Sal Cordova and Aging Galaxies

You are correct about it still being a very old cosmos in Humphreys original model (and even his later one). Yes, even Hartnett’s model found an very old cosmos ‘out there’.

This idea of time running at different rates in different parts of the universe met with disagreement early on - I am specifically thinking of a rebuttal statement made by Hartnett towards Humphreys original model on exactly those lines. (Can’t find it right now).

Honestly? There is nary a one really good YEC cosmology that has been proposed. And the two latest ones cited by @stcordova from the 2018 ICC fell under rapid scrutiny because they both invoke Lisle’s ASC, an utterly failed paradigm (not to mention an embarrassment to the YEC cause).

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PdotdQ, Rich Hampton,

Thank you both for your forebearance. As much as I’m obviously prejudiced against certain viewpoints, it would be irresponsible of me to not convey your criticisms of YEC/YCC views to my students. I will convey what you have said. The arguments you have asserted in this discussion, I personally deem too weighty not to give it an adequate hearing even when I teach the varieties of Creationism, especially YEC/YCC creationism.

Thank you again for participating in this discussion.

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FWIW, I feel relatively comfortable sharing an article like the following with my students. It reflects my concerns about cosmology, but spoken from secular (not YEC/YCC) quarters. It reflects what I’ve heard from grad students and faculty in the schools I was a part of (GMU and JHU). Some of the faculty have gone public like Menas Kafatos and Sisur Roy. There are many others with private skepticism.

It doesn’t prove YEC/YCC, but it does convey my general feeling for some big questions about the universe, its too early to be making pronouncements. And also some of the patches to Big Bang, imho, are comparably outrageous to claiming creation by miracles. That still doesn’t make YEC/YCC true. However, as much as I will give space to opponents of YEC/YCC when they make weighty objections, it will also bother my conscience if I didn’t mention there are concerns with mainstream cosmology from secular quarters.

Of course there are still phenomena that cannot be described by modern cosmology. However, the evidence is clear that the big-bang model is in large brush strokes successful in modelling the Universe.

To wit, all of the “big problems” in the blog post that you cited relate more to the details of particular big-bang models, higher order corrections, so to speak. These problems, for example, stem from what exactly is dark matter - is it charged, is it interacting, is it quantum, does it even exist as “matter”? While this might mean that Lambda-CDM is false, this is a far-cry from saying that all big-bang models are wholesale false.

Think back to Newton’s law. It is false, because it cannot explain the precession of Mercury, but it accurately models in large brush strokes, most of the rest of the solar system. This is the level of error that is plaguing modern cosmology.

Please refrain from comparing these issues with the problems of YEC/YCC cosmologies, which cannot even model the Universe in large brush strokes, as you admitted yourself.

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Think back to Newton’s law. It is false, because it cannot explain the precession of Mercury, but it accurately models in large brush strokes, most of the rest of the solar system. This is the level of error that is plaguing modern cosmology.

But we have adequate tests of Newton’s laws in the classical domain every day, and the approximation is very good in that domain and is used to make life-critical systems year in and year out. Reminds me of that line in the movie Apollo 13 where Astronaut Jim Lovell says, “We just put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat.”

This is not the case with inflation and dark matter and dark energy or any number of even more basic issues like redshift in quasars and even to some degree stellar structure. We can’t break apart stars to find out how good our models are. One star did break apart recently and it did show our models were good but need some revision:

It was a spectacular achievement the the structural models were as accurate as they were.

Nevertheless, after I saw the difficulty in confirming theories in astrophysics and especially cosmology, I realized the condensed matter and biophysics realm were more suited to the level of confirmation that would make me comfortable in postulating and defending ideas.

I am going to repeat what I said, Lambda-CDM is successful in modeling many facets of the Universe in large brush strokes. Just a short list, it is successful in explaining the chemical abundance in the Universe, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the baryon acoustic oscillation.

Of course, there are higher order effects that it cannot explain, such as whether the expansion is time-dependent (which causes the Hubble tension that the link in your previous post refer to). No astrophysicist claims that Lambda-CDM is 100% correct. Is dark matter actually interacting? Is it actually matter or some sort of modification of gravity? These are all questions that can be asked as corrections to our current understanding of big-bang theories.

This is similar to many other things in astronomy, for example, the article that you linked,

the researchers discovered that its carbon and oxygen core was twice as big as the theory predicted

As you admit, this means that we got most of the theory correct! White dwarfs do have carbon and oxygen cores, just that we got the size of it wrong by a factor of two - an incredible feat for stellar physics standards, where quantitative predictions are often made within an “order of magnitude” (though this is quickly changing now).

Also, on your complain about redshifts in quasars: that quasar exhibit no time dilation is data coming from a study by one person that is never independently confirmed/repeated. Not one group, but one person! You mentioned above that you think that CMB lensing is a “statistical phantom”, despite their many detections, even one at 40 \sigma. I apologize, but I have to call you out on your double standard here: If there is ever a statistical phantom, don’t you think it is more likely to come from a study by a single person that is never independently repeated?

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@stcordova, notice that cosmologists “have a theory”, a foundation they are working from. I am not your enemy, but this is precisely what you and YECs lack – a theory. Not to mention a theory that largely works, like the BB…!

Again, I am not your enemy, but you seem to listening a lot to YEC personalities like F., H., H., S., without mentioning their names, who will frankly keep you tied up in knots about details and anomalies in our understanding of the Universe…but will never come up with a working model. Or so it seems at present.

You have to be better than them to help bring in the next generation of serious YEC thinkers. You must find a way to break free from their hypnotic hold and 1. start to question first the ruling YEC paradigm and ask why it is not really working and 2. start to formulate valid, testable hypotheses that still uphold the Bible.

Challenge to you and all YEC cosmologists: If you cannot do science, then stop trying. Start preaching the gospel again and leave off with science…! Either do science or don’t but stop acting like you are doing science just by continually attacking a solid [largely] working paradigm like big bang.

Reminder. I am your friend, not your enemy, but I must get honest with you about these things.

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https://creation.com/antimatter-missing
For instance, Sarfati just came out with this one today. I personally think it is misleading in that it is really not dealing with a big bang problem per se, but rather, with a problem that predated the big bang, more like problems with the singularity.

My question would be – should we discard the entire theory* or should we try to dig deeper into what came before the big bang? Yes, it seems that a singularity would definitely produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Then should we perhaps question the singularity? Maybe we have missed something in our understanding about it and perhaps an imbalance already existed before the BB commenced – if such a thing were even possible in a naturalistic sense!

But then, if not possible naturalistically, why does Sarfati not take the opportunity to say that God created the imbalance?! I must admit my frustration with YEC cosmology to this point. They create a lot of noise and confusion, but they never really successfully approach the subject matter at hand.

*Disclaimer. I am not necessarily a big bang fan, but then, neither am I an enemy because I still think the idea can magnify God.

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What was detected were autocorrelations, and unless other mechanisms are ruled out for the correlations, it’s not necessarily weak gravitational lensing. There is more than one way to bend a microwave than just gravity from far way, especially with really weak signals. As you pointed out weak lensing isn’t the same as strong lensing. So it is inappropriate to represent the 40sigma phenomenon as absolute confirmation of CMB, especially in light of the fact it just looks like amplified noise with a suspcious alignment to the solar system plane! The axis of evil looks troublesome, and are we just going to build filters to filter out the anomaly that may be telling us something?

You’re more than welcome to call me out on double standards. I’ve admitted my prejudices, but it bothers my conscience that cosmological models are highly precarious. I only need point out what one of the early Inflation advocates himself is now saying and backtracking:

Inflation was proposed more than 35 years ago, among others, by Paul Steinhardt. But Steinhardt has become one of the theory’s most fervent critics. In a recent article in Scientific American, Steinhardt together with Anna Ijjas and Avi Loeb, don’t hold back. Most cosmologists, they claim, are uncritical believers:

[T]he cosmology community has not taken a cold, honest look at the big bang inflationary theory or paid significant attention to critics who question whether inflation happened. Rather cosmologists appear to accept at face value the proponents’ assertion that we must believe the inflationary theory because it offers the only simple explanation of the observed features of the universe.”

For that reason, I went in the direction of Earth-bound condensed matter and biological physics. At least there is stronger expectation of experimentally testing out ideas and seeing their influence in the advancement of technology, albeit the discipline seems pedestrian compared to the more theoretical disciplines of physics.

And speaking of double standards, if we held cosmology up to the standards of condensed matter physics, we’d see cosmology is not on the same footing and thus should be advertised with the same level of veracity. Some skepticism should be valued, and that skepticism isn’t restricted to YEC/YCC quarters, it’s sentiment that bubbles to the surface from various quarters.

You are free to propose a model that produces the same statistical signals. Note that the signal that lensing produces is quite specific.

This is not what a lensing signal does. The lensing signal changes the CMB spectrum in a specific way, introduces non-gaussian components in the power spectrum in in a specific way, and generates polarization signals in a specific way. Again, if you can produce a model that can create these specific signals as well as weak gravitational lensing, you are free to publish your model.

I am extremely familiar with Steinhardt’s criticism. Do you know what he is criticizing? He is criticizing inflation, and gives another model that still begins with a singularity, i.e. another big-bang model. His model does not refute the big-bang or the CMB, or the expansion of the Universe. As with any disciplines, certain things are more certain than others. What YECs do not like are part of the “very certain” club.

In cosmology, we work with what we have. With no experiments, this is as good as we get.

Whose double standards? I have never held cosmology up to the standards of condensed matter physics.

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@stcordova, I don’t think big bang cosmology is precarious. It is under refinement, and it will be revised, but it successfully explains quite a bit, and it does so without appealing to miracles. Whatever comes next would have to explain quite a bit of what it gets right, which is why BB cosmology not precarious. It would be very hard to unseat it.

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I would not be surprised if we find an unforeseen answer to the dark matter/energy mystery and other fuzzy areas of Lambda+CDM.

However, a discovery that standard candles that appear to be billions of light years away are in fact only 7000 light years away would be akin to discovering that the earth is flat.

You seem to think that nibbling at the edges of Lambda+CDM will bring us to the place where we believe the universe is only thousands of years old. You are tilting at windmills, in my opinion.

Best,
Chris

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I mentioned John Gideon Hartnett who is a YEC/YCC physicist at a secular university and has several PhD students. I mentioned he invited me to be his student, but I couldn’t manage a move to Australia, for starters…

Anyway, one of the “best” explanations for redshifts as due to cosmological expansion is the apparent time dilation in supernova light curves. Supposedly a supernova’s unfolding/evolution over time should appear to take longer the more redshifted it is.

But, Hartnett refers to a paper by Crawford and summarizes:

A similar point is made by Crawford [22]: “Since current investigators assume that the type Ia supernovae have essentially a fixed absolute BB magnitude (with possible corrections for the stretch factor), one of the criteria they used is to reject any candidate whose predicted absolute peak magnitude is outside a rather narrow range. The essential point is that the absolute magnitudes are calculated using BB and hence the selection of candidates is dependent on the BB luminosity-distance modulus.” Basically he is claiming selection bias. Is not this circular reasoning? If you select only the candidates that fit the desired luminosity-distance criteria and use them to determine the luminosity distance. Since one cannot determine the absolute magnitudes of the sources without assuming a cosmology, the standard concordance criteria (Ωm ≈ 0.3, ΩΛ ≈ 0.7, and H0 ≈ 70 km/s/Mpc) are used to calculate the absolute magnitudes for the candidates, which must be in a narrow range near MB ≈ −19, and the acceptable ones are used to test the same model, and therefore determine values for Ωm and ΩΛ. This is confirmed by [26] who state “…for any individual SN Ia, the intrinsic width is unknown, so without assuming a (1 + z) dilation, the intrinsic width and dilation cannot be separated.”

Next as already mentioned, and practically ignored is the invariant blink rate of quasars with red shift! This isn’t trivial. This is evidence, as far as quasars at least, that the redhift isn’t cosmological.

Comparably bad is this observation by Hartnett:

they should be young objects. Their larger redshifts imply younger quasars. Therefore, quasars should be deficient in metals at higher redshifts, which should be observed in their metal abundances as a function of epoch. But observations show no metal deficiency as a function of redshift [25, 83]. Quasar environments, based on their emission lines, are generally metal rich with metallicities near or above the solar value even to the highest redshifts.

Add to that observed proper motions in quasars as mentioned in a paper above, high Z quasars could be near.

Then the gamma ray bursts is red shifted galaxies:

Crawford [21] makes a careful analysis of the traditional explanation that an inverse correlation between luminosity and these time measures together with strong
luminosity selection as a function of redshift cancels any observed time dilation. He confirms that there is an inverse correlation between luminosity and some time measures. Of the 4 listed above it is strongly seen in 2 of them. But using the concordance cosmology strong luminosity selection cannot be achieved. He finds that GRBs out to z = 6.6 show no evidence of time dilation in the raw data and rejects the hypothesis with a probability of 4.4 × 10−6
.
So we have dubious issues with redshift, especially the quasars, we have a failed Tolman test according to Disney, we have a religiously adopted inflation model, tried replace it with Variable Speed of Light, and no lab confirmation of dark matter or dark energy, attempted to replace Dark Matter with Modified Newtonian Dynamics. Without cosmological redshift we don’t know the universe is expanding.

We also don’t absolutely know we’re in the sort of curved universe where we’ll see the appearance of galaxies receding about the same way no matter where we are in the universe. We could actually be in privileged geometric position in the universe, something that troubled Hubble himself.

The Big Bang model should not be compared to the supposed flaws in Newtonian mechanics at relativistic speeds or Newtonian gravity with gravity under General Relativity. Newton’s is at least in the drivers seat for a lot of practical applications, in including spacecraft. That is not the case with the major pillars of the Big Bang.

I think it’s a little premature to be making pronouncements that the Big Bang is confirmed model.

Even my professor James Trefil, a big advocate of Dark Matter, was not convinced of the Big Bang. He gave a table of reasons he was skeptical, albeit favorable, to the Big Bang in his book on Dark Matter.

Notwitstanding the weighty objections to YEC/YCC, criticisms of the Big Bang are fare game. It’s certainly not as well established as many bread-and-butter principles in Earth-bound condensed matter physics as evidenced by the success of silicon valley.

I’m not saying that Big Bang advocates are fraudulent (though Dr. De would say so), but rather, cosmologists and astrophysicists have been dealt a tough hand. We are limited as a matter of principle what we can actually deduce about all the universe from our little corner of reality. I respect that gallant attempts at trying to extrapolate grand ideas from such small tiny dots in the sky.

This Hartnett paper is not published in a peer reviewed publication, and the Crawford paper it cites is published by a known pseudoscienctific journal: Journal of Cosmology. I don’t have the time to give criticism of entire papers in this thread.

The lack of time dilation for quasars and GRB comes both from Hawkin, a single person, and those studies have never been replicated. If there is a statistical fluke, it’s probably here.

Anyway, where are you going with this? Even if the big bang is false, the next best model will be a steady state eternal universe, or a cyclical eternal universe - both worst for a YEC. It’s not going to go in the YEC direction of only being ~6000 years old.

Regardless of what you think of the “pillars of the Big Bang”, the claim that the Universe is ~6000 years old is in the “very certainly false” club.

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And where has all this gotten John Hartnett? He has now aligned himself with Jason Lisle’s ASC, thus making himself almost completely irrelevant in his own field of study.

Is that where you are headed? Are you about to tell us that you too believe Lisle’s proposal to be the best answer currently for cosmology?

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And what about Faulkner’s disagreement with Hartnett over this very issue? Why do you not quote Faulkner?

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I’m happy to put Faulkner’s opposing view on the table.

The interpretation of redshift comes from secular quarters and the the divide in the YEC community reflects the divide in secular quarters.

As far as models, how about, “we really don’t have enough data right now to make a workable hypothesis.” Is saying “we have our biases, but we don’t know for sure” an honest statement of the state of affairs?

Contrast the state of affairs in cosmology with the relative certainty a creationist would assert, “abiogenesis was a highly improbable event.”

Doesn’t everyone agree to this? This can’t be the salient disagreement!

Just add that mainstream physics does have a workable model and you are on the right track.

I suppose the question is one of degree, and the answer to that question relates to other issues even the ones raised in this thread.

How improbable, or mechanically impossible does an event have to be (relative to what little knowledge we have) before a Christian begins entertaining the idea an event was a miracle of special instantaneous creation by God vs. some slow process guided by God?

Most professing conservative Christian believe Jesus fed the 5000 by pretty much instantly creating matter and copying the pattern of fish and bread. Similar for the turning of water into wine. Granted we were not there to see it, but say hypothetically we were, we would regard it as a miracle.

So with respect to abiogenesis, biological evolution, solar system evolution, galactic evolution, cosmological evolution, how bad will mechanistic processes have to be shown inadequate before one considers special miraculous instantaneous creation as a plausible description (not explanation) of what happened?

I guess each person has their threshold, and for me, the question of abiogenesis has crossed that threshhold, same for eukaryotic evolution. Same for a lot of other things.

Maybe God created life to resist explanation by slow evolutionary processes. I felt that way about Solar System evolution, and I suspect that is the case for cosmological evolution. Invoking quasi-religious ideas like Guth inflation to solve problems with the Big Bang certainly motivated me in that direction.

Maybe God didn’t make the universe in way that could be explained by a Big Bang any more than he made life in a way that could be explained by a process of abiogensis by ordinary events.

Improbability is often just a proxy of our ignorance of how different natural mechanisms could have resulted in some phenomenon. Before we discovered classical mechanics one could have said that it was improbable for planets to orbit around the Sun. (In fact even Newton famously thought angels were required to keep the orbits of the Solar System stable.) Before we discovered GR one could have said that the precession of Mercury’s orbit was improbable (perhaps even impossible). So even though abiogenesis might seem fantastically improbable or even impossible right now because we have no complete theory of how it happened, the situation could change if some day someone manages to do it in a laboratory, for example. It would still be improbable but tractable, no longer impossible.

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