Cosmology

Figure 1

One scientific challenge young earth creationists have had to address is the starlight-time question.

From NASA: Binary spiral galaxies NGC 2207 (left) and IC 2163 (right) are estimated to be 114 million light years away from Earth

The universe is vast. The Earth seems large, yet when examined on a cosmic scale, it is like a spec of dust, even less than a grain of dust. The sun itself is large enough to hold about one million Earths. And the sun is only an average star in a galaxy containing many, many stars in a universe of many, many galaxies.

Recently I was asked to give a talk on resources available on creation. I expanded the topic to include best evidences for creation. This article is based on that talk. For resources, I will discuss some of the major websites and organizations. Many of these will probably be familiar to you if you have been interested in creation science for a while. For best evidences, I will discuss scripture, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the origin of species, empirical detection of intelligent causes, and the age of the earth.

REPORT FROM THE Intelligent Design Conference 

 Highlands, North Carolina, June 24-26, 2004

Setting and Overview

The conference was held at the Community Bible Church in Highlands North Carolina situated in the beautiful Smokey Mountain area surrounded by clouds, forest, and waterfalls (website: http://www.idconference.org/). My daughter, Holly, and I attended. I took a digital camera and made a few pictures some of which are included below.

On February 11, 2003, a NASA press release announced "the best ‘baby picture' of the Universe ever taken." The "baby picture" shown here has subsequently been featured in prominent science journals and newspapers across the globe. 1 ^,2 ^,3 ^,4  It was taken about 1.5 million kilometers above Earth by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a satellite that measures the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).

Image

This month I discuss 4 topics that point to God or agree with Genesis, including evidence the early earth was completely covered by water, problems for Big Bang inflation, why you are not related to Homo naledi, and spiritual empiricism. The segment on spiritual empiricism relates to how we can know God through communication with Him and contains my testimony.

One might ask, how were there days, mornings and evenings, before the sun lit up on day 4, according to the Bible? There is a scientific model that can account for that! According to the physics of this model, there would have been light, starting on the first day, from a quasar at the center of the galaxy. This would provide light from a single direction, like the sun does today. See the illustration of a quasar, which make this point obvious.

Quasar Image - from NASA

Agreement with Biblical Chronology

The model agrees with Biblical chronology. We noted in the second article of this series that the actual age of astronomical objects, as well as the actual age of radiometrically-dated objects (rocks), can be calculated using this model. We will look at the calculated age of the universe from the calculations of the model, and compare this with when creation week occurred according to the most ancient available Biblical texts.

One might wonder whether there is any science to support the model described in the earlier articles in the Big Stretch series, especially after seeing how much it agrees with the Bible. In this short article, we take a look at the scientific evidence for this model.

This article is part of a continuing series about a cosmological model that integrates 2 scientific fields, each based on work of multiple Nobel prize winners. The resulting model, referred to here as the Setterfield model or the Setterfield ZPE-plasma model, is not only in agreement with laboratory results and astronomical observations, but is in amazing agreement with the oldest texts of Genesis. Last month we reviewed evidence for the agreement of this model with the Bible. That included the sun forming on day 4 of creation week, light on day 1, and the earth forming before the sun. See part 3 of the series (http://tasc-creationscience.org/article/big-stretch-3) for more Biblical evidence, and part 1 (http://tasc-creationscience.org/article/big-stretch-1) for a general introduction to this model.

There is an expression about not seeing the forest for the trees. Sometimes it is good to step back, and look at the larger picture. With regard to creation science, there are lots of "trees;" we have articles on geology, genetics, chemistry, paleontology, cosmology, botany, etc. But what is the big picture? Let's start at the beginning: the origin of life.