He didn’t appear to go into any detail in the article about how he squares the words of Genesis and the biblical timelines with cosmology(what are the passages he finds this support in, and how does he read them? What is the support for such interpretations?), but I do find a lot of similar sentiments in how he describes his disillusionment with YEC apologetics concerning the supposed failures of modern science.
In particular this part significantly mirrors my early experiences with ID-creationism and their arguments against evolution:
If you’re prepared to dive into some details, here’s one example:
“The problem of explaining the existence of galaxies has proved to be one of the thorniest in cosmology”, says physicist Dr James Trefil. This quote was presented in books by young earth advocates as a disastrous admission of an unfillable hole in the Big Bang theory.
But among cosmologists, I found a very different attitude. Yes, there was a genuine puzzle when it came to galaxy formation. How had the almost perfectly uniform expansion of the universe allowed matter to clump together fast enough to form stars and galaxies?
Admittedly, when Trefil made his statement in 1988, nobody was sure of the answer. Seminal papers in galaxy formation theory were still being written. Large-scale galaxy surveys were a decade away. Computer simulations were just beginning to be explored. But far from being hidden, problems were openly embraced. Trefil’s statement wasn’t overheard on a wiretap or blurted out under cross-examination; it was published.
Why think that galaxy formation is unsolvable, rather than merely unsolved? When I began to engage with the evidence in the early 2000s, I read in a YEC book of a challenge to Big Bang theory. It promised that a mathematical proof had been found which rendered galaxy formation impossible in Big Bang cosmology.
It didn’t take me long to track down the original paper, written in 1977. I found that the mathematical result was not a secret – it had also been derived in 1966 by Stephen Hawking and could be found in most cosmology textbooks. And, like all mathematical proofs, it had terms and conditions. Hawking had already suggested in 1966 that one of the conditions may be false and, by 1992, observations of the CMB had confirmed that he was right. In short, the first moments of the universe were lumpier than had previously been thought, providing the seeds of later galaxies.
Thousands of papers have been published in the field in recent decades, including analyses of deep observational galaxy surveys and massive supercomputer simulations. Yet that same YEC book in 1999 had claimed that “there are few researchers left in the field” pursuing answers to galaxy formation. I knew this was false when I read it in 2002; reading it again today, it is flabbergasting.
This is just one example. The rest of the folder’s objections to modern astrophysics – the speed of light, white hole cosmologies, rotating universes, supernova remnants, quantised redshifts, star formation, population III stars – couldn’t withstand scrutiny either.
The study of galaxy formation continues. Puzzles remain. The universe is a complicated place, not a Rubik’s cube that we’ve solved. I’m not saying that we know everything now. Yet it seemed to me that where the mainstream scientific community adopted an attitude of open inquiry, the YEC literature seized on any open problem or anomaly and announced it to be unsolvable and catastrophic. I had to discover the full picture for myself.
This is the same experience I have when I look into the articles and videos produced by someone like James Tour when he attempts to criticize the origin of life field. His whole case, every single argument or statement, collapses when subject to close scrutiny.
. This was biochemistry showing me evolution was indeed a reality.