Part 1I’ve been pretty active in the online atheist community for the past ten years or so, in one form or another, and in that time, I’ve heard all sorts of arguments for and against all sorts of crazy religious beliefs. I had a thought, today, which I realize that I’ve never, in all of those years, heard brought up, and that surprises me a great deal. I’m sure if I looked around a bit, I could find it being discussed somewhere, and perhaps I will later, because I would love to hear what Young Earth Creationists would say about this one.
Okay, so Young Earth Creationists (hereafter referred to as “YECs”) say the world was created about 6,000 years ago. They have a specific date, but I don’t care quite enough to check it out. 6,000 is close enough for my purposes here. Now, let me paint a little picture of what, if they’re correct, a certain element of human history would have looked like:
In the beginning, there would have been not one single star visible in the night-time sky, because even the nearest star to the Earth (aside from the sun, obviously) is about 4.37 light years away. This means that, some four years and four months after the creation of the Earth, a little speck of light would have appeared in the hithertofore nearly-empty night sky, as the first rays of light from our nearest cosmic neighbor finally reached us. Gradually, as time went by, one by one, more and more stars would have begun to appear, as the light from them, travelling at a known and constant speed, arrived on Earth.
Throughout history, astronomers should have been reporting more and more new stars appearing in previously-empty spots in the sky, the heavens seeming to populate themselves more and more densely with each passing day. But this is not the case: the star charts of astronomers from thousands of years ago are remarkably consistent with what we can see today, and there exists no record of a gradually-decreasing black void in the sky.
Today, with our marvelous telescopes, we should be able to see the light of stars which are 6,000 light-years away burst into existence in real time. Indeed, since the bible teaches us that Yahweh created all of the stars in a single day, we should be seeing a black shell of nothingness all around us, some 6,000 light years in radius, gradually retreating at a rate of one light second per second. If we did see that, it would be pretty much impossible to make a serious argument that the universe were more than 6,000 years old, or that it wasn’t all created in one day. The evidence would be conclusive and irrefutable.
But of course, that’s not what we see, is it? What we see is the light from stars which are more than 6,000 light years away. Much more. Thousands of times more. Millions of times more. This should not be possible if YECs are correct. Indeed, if they were correct, to be able to see light shining from stars which are more than 6,000 light years away, that light would literally need to have been created, in-transit, between the stars which supposedly emitted them and the Earth.
Think about what that would mean: As we watch what we think is a star located more than 6,000 years ago, what we’re actually watching is an elbourate illusion created by Yahweh, of a history which never took place, of an object which did not in fact exist at the time we think we’re seeing it. We believe we’re seeing the story of a star which is, say, 7,000 light years away, but what we’re actually seeing is 1,000 years of bullshit and deception before the first ray of light from that star ever reaches us.
In fact, the christian god would not only have needed to spin this elabourate lie in order to beguile and deceive us into believing that the universe was more than 6,000 years old, he would have needed to create a consistent illusion, with rays of light carrying illusions and lies to us from every point in the heavens in such a way as to consistently indicate and provide evident support for a history which never took place.
It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just in order to dissuade us from believing in him. One would have thought that planting all of those false dinosaur fossils would have been sufficient, but I guess he’s a perfectionist when it comes to trying to prevent us from believing in his own inerrent word. It just seems like it’s desperately important to him that we don’t believe in him.
And of course, many YECs are really very preoccupied with finding evidence for their specific and literal interpretation for the bible. You can go to one of their hilariously Flintstones-esque “Creation Museums” and learn all about how the Grand Canyon scientifically proves that the story of Noah’s Flood is real and proven history. Physical evidence is extremely important to them, even if it needs to be massaged and twisted and distorted until it suits their specific purposes. So I wonder what they say about this matter of physical evidence...?
Part 2 Okay, so since writing part 1, I’ve spent several hours looking into this topic, and as I’ve surmised, there’s a lot written and discussed on this issue. A whole lot. Like, “hundreds of thousands of hits on Google” lots. I’m frankly kind of stunned that this has never once been on my radar, so to speak, but what the heck. Better late to the party than never to show up, right?
First off, it seems that, as I guessed, the “light created in-transit” idea was in fact in vogue for a while among YECs, until they realized that it did in fact seem to implicate their chosen deity as a kind of mischievous trickster-god. They didn’t care for this notion too much, and so discarded it as inconvenient to the point they were trying to make.
There followed a number of other ideas, which I won’t touch upon beyond saying that they eventually realized that the facts did not seem to support these notions, and so they too were discarded. Bully for them, I say, for having the wits and character to do so.
The current popular notion is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, and one I’m going to have to look into a bit more deeply when I have the time. Basically, as I understand it, the concept goes like this: The Earth is the centre of the entire universe (as befits its place as the cornerstone of their god’s creation), and therefore has around it a massive gravitational field, caused by a ginormous white hole spewing out all of the matter and energy which comprises the rest of the universe (but which is not visible to us and which has none of the “wiping out the solar system and all of its contents in a matter of seconds” sorts of effects that such an object would, one would expect, actually produce). From what I’m reading, it seems that white holes are not understood to actually have this sort of effect on gravity, but here I concede that I am simply over my head, physics-wise. At any rate, the effect of this, they claim, is that time is dilated in the neighborhood of our solar system, such as that, while the rest of the universe experiences the many billions of years which the evidence tells us that it has, LOCALLY, here on Earth, only 6,000 years have passed since the beginning of time.
Physics, as I’ve said, are not my strong suit, and astrophysics even less so, but I can’t help but think that this is the sort of thing that doesn’t really work. My first impulse is to ask if, if we assume this concept is correct, they’ve considered the idea that a super-dense gravitational field around our solar system would seem likely to cause all of the matter in our immediate vicinity to collapse into a black hole. My second impulse is to wonder if, if this is the case, whether or not they simply declare “god doesn’t want for that to happen, and so he waves his magical wand three times and causes it not to happen.” From what I’ve been able to discern, there seems to be a certain amount of deliberate hand-waving on this count, of the “this theory does not address this point in a meaningful way” variety.
My third impulse is to chuckle bemusedly. Because it seems to me that even the YECs have been forced to retreat in the face of the available evidence; they concede that, yes, the universe is billions of years old, there’s no more denying that. But we can still say that the Earth itself is only a few thousand years old, because – due to this relativistic effect – we’ve missed out on most of those billions of years, and indeed, it’s not even that the rest of the universe is billions of years old; it’s that it’s experienced billions of years of growth and change during the 6,000 years of “real time” which the Earth has experienced, which is the only time worth mentioning or counting. Which sounds like an amazingly semantic argument to me.
My fourth impulse is to laugh a little bit. Because it seems to me that they’re positing a god which has gone to an amazing amount of trouble to create a situation which SEEMS to have been a product of billions of years of natural development, and which SEEMS to disprove the story he ostensibly wants us all to believe, when simply plopping things down in such a way as to produce the “ever-expanding shell of visible stars” model I proposed above would have been just as easy, and would have, again, presented clear and irrefutable evidence of the veracity of his creation. But instead, he would have had to go out of his way to create a universe which seems to obscure and obfuscate this truth, as though attempting to mislead anyone who doesn’t make some massive and seemingly-unfounded leaps of faith in order to get to the “proper” conclusions. I laugh because a god which would do all of this still seems like the mischievous trickster-god which they rejected in the first place.
Honestly, the mental gymnastics these people put themselves through in order to never have to admit that they’re wrong is amazing. As a sort of mental exercise, it’s almost admirable in a Rube Goldbergian sort of way, but as an actual approach to life, the universe, and everything, it’s a little on the horrifying side.
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