Sunday, November 14, 2010

YEC Star light Travel Time: If at first you don’t succeed…


Judging from this article over on the Institute of Creation Research Young Earth Creationist Russ Humphreys is still beavering away on his geocentric cosmology. The article is dated 1st Nov 2010 but it points back to an article here which in turn refers to some 2007 work by Humphreys where he attempts to perfect his model. I had a look at Humphreys ideas in my blog post here, but I haven’t seen this later work. Essentially Humphreys idea involves postulating a finite asymmetrical big-bang-like event with the Earth near the centre. His hope is that the resulting space-time metric generates enough time dilation in the vicinity of the Earth to slow down time to the extent that only about 6000 years  passes in the Earth’s locale since creation.

One of the problems in Humphreys earlier work, the article claims, is that his models “Did not provide enough time dilation for nearby stars and galaxies,”. Humphreys later models, I gather, attempt to address this problem. This difficulty actually brings out just how geocentric Humphreys model must be: Problems start little by little for the YECs at a mere 6000 light years from Earth. At all distances greater than that light is hard pressed to reach is in time unless the “Humphreys effect” kicks into action in stages for astronomical objects seen beyond that distance. A distance of 6000 light years covers only a small fraction of own galaxy let alone the wider environs of the cosmos. Thus, the Earth, according to Humphreys, must lie very precisely at the centre of his cosmic model. In fact I think that Humphreys is effectively claiming that the Voyager gravitational anomaly may be evidence of the special status of Earth’s locale.

I suspect that Humphreys ideas will come to grief in time. If the “Humphreys effect” can be thought of as a concentric gravitational field with the Earth centrally placed, then the fact that the metric of that field must at some point in the past have very steep differentials within a few thousand light years from Earth’s locale would, I guess, considerably distort the shape of our own galaxy. Off the top of my head let me just say that I’m not aware astronomical observations support such a conclusion.

Anyway, Humphreys is at least showing some respect for science and the integrity of the created order by taking this approach; that is, he is trying to craft a creation narrative that doesn’t make recourse to large dollops of arbitrary Divine fiat. His type of approach is probably the best bet for the YECs - although many YECs may feel uneasy about the fact that according to Humphreys  billions of years of history passes in most of the cosmos implying that there are likely to be planets out there with an “old Earth” geology. As for the ideas of YEC creationist Jason Lisle they are best binned and forgotten about.

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