|
Creationist cosmologies are arguments (thought of as pseudoscientific by the general scientific community) by various creationists, that a significant portion of the observable universe is a few thousands of years old, and as such, run contrary to the Big Bang Theory, which states that all of 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. Inaccurate astronomy The current cosmological paradigm (the Big Bang) is built on painstaking 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. When such critics refer to these issues in reply to light-travel problems in their own cosmology, however, they commit the fallacy of tu quoque. 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 steller objects were within a radius of 6000 light years. 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. Light created in transit Some creationists have held that light only appears to have come from distant objects, but is really created in transit. This is 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 an epistemologically impossible to refute idea similar to solipsism. The assumptions science generally relies on are that unfalsifiable claims like that are not considered worthy of scientific consideration. 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. "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. Creationists touting their own cosmologies will often spend considerable time in explaining how the "problems" are solved or avoided with their idea. 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 observational evidence to support this cosmology including an isotropic 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. Most prominent creationist organizations have distanced themselves from these ideas including Answers in Genesis. 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 millions 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: Gentrys 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. 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: Genesis as a history only of the creation of the Earth Some YECs 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 measurement of the age of the solar system is very well constrained by radiometric dating methods of meteorites found on Earth. Consistently, the meteorites give the very similar 4.56 billion year ages which serve as important astronomical markers for the age of the solar system. The oldest rocks on the Earth are found to be roughly a billion years younger than that giving a rough age estimate for when the latest crust of the Earth could have cooled. There is a level of overlap within science between each of the different disciplines. While a cosmologist might not ever work on a planetary science mission, the historical interconnectedness of these disciplines is undeniable and there is no telling when in the future interdisciplinary collaboration will occur. See also Creationist sites | |||||||
|
| ||||||||
 |
|
| |