Truth Really Matters

There is considerable evidence that the universe and the earth are far younger than the billions of years absolutely required by evolutionary fantasy – although “billions of years” isn’t enough to make it work!

Evolutionists rely on the magic of infinite time to overcome their probabilistic impossibilities. They are sure that a few billion years is sufficiently close to infinity to allow for chance chemical processes and the guidance of natural selection to account for all the pageantry of God’s living creation. But as we have seen, even a few billion years isn’t enough.

But there is much evidence to indicate that the universe and the earth cannot be billions of years old. Let’s look at just a very few items. (Sarfati’s book, below, has good summaries of many of these issues.)

i. Carbon 14 dating has been ‘born again.’ (See De Young.) The half-life of C14 is 5730 years. Dead organic matter contains trace elements of C14, which the organism ingested from the biosphere while alive. Once dead and buried, however, the C14 content drops by 50% every half-life. An evolutionist would expect that coal samples, allegedly hundreds of millions of years old, would have absolutely zero atoms of C14 remaining after all this time. In fact, coal shows readily measurable C14. Diamonds, allegedly a billion years old, also contain C14. That is IMPOSSIBLE from an evolutionary point of view. If the entire earth were made of solid C14, in a ‘mere’ one million years (174 half-lives), not one atom would remain. Ergo, the earth is young.

ii. Zircons are tiny crystals which can often be found in granite. A given zircon serves as a cage for helium atoms which derive from uranium decay. Careful experiments have measured the rate at which helium diffuses out of zircons. Considering the amount of uranium decay, which is interpreted to be equivalent to that of billions of years under uniformitarian assumptions, essentially all of the helium should have escaped. But helium is abundant inside zircons. The measured abundance indicates that the crystals and the granite are about 6,000 years old. (See DeYoung.)

iii. Spiral galaxies present a real mystery to evolutionary cosmologists. Stars closer to the center of a galaxy orbit around the center faster than those at the extremities. The same gravitational dynamics govern satellites in orbit around the earth and planets around the sun. For spiral galaxies, this leads to the “winding-up dilemma.” If any spiral were more than a few hundred million years old, it would “wind up” and look like a uniform disk. For example: A typical period of galactic rotation is 100 million years. In a lifetime of 10 billion years, 100 rotations would occur. No spiral structure could survive that! Lots of theories have been built and discarded over the last 50 years, but none have survived careful examination. An additional problem is that the orbital velocities don’t fit the right profile, given reasonable assumptions for the mass of a given galaxy, based on the number of observed stars. This problem increases the stability issue for an age of billions of years. Assuming that undetectable and unimaginable “dark matter” suffuses galaxies at just the right concentrations to solve this problem shows the level of desperation in cosmologists’ hearts.

iv. Globular clusters found near our galaxy contain hundreds of thousands of stars. Some are moving rapidly away from our galaxy, and definitely not in orbit around it. They will depart the vicinity in just a few million years. But then how could they have existed in proximity to the Milky Way for the last 10 billion years? And how can it be that their spherical symmetry hasn’t been distorted by the galaxy’s gravitational field in all that time? It’s also been noted that there isn’t much gas within a large number of clusters – but the “solar wind” from each star in a cluster should have been spewing gas into its vicinity for billions of years!

v. Groups of galaxies produce the same dilemma. Individual galaxies move too fast to be contained within their group for long. Backtracking the trajectories implies that they were “together” not so long ago.

vi. Speaking of spewing gas, note how a comet evaporates as it approaches the sun. Calculations indicate that so much material is lost that they couldn’t possibly be more than 10,000 to 100,000 years old.

vii. A supernova is a violently exploding star, a spectacular example of decay in a fallen universe. Based on astronomical observations, a galaxy like ours, the Milky Way, should see about one supernova every 25 years. The gas cloud that results will expand and glow for hundreds of thousands of years. Analysis indicates that we should be able to see quite a number of such “old” expanding gas clouds. But all of the approximately 200 remnants observed indicate an age of just a few thousand years at most. There are zero “old” remnants. (See Sarfati.)

viii. There isn’t enough mud on the sea floor. About 25 billion tons of dirt and rock erode from the continents annually. The average depth of ocean mud is less than 400 meters. At current rates, this limits the age of the oceans to about 12 million years. That’s not long enough for the evolutionary time scale, which requires the oceans to be at least 3 billion years old. (We know from Biblical history that most of that mud is runoff from the Genesis flood – that’s why there is as much as there is, but not nearly enough for the evolutionist.)

ix. Similarly, there’s not enough sodium in the sea. Annual deposits amount to about 450 million tons. The numbers work out to a limit of about 62 million years. Measurements of other sea water elements pose even younger ages for the ocean.

x. The earth’s magnetic field is decaying too rapidly. A backward extrapolation over even millions of years would require a virtually infinite amount of energy in the early earth’s field – Enough to melt the earth and vaporize it!

xi. Geologic strata are tightly bent, with many folded into hairpin shapes. Conventional wisdom says that these formations were bent by crustal movements hundreds of millions of years after they were formed and solidified. Yet the folding occurs without cracking, and with radii so small that entire formations had to be wet at the time. Thus the folding must have occurred within months to years at most after formation. We know Biblically that the layers were laid down rapidly during the Genesis flood and would have been folded during the geologic upheavals of that period.

xii. Evolutionists claim that Cro-magnon and Neanderthal men populated the “stone age” for at least 100,000 years. The world population was allegedly a few million during this period. These people buried their dead, which would demand a total of billions of skeletons. But only a few thousand have been found. Perhaps the stone age was only a few hundred years – after Noah’s flood.

xiii. Similarly, archeological evidence indicates that agriculture is only about 10,000 years old. But other evidence indicates that stone age people were certainly as creative and intelligent as modern man. Is it reasonable that intelligent people would not have discovered for 100,000 years that seeds grow into food?

xiv. Furthermore, written records only go back about 4 – 5,000 years. But, allegedly, prehistoric man built monuments, painted beautifully, and recorded the lunar phases. Did he really live for 100,000 years before figuring out how to write? By the way, the Great Pyramid in Egypt is the oldest one on the plain of Giza. The other pyramids are more recent in construction and less well made. Sounds like people were smarter at the beginning and degraded.

For each of the items above (and there are hundreds more that are discussed in the literature), there are a variety of speculations to explain away the dilemmas. But speculation is not evidence. The evidence – looked at honestly – would lead one to believe that the universe has been here just a short time. If you are confident that the time scales are huge, then your confidence derives from a deep faith in evolution, which is based on the weakest of speculations, which in turn are unsupported by both reason and mathematics.

http://pulsobeat.com/tag/after-party/ What about the “speed of light – time of flight – horizon” problem? One of the biggest issues in cosmology for the creationist is how can the earth/universe be 6000 years old while we can see galaxies millions to billions of light years away? If the light has been traveling for billions of years, then surely the universe has been around that long, hasn’t it? Interestingly, the evolutionary cosmologists have a related problem called the “horizon problem.” One of the most famous evidences for a big bang cosmology is the presence of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which comes from all parts of the sky with incredible uniformity (1 part in 100,000). This radiation is supposedly the left over “heat” from the early stages of the big bang. As the universe expanded over billions of years, everything cooled down (except for stars and galaxies!), leaving the universe in radiative thermal equilibrium.

But there’s a problem. The universe is now at least 50 billion light years across (estimates vary), yet is allegedly “only” 14 billion years old. For equilibrium to occur there must be continual interchange of energy among all regions enjoying that equilibrium. Yet the speed of light is nowhere fast enough to produce that equilibrium for such a huge universe. Furthermore, the uniformity was a shock to cosmologists because of the serious “lumpiness” of the universe. Galaxies are “lumps” and are lumped into clusters of galaxies which are distributed (lumped) in nonuniform ways throughout the universe.

The evolutionists’ ad hoc way around this problem is termed “inflation.” When the universe was VERY young and VERY small, it may have lingered long enough in this state (10^-35 seconds) to achieve thermal equilibrium, and then the universe expanded (inflated) much faster than the speed of light for a time (“FTL” on a universal scale!), then dropped out of FTL and resumed the current normal expansion. The speculative details keep changing, but anyone with any scientific training should appreciate the imaginative ad hoc inventions used to avoid the bigger problem – Big Bang cosmology is a bad model. Just consider a short list of the unexplainables:

1. Out of nothingness (get your head around that!) popped the entire universe with space, time, and all of its carefully balanced physical laws and variety of interacting particles. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
2. This universe-crammed-into-a-point decided to expand. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
3. Once the right mix of particles and radiation achieved thermal equilibrium, the universe decided to accelerate its expansion far beyond the speed of light. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
4. When the universe got to a size so that we could eventually enjoy it, it dropped out of hyper-speed. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
5. Matter coalesced into nice tidy stars arranged into picturesque, orderly galaxies. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
6. Some of the matter coalesced into nice tidy planets arranged into picturesque, orderly solar systems. How? Why? There is no science supporting this point.
7. The universe continues to expand at a reduced (from before), but still accelerating rate. How and Why is it still accelerating? There is no science supporting this point.

The continued accelerating expansion is “explained” by the presence of “dark energy” in the universe. What is dark energy? It must be a “negative” energy, because the gravitational acceleration from all the matter of all the galaxies would produce DEceleration, not acceleration. How can energy be negative? Nobody knows. Just what/why/where is dark energy? There is no science.

Furthermore, galaxies exhibit rotational structure (orbits of stars) that just can’t exist for a universe billions of years old. And galactic clusters have similar problems. Thus “dark matter” is invoked to explain observables that just can’t be in an evolutionary universe.

It’s fascinating. Cosmologists estimate (in order to make their models believable) that dark energy accounts for 73% of all the stuff/energy in the universe, that dark matter must account for 23%, and the stars/galaxies make up the other 4%. Evolutionists proclaim that their cosmology/philosophy is FACT, and yet they have not observed the first two (96% of everything!) and still have no credible science supporting the formation of the remaining 4%.

Now that’s a long discussion to make the point that although creationists have a real challenge – worthy of continued research – to lock down the speed of light problem, the “other side” is sunk without a trace. So how are creationists doing on their problem?

Russ Humphreys (see ref below) has developed a “white hole” cosmology, using the theory of general relativity. This cosmology assumes a center of expansion and a bounded, finite universe. (Big bangers assume no center and no edge – get your head around that!) With the Biblical book of Genesis in mind, Humphreys postulates a universe that is localized to within a few light years of earth, which then expands continuously until the present day. At the center of this gravitational well, clocks run slower, while in the expanding universe they run faster at the edges. Expansion produces the red shifts that we presently observe in astronomy. The results from general relativity allow the entire process to take place in days (under a guided hand – God’s), while up to several hundred million years (NOT many billions!) of time tick by in far away galaxies. This allows for some galactic rotation and distant events such as supernovas without the destruction of spiral structures that would occur in a billions-of-years-old universe.

There is much more to this, of course, and many issues to investigate both mathematically and observationally, and that’s why Humphreys has written a book on the subject. Please check it out.

Another book-length creationist treatment is available by John Hartnett. Hartnett employs Einstein’s general relativity, plus modifications of the theory generated by Moshe Carmeli in the 1990s, and constrains it to a Biblical time frame. His theory also involves accelerated clocks in the distant universe, and is able to explain much of what astronomers observe in galactic/universal structure while avoiding ideas like dark matter and dark energy.

In both of the models of Humphreys and Hartnett are found solutions to the speed of light problem – namely, that within the bounds of known physics (general relativity), the earth and universe are young (by earth clocks) and yet we enjoy distant starlight.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: Getting your heads around these theories will require some real work on your part. You’ll probably want to have taken at least graduate work in physics if you really want to check these guys out. The main point is that there are dueling cosmologies out there. As a PhD physicist myself and, more importantly, as someone simply trained in the scientific method, it’s easy for me to see who has to be more inventive and arbitrary in constructing models. I also recommend the last two books in the reference list for analysis of this subject at the popular level.

icily References:
Paul M. Steidl, “The Earth, the Stars, and the Bible,” Baker Book House, 1979.
D. Russell Humphreys, “Evidence for a Young World,” Creation Matters, a publication of the Creation Research Society, July/August 1999.
D. Russell Humphries, Starlight and Time – Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe, Master Books, 1998.
Jean-Marc Perelmuter, “Chiaroscuro in Space: The Suggestion of Matter Bears Much Meaning for the Universe,” Fox News on the web, 8.00 a.m. ET (1200 GMT) July 14, 1999.
John Hartnett, Starlight, Time and the New Physics, Creation Ministries International, 2007.
Alex Williams and John Hartnett, Dismantling the Big Bang – God’s Universe Rediscovered, Master Books, 2005.
Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting Compromise – A Biblical and Scientific Refutation of Progressive Creationism (Billions of Years) As Popularized by Astronomer Hugh Ross, Master Books, 2004.

– Dr. Dave