On August 7, 1996 headlines across the country emblazoned the news that NASA had identified evidence of life on Mars. A meteorite named AHL84001 had been found in the Antarctic and was studied by a team of ten NASA and Stanford University scientists. Their conclusion was that life was present on Mars some 3.6 billion years ago. 1
I recently attended the Creation Ministries International (CMI) five-day Creation 2022 Superconference at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. TASC board members Drs. Jeff Gift and David Greear were also in attendance. The conference was held from May 30 to June 3 at the beautiful Hilton Myrtle Beach Resort, located right on the ocean. There were 597 in attendance from all over the country, 22 lectures, 10 CMI presenters, a massive bookstore, a children’s program, optional opportunities to attend a guided tour through a nearby aquarium with marine biologist Dr. Robert Carter or to match wits with chess master Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, and free time to enjoy the beach.
NOTE on terminology: CDK implies that light was faster in the past, and then over time, gradually decayed. So, CDK refers to the DeKay (decay) of C (the speed of light): CDK.
This article is a continuation of the article Faster than light? 1 which explores the possibility of the speed of light being faster in the past.
The redshift is an effect observed in astronomical data in which the color of light from distant objects is shifted toward longer wavelengths (the red end of the spectrum).
In this short article, we shall not try to examine thoroughly every attempted interpretation of the red shift, but we shall briefly examine a few generally well-known ones and primarily focus on a relatively new one.
The following are some well-known conventional explanations of redshift:
One problem for young-earth creationists (those claiming that God created the universe only thousands of years ago, rather than billions of years ago) has been the apparent great age of distant galaxies.
Figure 1 - Front cover of the book
We are excited to announce that TASC‘s Restoring the Truth About Origins: Book I is now available! We pray and hope you will purchase copies for yourself, family, and associates as gifts to enjoy and be even better edified on this important topic of origins. What we think about our origins has had a profound influence on the thinking and actions in our society in the past and will today and in the future. So we encourage you to get copies today (see ordering information under Availability and Purchasing heading below)!
This month we will discuss several notable findings in the recent scientific literature that have relevance to the creation issue. The topics were selected by the author and are by no means exhaustive. Background reading for some of the topics is provided in the references.
Chitin. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitin Accessed 2018 Dec 10
Shifts in the lines of absorption in the spectrum of visible light
When astronomers view distant objects through the telescope, they find that the more distant objects have a larger red shift. This means that their light is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum; in other words, the wavelengths have become longer than for similar objects seen close to us. They interpret this as meaning that these distant objects are receding from us and that objects farther away are receding from us faster. It’s a little like the Doppler effect that makes sound have a lower pitch when the source is traveling away from us. The faster an object travels, the larger the change in pitch. However, some properties of the red shift call this interpretation into question; these are the subject of the article that follows. One such property is the quantization of red shifts. They seem to occur in abrupt steps rather than continuously, which has interesting implications for the study of the universe. This suggests that the red shift may be caused by something other than the expansion of the universe, at least in part.
