consider to be problems with mainstream Big Bang cosmology, in particular the classic horizon problem, criticizing its most common standard cosmological resolution, cosmic inflation. This is designed not to offer an alternative cosmology but rather to cast doubt on the entire scientific field.
While some creationists initially questioned the accuracy of accepted distances to stellar objects, this idea was eventually dismissed by most creationists as life on Earth would not last if all observed stellar objects were within a radius of 6000 light years[citation needed]. Such ideas are still occasionally advocated with laymen who hold creationist views, presumably as it is far easier to understand than the perspectives now adopted by creationist organizations. Creationist orators often avoid explaining the new creationist cosmologies to audiences ostensibly because it is conceptually difficult for those outside the field of physics to understand. Instead some creationists continue to avoid questions on this topic by saying that astrophysics is the least of the sciences and it has greater error margins than any other field while simultaneously referring to currently accepted creationist cosmologies.
[edit] Light created in transit
Some creationists have held that light only appears to have come from distant objects, but is really created in transit. However, critics point out that this is only a variation of the so-called Omphalos hypothesis of a creator who essentially misleads the world by creating the appearance of age or, in this case, light-travel time. As the idea relies on a supernatural conspiracy to create the appearance of a material reality that is different from actual reality, it is clearly irrefutable. Many take refutability as a necessary property of scientific theories and by this measure, the light-in-transit theory is literally unscientific[citation needed].
One implication of this idea would be that supernovae that occur in the distant universe would have had to have been manufactured optical effects at the time of creation. In other words, in this idea distant supernovae never really happened even though we see them.
[edit] Newer theories
[edit] Claimed problems with the Big Bang
Proponents of creationism often try to discredit current scientific understanding by referring to what they perceive to be discontinuities in scientific theories and observations. As such, some proponents of creationist cosmologies continue to offer arguments deriving from more sophisticated claims of inaccurate astronomy. In particular, these creationists try to discredit mainstream theories by referring to actual scientific controversies and debates about the details of the paradigm and concluding from these that the mainstream view is somehow "fundamentally flawed" or "ridiculous". Even when scientists find solutions within the mainstream paradigms for legitimate points of scientific debate, creationists tend to dismiss the resolutions and often continue touting the "errors" and "problems" long after the scientific community has come to consensus on the issues in question. Common creationist attacks using problems with the Big Bang that have resolutions accepted by most cosmologists include references to the horizon problem and the flatness problem as well as dark matter, dark energy, and fine-tuning.
These types of arguments are meant to imply that discrediting the Big Bang will bring credibility to creationist cosmologies (a form of false dichotomy). Creationists touting their own cosmologies will often spend considerable time in explaining how the "problems" are solved or avoided with their idea.
[edit] Modern geocentrism
Perhaps the most radical creationist cosmologies are those that rely on the Earth being fixed at the center of the cosmos with the rest of the universe revolving around it once per day. Geocentrists cite alleged evidence to support this cosmology including the distribution of gamma ray bursts in the sky, claimed instances of redshift quantization, and the equivalence principle of general relativity to support various frameworks that place the Earth and the Milky Way squarely at the center of the universe.
[edit] Time dilation effects on the local universe
In a bounded universe, creationists claim that unspecified relativistic effects might cause time to pass more slowly near the center than at its periphery. If the Earth were near the center (see modern geocentricity), then far-away objects might indeed be billions of years old, while the earth would be only thousands of years old, even if created at the same time. The author of this idea is creationist physicist Russell Humphreys. In recent years, he has argued that such a universe could have arisen from a white hole rather than from a Big Bang.
This cosmology has been criticised on several grounds:
- A bounded universe would also have observable topological effects which are not observed. The observations currently point to a universe that is topologically constrained to be unbounded on observable scales.
- The effect of gravitational time dilation should be observable if Humphreys is correct. However, we observe (from the periods of Cepheid variable stars, from orbital rates of binary stars, from supernova extinction rates, from light frequencies, etc.) that such time dilation does not exist. There is some time dilation corresponding with Hubble's law (further objects have greater redshifts), but this can be attributed to the well-understood expansion of the universe, and it is not nearly extreme enough to fit more than 10 billion years into less than 10,000.
- Humphreys tries to use clocks in the earth's frame of reference although the cosmos is much older than the earth. The heavy elements in the Sun and rest of the solar system show that our sun is at least a second generation star. Thus, prior to the formation of our solar system, at least a generation of stars must have been born and died and the gases from the resulting novas must have then been have gathered into new star systems. This process would take billions of years and is not accounted for in Humphreys' work. Nor does Humphrey's model account for the radioisotopic dates of rocks. [1]
- Humphreys' idea assumes that the earth is in a huge gravity well. The evidence contradicts this assumption. If the earth were in such a gravity well, light from distant galaxies should be blueshifted. Instead, it is redshifted.
- The idea also assumes the existence of an edge to the universe. Observations of the topology of the universe see evidence for no physical edge. In order for Humphreys to be correct, the observed expansion of the universe would have to be explained as being due to an effect that was not found in Friedmann cosmology. The unexplored cosmological implications, the lack of explanations for cosmological observations, and the lack of supporting observations relegate Humphrey's explanation to little better than a falsified hypothesis.
- Humphreys' cosmology is impossible if one sticks to the laws of physics as we know them. This weakness Humphreys readily acknowledges, although to him it is a strength. Humphreys refers to Isaiah 40:22, Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them out like a tent to Dwell in. To Humphreys, this is an indication that God side-stepped the laws of physics, to drag spacetime out of its own black hole and force the universe to expand, in what Humphreys calls a "white hole cosmology". The need for divine intervention comes about because Humphrey's assumes a bounded universe with a distinct center, both of which are aspects absent from standard cosmology.
- These ideas attempt to fit the same cosmological data that the Big Bang theory explains, but fail to do so in the existence of detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background, the observed abundance of light elements, and the large scale structure observations of the means by which galaxies and clusters of galaxies are organized. Modifications to the idea try to sidestep the issue by attempting to answer the question of how light from distant stars millions of light years away could be visible from Earth if the universe is only 6,000 years old. They offer no scientific test of their proposed solutions.
[edit] Gentry's Vacuum Energy Repulsion
Recently, Robert Gentry, the creationist most famous for making frequently criticized claims that polonium haloes yielded a young age for the Earth, has adopted and slightly modified the idea that the Earth might be near the center of the universe with a model that uses a distant shell of matter to create a vacuum energy that Gentry claims describes the universe better than any other cosmological model. Gentry claims it accounts for a number of features unaddressed by other creationist cosmologies such as the standard candle observations of type Ia supernovae, and the time dilation of supernovae. His model recreates the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker cosmology with an additional term due to a vacuum energy density with a positive pressure (as opposed to the dark energy version which has negative pressure).
Gentry's cosmology relies heavily on the critiques made by supporters of non-creationist non-standard cosmologies. In particular, Gentry is intrigued by the work of Halton Arp on quasar and redshift anomalies. The superficial similarities to white hole cosmology causes his idea to suffer from many of the same criticisms as those leveled against Humpreys above.
Gentry filed a lawsuit in 2001 against Los Alamos National Laboratory and Cornell University after personnel deleted 10 of his papers about his cosmology from the public preprint server arXiv. On 23 March 2004, Gentry's lawsuit against arXiv was dismissed by a Tennessee court.
[edit] c decay
Another creationist approach was to consider that the speed of light may not have been constant throughout history. If the speed of light were significantly faster in the past, light from distant objects could have spent less time in transit, before reaching Earth. Such an approach is attractive — after all, it seems impossible to prove today that fundamental physical constants have not changed over time. This hypothesis, called the "c decay" hypothesis, was originally proposed by Barry Setterfield.
This cosmology has been criticised on several grounds:
- A change in the speed of light of the necessary magnitude would have had profound implications on other physical processes, particularly the nuclear fusion reactions that power the Sun. Given that these measurements have been extremely accurate over a long period it seems unlikely to opponents of this theory that there were substantial changes in the last few thousand years. Any residual decay of the velocity of light would be easily detected with modern electronic equipment.
- Setterfield, who claims to document the decreasing speed of light, used faulty techniques. Many different measurements of the speed of light have been made in the last 180 or so years. The older measurements were not as accurate as the latest ones. Setterfield chose 120 data points from 193 measurements available (see [Dolphin n.d.] for the data), and the line of best fit for these points shows the speed of light decreasing. If you use the entire data set, though, the line of best fit shows the speed increasing slightly. However, a constant speed of light is well within the experimental error of the data. If Setterfield's formulation of the changes in physical parameters were true, then there should have been 417 days per year around AD 1, and the earth would have melted during the creation week due to the extremely rapid radioactive decay. [Morton et al. 1983]
- While a variable speed of light has been proposed seriously by non-creationist theoreticians like Paul Davies, the relative changes that are allowed from current observations are far less than the relative changes that the creationists require. Upper limits on how much the speed of light has changed with cosmological epoch can be made by observing atomic spectroscopic lines in distant objects which have ratios that are set by fundamental constants like the speed of light. The upper constraint from such observations is set at roughly one part in 107 for the variation of the speed of light back to the epoch of recombination.
- It does not explain why distant pulsars do not appear to speed up, as they would if the speed of light was indeed slowing down.
- It would not place Supernova 1987A in the creationist timeframe.[2]
[edit] Genesis as a history only of the creation of the Earth
Some young earth creationists hold that Genesis records only the creation of the Earth and solar system, not the entire universe, and that the universe may be many billions of years old, allowing time for the light to travel. While this idea allows the avoidance of the question of cosmological distances altogether, the development of the ability to measure the size of the universe was dependent in part on the development of dating techniques of the Age of the Earth and the solar system. In particular, these ages put important lower bounds on the age of the universe before the details of the Big Bang model were known. Since the speed of light is constant, this also gave a limit to the observable size of the universe.
The age of the solar system is very well constrained by radiometric dating methods of meteorites found on Earth. Chondrules consistently date to 4.56 billion years ago, setting the age of the solar system. The oldest rocks on Earth are roughly a billion years younger than that, with some small zircon crystals dating to 4.38 billion years ago.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition (1999)
- Errors in Humphrey's cosmology.
[edit] Creationist sites
- Russel Humphrey's Bounded Universe.
- White Hole cosmology.
- Humphreys Answers Critics.
- The Orion Foundation
- Gentry's halos website.
- Gentry's cosmology: A New Redshift Interpretation,
- Gentry's cosmology : A New Cosmic Center Model.
- Barry Setterfield attempts to answer his critics.
- "Age of the Universe", creationist interpretations of science.
