I might have lost the bet simply on the basis of incautious wording. There is “metal”, Oxygen III used to measure the red-shift, but Carbon is not used because it takes much longer to accumulate. Maybe lack of carbon doesn’t necessarily mean a young galaxy?
The now hypothetical wager would seem to require either more data on metal content, an independent arbitrator, or both. 
Um, sorry, but yes it is. ASC only gives us an alternative coordinate system which defines light as having got here simultaneously. It doesn’t do a thing to falsify the conventional synchrony convention in which light travels at the same speed in both directions and has taken 13.8 billion years to reach us from the furthest limits of the visible universe. You still end up with two legitimate frames of reference, a contrived one with a short timescale and an intuitive and much simpler one with a long timescale. That is day-age creationism, period.
That may be so but it doesn’t make physics a free-for-all. No-one gets a free pass to make things up and invent their own reality just because we learn things about how the world works that are counterintuitive.
It’s like I said. Real scientists see weird things such as quantum entanglement happening and conduct rigorous and careful experiments to try to understand what exactly is going on and what they can and can’t legitimately say about them. Pseudoscientists see weird things such as quantum entanglement and take it as a free pass to make things up.
Let’s review.
“(1) I expected to find galaxies at higher redshifts than the secularists were expecting. This would force secularists to conclude that galaxies formed earlier than their secular models had predicted.”
CONFIRMED
“(2) These galaxies would be fully-formed, not in the process of assembly.”
I haven’t seen any pre-print or published evidence to the contrary. Have you? We’ll have to wait for more papers.
"(3) I expected evidence of some heavy elements in these galaxies, rather than pop III stars with no such elements.
Reading up on this, I can understand your objection and it’s difficult to prove a negative. So we could cross this out as a prediction that would help prove one model/worldview over another, unless a population III star with no heavy elements is found in the distant universe someday.
I’d also like to discuss what you wrote here:
Scientists think (thought?) they might be able to better understand the process you describe, and eventually thought they could see individual stars within that process. Did they think they might be able to detect a star with no heavy elements? I guess depends how you read the quoted sections below and if the writer was characterizing their views correctly. See below. Emphases mine.
Since 2002, Windhorst has been Interdisciplinary Scientist for JWST, with which he plans to make detailed a study of the epoch of First Light, when the universe was much less than one billion years old. He hopes to observe the First Stars directly during the first 500 Myr via so-called “cluster caustic transits”, where gravitational lensing from foreground galaxy clusters can temporarily produce extreme magnifications of these individual early stars that happen be in exactly the right location behind the cluster. His JWST GTO team also plans to monitor the best survey field at the North Ecliptic Pole (NEP) to find the earliest supernovae with JWST in the first billion years, faint variable brown dwarf stars in our Galaxy, faint variable Active Galactic Nuclei, and to study the host galaxies of the first quasars seen less than one billion years after the Big Bang.
"We want to answer questions about the early universe such as, were binary stars common or were most stars single? How many heavy chemical elements were produced, cooked up by the very first stars, and how did those first stars effect star formation?” added co-author Frank Timmes of Arizona State University.
The key will be to look for a star that has been gravitationally lensed, its light bent and magnified by the gravity of an intervening galaxy cluster. But not just any gravitational lensing will do. Typical gravitational lensing can magnify light by a factor of 10 to 20 times, not enough to make a first-generation star visible to Webb.
But if the distant star and closer galaxy cluster line up just right, the star’s light can be amplified 10,000 times or more, bringing it within the realm of detectability. This could be done via so-called cluster caustic transits, where the light from a first star candidate could be enormously magnified for a few months due to the motion of the galaxy cluster across the sky.
The chances of such a precise alignment are small, but not zero. Astronomers recently announced that Hubble spotted a super-magnified star known as “Icarus.” Although it was the farthest single star ever seen, it was much closer than the stars Webb might locate. With Webb, the team hopes to find a lensed example of a star that formed from the primordial mix of hydrogen and helium that suffused the early universe, which astronomers call Population III stars.
In addition to the first stars, Windhorst and his colleagues investigated the possibility of seeing accretion disks surrounding the first black holes. Such a black hole, formed by the cataclysmic death of a massive star, could shine brightly if it pulled gas from a companion star.
Interestingly, Windhorst and team did monitor the survey field that he was most interested in. I read this blog post and think - they’re overwhelmed by the galaxies. I’m sure one of these will break the record, once their paper(s) is/are published. But after reading about their hopes for JWST, it also looks like they’re underwhelmed by everything else they’d hoped to find related to galaxy formation - they’re really not seeing much. We’ll see. Maybe more will come out. Webb Glimpses Field of Extragalactic PEARLS, Studded With Galactic Diamonds – James Webb Space Telescope
Yeah, I was probably thinking of this. I’ve got too many articles that I’ve read about JWST galaxies in the last year. But I should be precise and not just make bald assertions.
I’m just having fun having an imagination. My imaginative ramblings aren’t science. But it would be fun to actually investigate them as such if I had the capability. Maybe in the next life. 
For me, my imagination helps me to have patience. I’m in no hurry to give up my beliefs because of the sad, yet still overwhelmingly impressive state of science. From what I’ve read today, it seems theories on the first stars and galaxy formation have gotten tweaked repeatedly to begin in younger epochs in the past 20 years, and the whole process is still pretty murky.
The next year with JWST will be pretty amazing I think.
Fair enough. I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on imaginative stuff. After all, you could argue that every scientific theory starts off as something that someone made up. Probably it’s more accurate to say that scientists make things up, then conduct careful tests to see whether or not the things they make up have any validity. Pseudoscientists, on the other hand, make things up but then continue to present them as fact without testing them properly, or even after tests have shown them to be invalid.
Lisle is disingenuous here, as he bushes off all galaxies, no matter what their interactions or apparent history, as just created that way. He considers any and all galaxies to be “fully-formed”, so that a counter example is not possible. He is willfully blind and impervious to any and all evidence. As a matter of fact, we observe the early universe to be undergoing massive assembly. That is what the filaments of galaxies is about. That is what the merger of smaller galaxies is about. Assembly. What else does he think the process of assembly would look like?
Some general discussion on JWST distant galaxy observations and cosmology
No, the Big Bang theory is not ‘broken.’ Here’s how we know.
Can Cosmological Simulations Reproduce the Spectroscopically Confirmed Galaxies Seen at z ≥ 10?
This more recent article is of interest:
Quanta Magazine
It includes the possible observation of Population III stars in recently discovered galaxies.
It’s similar to how creationists deny the existence of transitional forms in evolutionary biology.
Saw it in my feed today, and read it and hopped on here. I was quite amused because what are the chances that gets published today right as we were discussing?! Anyway, I think again it shows @Rumraket is wrong --There definitely are scientists that think they can spot stars without heavy elements.
Windhorst leads a JWST program that is attempting the technique. “I’m pretty confident that in a year or two we will have seen some,” he said. “We already have some candidates.” Similarly, Eros Vanzella, an astronomer at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, is leading a program that’s studying a clump of 10 or 20 candidate Population III stars using gravitational lensing. “We are just playing with the data now,” he said.
So we’ll have to see if the pre-print paper mentioned gets published and isn’t challenged. But I checked the abstract and they’re claiming to have found a galaxy that probably has a mix of stars, including pop III stars. How definitive could that be?
Now Xin Wang, an astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and his colleagues think they’ve found them. “It’s really surreal,” Wang said. Confirmation is still needed; the team’s paper, posted on the preprint server arxiv.org on December 8, is awaiting peer review at Nature.
Anyway, Lisle could be proven wrong. We’ll have to see.
Also, to me as a creationist, this quote is wild. Scientism much?
“We exist, therefore we know there must have been a first generation of stars,” said Rebecca Bowler, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
As someone who is not a scientist, I’m enjoying the thread. Saw this one recently, and found it hilarious:
“the processes that produced life were not directed"
Dave Farina
It seems to me that you are conflating Population III stars with stars with absolutely no heavy elements. @Rumraket denied the latter.
Not unless you think the Steady State Model is still considered scientifically viable. Scientism requires more than preferring science to your beliefs.
Nothing weird about that. They’re just working from established cosmology. We already know that at some point the universe was so hot and dense stars could not have existed, that the elements of life are produced in stellar nucleosynthesis, and that stars go through generations with later stars forming from the ejecta of previous stars. It logically follows there must have been a first generation of stars.
That’s not scientism. It’s science.
No, not confirmed. Which are these models that said no galaxies should exist at these redshifts? Were there truly none that said they should exist, or be detectable, at these redshifts? I find that idea extremely unlikely exactly because of the huge uncertainties involved.
Already explained why that statement is meaningless. How can a galaxy FAIL to be fully formed? What would a not fully formed galaxy look like according to how Jason Lisle thinks astronomers think galaxy formation occurs?
Well color me surprised. But if I’m wrong then so is Lisle, who said both that no astronomers expected we should be able to detect stars at these redshifts and that he’s the only one who predicted observation of galaxies at these redshifts (the article says others expected it), and that we wouldn’t find genuine population III stars with no metals (the article says there are already candidate observations).
Though they lack the heft to break the prevailing cosmological model, the JADES galaxies have other special characteristics. Hainline said their stars seem unpolluted by metals from previously exploded stars. This could mean they are Population III stars — the avidly sought first generation of stars to ever ignite — and that they may be contributing to the reionization of the universe. If this is true, then JWST has already peered back to the mysterious period when the universe was set on its present course.
I also have to caution against bs pop-sci articles, which all your links are, which thrive on exaggerations, hyping results, dramatizations etc. Some of them mutually contradictory. In the same article we read that galaxies formed earlier than “anyone anticipated”, and that others can model it. As I wrote earlier there has always been a range of models under consideration, with many of the parameters to use in these models being subject to huge uncertainties. That means there is no such thing as just one thing that “astronomers expected”. There was a range of options with some probably deemed more likely than others given already known values.
I had hoped to write a nuanced response to your specific claims tonight but my brain is tired after a long day, yet I need to vomit out some screenshots that I’ll describe to get some things off my mind. So I do hope to respond more specifically in the next few days. But I’ll just share what I’ve been listening to / reading today.
I had remembered that some of what I’ve been referring to was from an article referencing a recent AAS conference. I found a press conference video with relevant updates from Kartaltepe (at about 4 minutes) and Yan (at about 30 minutes) (see video description.) and the Q&A period is relevant at the end. https://www.youtube.com/live/G4VpoNl_DFE
Relevant slides from Kartaltepe on galaxy morphology and evolution. Notably on the high side they’re out to less than a billion years from the big bang, and this survey using JWST hasn’t answered any questions about galaxy formation yet. They want to know how disk galaxies formed but their percentage actually increased compared to Hubble due to being able to resolve more (Remember I had predicted the distant universe would be clumpy just like the local universe).
Aqua are disk galaxies. (Her pic is in the way)
So I was amused by this first slide I’m sharing from Yan. (First stars forming at 400 millon years is crossed out. He said that would take too long to get into. But it’s probably the most recent Big Bang diagram put out by NASA I suppose. )
Notice this slide below. This speck of the sky has 12 Galaxy candidates for a redshift of more than 20 (less than 200 million years after the big bang). He didn’t even get into that but it made me chuckle.
(Edited for clarity) Ethan Siegel asked him about confirmation of these redshifts of 11-20 (200-400) in this slide in the Q&A and he bet $20 and a beer that over half would be confirmed.
So Yan wrote in the slide above “our previous picture of galaxy formation in the early universe must be revised.”
Lisle predicted a year ago before there was any data:
What do creationists expect to find? I cannot speak for all creation scientists. But I personally expect that the JWST will find quite a different situation. Rather than galaxies just starting to form, I expect to see fully-formed (fully-designed) galaxies at unprecedented distances. This will force secular astronomers to adjust their estimates of when the earliest galaxies formed, pushing them much closer to the supposed big bang. We might see headlines like “Webb discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.”
Relevant article where astronomers are actually quoted using the word “expected” about what they expected. Can’t make it up. 
I remember watching this last summer. Anton Petrov also used the word “surprised” about what they saw in relation to what they expected. https://youtu.be/o8_KMiYu3BM
Ethan Siegel asked him about confirmation in the Q&A and he bet $20 and a beer that over half would be confirmed.
See? It’s not just me. Are you sure you don’t want a piece of the action?
This has been useful as a scientific heuristic in the past. We are carbon based lifeforms, but back when there was no known path for stellar carbon synthesis. Whether formally or informally, the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle reasoned that we exist, therefore we know there had to be a pathway for generating carbon in stars, which he eventually found. I would not be surprised if Bowler was rifting on this.
If you see a mouse in your house, there is probably more than one mouse in your house, along with an associated source of carbon from which mice are made.
That just seems to confirm what I’ve been saying. That these questions about when exactly and to what extent galaxy formation first occurred, and how quickly they developed into the kinds of galaxies we see “locally” are actually largely unknowns, and that the reason for launching ever better and bigger telescopes that can see further away and deeper into the past is to try to get answers to such questions(which will help discriminate among different models). So once again, there really wasn’t any “hard” predictions for the exact timing of these events. There was all sorts of models that always had a range of different assumptions. I’m sure various camps of astronomers had their preferred models.
The fraction of galaxies classified as “unclassified/unresolved” was comparatively higher in the Hubble data because they were too small and faint for astronomers to reliably estimate their morphology. With the JWST galaxies at those distances can now be better seen and so can be better classified. Even with JWST the fraction of galaxies that are classified as discs or spheroids still appear to decline slightly with increasing redshift(most noticeably for discs), it’s just that the steepness of the curve has been significantly reduced.
That’s for the range of z=3-9. We need those same figures extended to z=whatever the furthest we can see with the JWST.
How any of this supports Lisle, much less YEC is lost on me.
Even though the steepness of the curves for z=3-9 galaxies have been reduced, the further away in time and distance from the present, the more different does the universe become. And none of these galaxies are actually really relevant to Jason Lisle’s so-called predictions. These galaxies are a billion years old or more. We are supposed to be looking at galaxies when they first formed at redshifts Jason Lisle claims nobody expected we should be observing any?
It seems to me this slide outright contradicts Lisle’s claim that astronomers did not expect to find galaxies at these distances:
As the presenter says, it is the number of them(and their brightness, which is related to their density) that seems to be much higher than expected.
Yeah first, that’s just meaningless because you give no actual values. Second, it is already expected that even at the earliest times the density fluctuations in the energy would ultimately be responsible for producing the large-scale structures of the universe:
So the small temperature fluctuations we can see in the cosmic microwave background radiation are thought to have ultimately caused the uneven distribution of matter that led to the first star and galaxy formation. And why some parts of the universe appears to have very low density of of matter(large intergalactic voids) compared to others that have very massive clusters of galaxies.
Your 2nd link also seems to confirm the point that there was never much certainty about the timing and magnitude of galaxy formation(my bold):
“People have been saying that JW should enable us to find those very far away objects, but nobody expected that we would be able to find them so quickly, in such a large quantity, and some of them are really, really bright,” he said.
Finding the candidate galaxies is an important contribution to our understanding of the universe, Guo said.
There’s no clear answer to when the first stars and galaxies should have formed, but if the candidate galaxies are confirmed, they will place unprecedented strong constraints on the models of the universe, Guo said. The candidates appeared in the universe earlier than what many astronomers, including himself, assumed.
Just to add some of my commentary. Although, be advised, this isn’t the field I am mainly working on, so feel free to correct anything I say here. I will also try to avoid making the same points that were already made by someone else.
I think this discussion highlights one important point about how science actually works. First scientists start to construct a model (aka a theory) that accurately describes the world to the best of the current understanding. However, the model is not complete, mainly because the knowledge about the world at any given time is not complete. Scientists are human and they of course not infallible. So as time goes on, and further experiments / observations occur that improve understanding and continuously test the predictions of the models, chances are that some of these new results don’t match the expectations of our model. So what happens next?
Outside the scientific community: Such discoveries often get abused to paint a negative picture about science as a whole. This is the old “Scientists have been wrong before, so why should be believe them now?!” tirade that is used in many pseudoscience and anti-science circles. The best (and funny) example I can think is the “Science is a lair… sometimes” Scene from the ‘It’s always sunny in Philadelphia’ show.
Within the scientific community: When discrepancies between results and expectations are observed, the following things happens (of course I am simplifying an otherwise very complex process):
Then we are at the cusp of a “paradigm shift”.
Step #2 and #3 are simply omitted when someone insinuates that, when something unexpected is discovered, this MUST mean that the current theory is wrong and should be abandoned. Often they think step #2 is like they are cheating the bona fide scientific procress. “This isn’t science. They are just desperately tryiing to safe their theories from conflicting data”…yadayada. This is simply not the case for two reasons. (1) Conflicting observations could mean that the theory is wrong, but it also could very easily mean the model is incomplete and that it should be updated instead. The latter in fact occurs far more frequently than the former. (2) Even if the theory is proven (or is shown with great certainty) to be wrong, we still shouldn’t abandon it immediately, because an imperfect theory is better than no theory. Only when a better theory comes along, that’s when the old model is abandoned (although the flawed theories are often still taught because of their simplicity and sufficiency to describe the world under limited contexts; e.g. classical physics and the Bohr model of the atom).
To give a standard example of this process: Newton provided a very accurate description of the motion of physical objects and gravity, including those of the celestial bodies with very high accuracy. However, the orbit of Uranus didn’t match the predictions of Newtonian physics. So did the scientists just throw their hands up and toss Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica into the river? No. They updated the model by including a new planet further out that disrupted Uranus’ orbit. That planet was later discovered (Neptune). So this would be an example of #2 in the previous steps. Now, later it turns out that the orbit of Mercury similarly also deviated from the expectations. For a long time, scientists had a similar answer. Another planet, that was preemptively named “Vulcan”, but never discovered. Because it doesn’t exist. This is where Einstein came in with his theory of relativity, which (A) accurately describes the same observations just as accurately as those described by Newtonian physics, and (B) Relativity makes accurate predictions that aren’t identical to those made by the former theory; e.g. Mercury’s orbit, time dilation, bending of star light by the mass of the sun (seen during a solar eclipse) and gravitational waves. This would be an example of #3.
This is why I often get frustrated when discussing (my main field of interest) evolutionary biology with creationists. When they ask me how X, Y, Z, etc evolved, often I am able to give an answer with citations (that will frequently get ignored anyway; first reason for my frustration). Alternatively, when I don’t know the answer, I will freely admit that we don’t have an explanation for those things. This invariably is followed by insinuation that therefore all of evolution must wrong. Then I push back on that by pointing out that this could be a “Neptune” situation instead of a “Vulcan” situation. Furthermore, I will point out that the theory does describe the part of the world that is relevant to the theory very accurately to the extend of no other. So, I will ask them: what do you propose as an alternative that explains all of this better? That question is also frequently ignored, but when push comes to shove, the answer essentially boils down to “goddidit with miracles. That explains everything”. That’s a whole lot of nothing to work with. In fact, that’s even worse than “no theory”. It’s just pretending you have a theory, which dulls any motivation to test, verify, build or improve upon any knowledge about the world. So, it remains preferable to keep and improve a well-established theory, even one that’s far from perfect.
So let’s apply what I said previously to the main topic is about Galaxy formation. Scientists have formulated various models for how the first galaxies formed. However, they had very little direct data from that time period. So, remember what I said about how models are often incomplete due to limited knowledge? That’s exactly the case here. While it’s true that their previous guess was that the earliest galaxies formed later than the ones that are now detected, cosmologists generally have been very open about the fact that early star and galaxy formation isn’t well understood, because their best devices couldn’t see far enough. In fact, this was the one of the main reasons why they made the JWST in the first place!!
Now that the JWST made observations that weren’t expected from our previous models based on limited information, what do we see? Do we see scientists working to upend of all of cosmology? Or do we see them motivated to revise their understanding on galaxy formation based on the new data that will keep coming in? Well, @thoughtful giving this quote from Yan gives a good hint:
And then there is this:
This is the stuff I mentioned before that I find frustrating. Rationalizing any observation in an ad hoc fashion isn’t the same as making testable predictions. “He probably did it this way because we see it this way”. It’s a useless model, if one even can call it as such.
Uhm… “scientists will revise their models in light of new data”… isn’t really a remarkable prediction. Even more so, this has been a trend for the last decades. The following a short list of (former) record holders for most distant astronomical objects by the year of their discovery (By = billion years, My = Million years)
Year 1998: Galaxy RD1 with z = 5.34 → 12.5 By ago or 1.300 By after big bang.
Year 2002: Galaxy HCM-6A with z = 6.56 → 12.8 By ago or 1.0 By after big bang.
Year 2006: Galaxy IOK-1 with z = 6.96 → 12.88 By ago or 920 My after big bang.
Year 2015: Galaxy EGSY8p7 with z = 8.683 → 13.2 By ago or 600 Mya after big bang.
Year 2016: Galaxy GN-z11 with z = 11 → 13.4 By ago or 400 My after big bang.
Year 2022: Galaxy HD1 with z = 13.27 → 13.4418 By ago or 330 My after big bang.
More importantly, it’s NOT a prediction FOR creation or any potential alternative model. That should be the answer when one asks “What do creationists expect to find”? What Lisle is doing here is pushing rhetoric of “Scientists have been wrong before, so why should be believe them now?!” that I went over previously.
Besides, Lisle assertion of a young universe wouldn’t just mean that big bang cosmology is wrong, it would mean pretty much all of our modern understanding of physics is wrong. What’s more parsimonious explanation for (and a proper response to) new observations of earlier galaxies? That our models were incomplete and need to be updated? Or that pretty much everything we know about an entire field of science is wrong? Hint: It’s the former.
I have a better analogy. Or rather a literal example regarding the evolution of tetrapods. The oldest body fossils of tetrapods are about 377 million years old and we have many transitional “fishapods” are from around or just prior to that same time. Then we discovered trace fossils of tetrapods that are 390 million years old, which preceded many of the transitional fishapods as well. The creationists started mocking evolution as if our grandfather was born earlier than our great grandfather… of course not understanding that transitional ≠ ancestral such that transitional species can also coexist and even persist beyond the first members of a given clade. Think trees, not ladders.
This isn’t even an instance where a model is incomplete. The big bang model isn’t intended to explain this. It has little if anything to with how and exactly when galaxies formed, only being tangentially related under cosmology. Let’s be clear about what the big bang model is - or specifically the “hot big bang”. That “hot” is added to clarify it’s meaning since the “big bang” has confusingly different usages. The pop usage is that it refers to either the (tenseless) beginning (t=0) or the earliest phase of the universe (from t=0 to t>0). However, sometimes the ‘big bang’ is used more specifically to refer to a period when the universe was in a ‘hot and dense state’, which later expanded and cooled to become the largely cold universe that we currently inhabit. This period was preceded by inflation, meaning inflation isn’t part of the time frame designated as the ‘big bang’. This is how the term ‘big bang’ is used according to a physicist I am reading this from and also an online acquaintance who knows more than me about this. The reason why it’s called “hot” is because the universe was apparently “cold” and “empty” prior to this, due to the insane rate of cosmic expansion during inflation. At some point, the universe underwent a phase transition which halted inflation stopped through the ‘collapse’ of the energy that drove inflation. This collapse produced the particles and (re-)heating the universe. At least, that’s the best way I can describe this here. And from what I can tell, the details preceding period of inflation is still very much debated. Click on the previous link or this PBS Space Time video for more details.
So let’s just skip inflation and focus on the “hot big bang” for a moment, which approx started when the universe was 10^-32 seconds old (exact date also up for debate). From this time onward, what happened is very well agreed upon. We can actually directly test the conditions during this time in particle accelerators. The universe was so hot that matter only existed as a quark-gluon-plasma and the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces were unified into an electroweak force. Then, at t=10^−12 seconds, a phase transition separated these forces into the 2 familiar ones and the Higgs field came into effect giving some particles their mass. But it was still too hot for quarks to associate. After t=10^−5 seconds, the universe was cool enough for quarks to form hadrons (incl. protons and neutrons). Now comes an important part. After 10 seconds, it cooled enough for the hadrons to form nuclei and until 20 minutes in, it was hot enough for nuclear fusion to occur (called Big Bang nucleosynthesis). This time interval predicts the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium isotopes we observe to day. Then another important thing happened. The universe remained hot enough for electrons to roam freely (everything was plasma, which kept scattering photons that made the universe opaque) until 18,000 years when the first neutral atoms formed through “recombination”. By 370,000 years, pretty much all matter had become neutral. This made the universe transparent for the first time, setting the photons free on a straight trajectory, which we can still see today as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB). It’s pretty much DIRECT evidence of the hot big bang. We can see the glow of the dense and hot universe, though it’s been red-shifted into microwaves. There is currently no other explanation for the CMB, and (for all intents and purposes) it’s pretty much the only possible explanation there can be.
That’s the basic idea of the (hot) big bang; which remains well-established. There are aspects that weren’t predicted from the classical big bang model (flatness, horizon, dark matter and dark energy). These things gave rise to the inflation hypothesis (step #2 of science, or a “Neptune” situation). However, the question of how and when galaxy formed does not affect the evidence for the hot big bang model in any way.
That Big bang diagram was made by NASA in 2006, probably when they thought the first stars formed 400 million years after the big bang. “Oh my, science was wrong before.” Don’t you think this non-argument ever gets old?
That isn’t the prediction.
Correct. And creationists’ best guess was better than theirs. Why do you think that was?
I even said I’d be willing to revise my beliefs if what scientists found what they were planning. That’s how much confidence I had; I thought it more likely than not that they wouldn’t see early evolution of galaxies.
I agree. To get there, some new variation in steady state theory would have to be viable and make predictions.
Edit: Unless multiple galaxy candidates are found and confirmed at a distance which would mean they existed at or before the beginning of the unverse. Then the poop hits the fan.
Except again that wasn’t the prediction.
So I’ll offer an alternative, and share some of the predictions of the creationist cosmology rumbling around in my imaginations. Some I’ve shared before.
That’s where I’m at so far. Creationists need a cosmology theorist for sure. There isn’t one, so there isn’t a model. But I had to try for my own curiosity. I think the day divisions of Genesis 1 that are scientific but the details within each day are somewhat phenomenological / come out of their ancient context. (Consider the difference between day 6 and Genesis 2.)
I heavily lean towards God created matter at the beginning because that makes scientific sense; it makes good sense of the text if Genesis if it views “waters” as a primordial state like ancient Egyptian cosmology does, and Moses would have been educated in that context; and an artist gathers all their materials before they begin.
Also, it is fun to keep coming across the unique properties of water that make it seem like a primordial state. This one definitely peaked my interest a few days ago. An illuminated water droplet creates an 'optical atom' | ScienceDaily
Thanks for writing all those words; I know it takes a while. If there’s something specific you want me to still address let me know.
Edit 2:
I was looking back at the figures you shared under the most recent record breakers. I noticed that to fix them based on what the astronomers shared at the conference probably all of the epoch of reionization has to go/be moved to earlier in history. I fixed it for you. Lol. Sorry, can’t help it this is fun.
An interesting recent article on simulations of this era. Video: Astronomers reveal remarkable simulations of the early universe epoch of reionization
