Stretching Out the Heavens: RSR Cosmology

 * Radially-Stretched Firmament: Real Science Radio co-hosts Fred Williams and Bob Enyart discuss more great news stories from the winter 2012 edition of Creation magazine. And the guys reply to a listener who asks why would a star die and collapse if the universe is only thousands of years old. See below the draft write-up of RSF's proposed solution to the starlight and time problem, which the guys call the Radially Stretched Firmament solution to the starlight and time dilemma, also known as RSR Cosmology!

* Anti-evolutionary Eels, Next-generation Band-Aids, Egyptian Blue, Dawkins Color Vision Challenge, Threes, and Black Holes in a Young Universe: The species of eel discovered in the South Pacific shows stasis, the primary expectation of the creationist (and of renowned evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould), rather than evolutionary change, the expectation of the atheist and of theistic evolutionists.

* New Band-Aids Designed Without Glue By Copying the Gecko Toe: It's about time human engineers got around to reverse engineering the adhesiveness of the gecko's feet in order to manufacture a better Band-Aid. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920, making it eleven years older than the Big Bang which was invented in 1931. See the series of enlargements in the gecko feet image to get an idea of how God used form rather than glue to enable geckos to walk on walls.

* Post-Show Note: Real Science Radio is looking for a sketch artist! Help us create the RSR Dawkins Color Vision Challenge! Similar to our PZ Myers Trochlea Challenge (for which PZ honestly answered, "I don't know"), Bob and Fred are constructing a similar challenge but this time for Richard Dawkins, and regarding a different aspect of the alleged evolution of vision. The guys are hoping to get an artist to volunteer to sketch their challenge, and also, they're eager to get comments and constructive criticism emailed to them on the challenge itself.

* Egyptian Blue and the Three Primary Colors: The ancient Egyptian chemists were brilliant materials engineers, and their effort to create a true blue pigment was stunning in its sophistication. Interestingly, there are three primary colors in pigments just as there are three primary colors in light waves.

* Threes Everywhere: The number three reflected in the Trinity and throughout Scripture turns the Christian's attention toward the creation to see space existing in three dimensions, height, width, and length, as does time in past, present and future. The electromagnetic force operates in positive, negative, and neutral, and in light waves, red, green, and blue blend into the hues of the rainbow whereas and in pigment the three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. We human beings on this third planet from the Sun experience matter primarily in three states, solid, liquid, and gas. The strongest shape for building is the triangle. Writers often give three examples and artists group in threes as in interior design, sculpting, and even movie directors, as they have the word trilogy (1, 2, 3) but no word for any other number of films. Photographers use the rule of thirds, genetic scientists discovered that the language of DNA uses only three-letter words, and the scientific journal Icarus has published a 2013 paper identifying a decimal system in the amino acids of DNA, which code thereby contains, at least once, all the three-digit values, 111, 222, 333, 444, 555, 666, 777, 888, and 999. And so we humans are body, soul, and spirit (1 Thes. 5:23), made in the image of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Today’s Resource: Have you browsed through our Science Department in our online store? Check out especially Walt Brown’s In the Beginning and Bob’s interviews with this great scientist in Walt Brown Week! You’ll also love Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’ Privileged Planet (clip), and Illustra Media’s Unlocking the Mystery of Life (clip)! You can consider our BEL Science Pack; Bob Enyart’s Age of the Earth Debate; Bob's creation/evolution debate that hits on Junk DNA with famous evolutionist Dr. Eugenie Scott (see description below); and the superb kids' radio program Jonathan Park: The Adventure Begins!

* The RSR Starlight and Time Proposed Solution

Real Science Radio proposes the Radially Stretched Firmament solution to the starlight and time dilemma.

Problem: Biblical creationists and atheists both have a similar starlight and time problem to answer. For creationists, if the cosmos is less than 10,000 years old, how is it that photons from stars billions of light years away strike the earth? Conversely atheists have their "horizon problem," for if the universe is only 13 billion years old, there is not nearly enough time within orders of magnitude for the background temperature of the universe to even out so perfectly to within a thousandth of a degree to about 2.7 degrees Kelvin. Existing creationist and atheist explanations for these observations are presented below.

Summary: As an analogy for our RSR cosmology, consider that the embryonic human heart is beating as it is being formed and before its assembly is even complete. How can that be? This vital organ is built up from stem cells that, as they are differentiated to become cardiac muscle, begin pulsatating, and continue beating, from long before the heart is complete.) That we know by observation. What we therefore propose is a similarly astounding creative accomplishment. To fill the universe with light, God radially pulled electromagnetic waves out of each star simultaneously as He was stretching out the heavens. Thus, the waves of starlight seen on earth were not created in transit but were hyper-generated and pulled out of each star to traverse the distance from that star to the Earth, and also, throughout the universe. So, just as the creation of Earth did not include fossils in sedimentary layers, so too God did not create information-laden starlight encoding a fabricated history of its travel through vast distances. Likewise, God did not fabricate supernovae explosions and transit through non-existing nebulae. Rather, the data artefacts in the waves originated from actual events that occurred as God was supernaturally pulling light out of the stars and radially stretching out the firmament of the heavens.

Previous Creationist Proposals include:
1) Appearance of Age / Mature Creation: Donald DeYoung (Ph.D in  physics), president of the Creation Research Society, defended in 2010 the popular claim that God's purpose in creating a mature universe would have led Him to create the light waves already spanning the universe. Many creationists though point to supernovae further than 24 trillion miles away (6k light years) and to the varying absorption lines in starlight both providing a historic record that the light has actually traveled across vast space. Of course God could have created such waves in place but it seems unlike Him to fill those waves with evidence of having traversed nubulae and to include explosions of stars that had never existed.
2) The One-Way Speed of Light: Astrophysicist Jason Lisle in 2010 (then with Answers in Genesis), proposed an anisotropic synchrony convention solution based on the observation from Einstein's relativity that only the "round-trip" speed of light is constant, and therefore there are no constraints on the "one-way" speed of light that would cause difficulty for a young universe. RSR does not recommend this proposal.
3) Light Speed Decay: Barry Setterfield in 1981 proposed that the velocity of light has decayed. RSR joins the leading creation ministries in not recommending this claim. Prominent secular cosmologists including a Cambridge Ph.D., Joao Magueijo, and a leading proponent and developer of the Inflation Theory, Andreas Albrecht, have recently proposed a decay in the speed of light to solve the Big Bang's horizon problem, and in 2004 New Scientist reported on a study suggesting that c has increased.
4) Relative Time - Two Variations: Physicist Russell Humphreys in 1994 proposed a white hole cosmology with a bounded geocentric universe, by which he calculates using general relativity that in a matter of hours on earth billions of years were able to transpire in the universe, as the white hole's event horizon approached our planet, which would be, according to terrestrial clocks, a young earth. Challenges to this view come from secularists who disagree with this particular application of relativity and from some creationists who see it as a noble effort but a concession nonetheless to an old universe. Dr. John Hartnett's white hole universe model, first proposed in 2005, claims that the Universe may be a finite expanding white hole with the event horizon receding from our (young) solar system. Hartnett's model, as a simplification of Humphreys' model, does not require relativistic effects that cause various clock rates throughout the universe.

Atheistic Proposal: The Big Bang is the standard model used to explain the universe and its origin. However, revisionist scientists claim that Big Bang theorists predicted the 2.7 degrees Kelvin of the cosmic microwave background radiation (as also claimed by Lawrence Krauss on RSF). Yet scores of appropriately degreed scientists at prestigious institutions reject this and similar alleged confirmations of the Big Bang, describing such exercises as "retrospectively fit[ting] observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters" (cosmologystatement.org). The actual prediction, by early big bang proponent and developer George Gamow back in 1946, missed the mark by the equivalent of about ten universes. “The big bang made no quantitative prediction that the ‘background’ radiation would have a temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin (in fact its initial prediction was 30 degrees Kelvin); whereas [Sir Arthur] Eddington in 1926 had already calculated that the ‘temperature of space’ produced by the radiation of starlight would be found to be 3 degrees Kelvin," wrote the Tom Van Flandern in 1994, an astronomer who had worked for 20 years at the U.S. Naval Observatory (although prone to embarrassing, discredited ideas).  A few years later, in the peer-reviewed journal Physics Essays William Mitchel reported, "History also shows that some Big Bang cosmologists’ ‘predictions' of MBR temperature have been 'adjusted' after-the-fact to agree with observed temperatures" (Big Bang Theory Under Fire, June 1997). Similar objections have been raised against the the claim that Big Bang theorists predicted the distribution of chemical elements. Halton Arp and others wrote in Nature in 1990:  “It is commonly supposed that the so-called primordial abundances [of deuterium, helium, and lithium] provide strong evidence for Big Bang cosmology. But a particular value for the baryon-to-photon ratio needs to be assumed ad hoc to obtain the required [predicted] abundances." And again, from Mitchel, "The study of historical data shows that over the years, predictions of the ratio of helium to hydrogen in a Big Bang universe have been repeatedly adjusted to agree with the latest available estimates of that ratio as observed in the real universe." And: "The estimated ratio… has also been arbitrarily adjusted to agree with the currently established helium to hydrogen ratio. These appear to have not been predictions, but merely adjustments of [Big Bang] theory to accommodate current data."

Radially Stretched Firmament (RSR Cosmology): For human beings this side of the afterlife, envisioning God's method of creation has significant hurdles. Being God, He had tremendous freedom and latitude in choosing the method or methods by which He would implement the supernatural creation of the cosmos.

The Supernatural vs. Natural Boundaries: There is also the challenge of discerning the boundaries between supernatural creative acts and then the commencing of natural occurrences as described by today's scientific laws. To illustrate, if we presumed that God's creation of the galaxies of the universe could be described in three distinct steps (1st, 2nd, 3rd), the cosmologist whose theory describes natural law as taking over, so to speak, between steps 1 and 2 (SN/NB = 1st/2nd), would have devised a failed theory if in fact all three stages were accomplished by God's supernatural intervention. Identifying the actual threshold between the operation of the supernatural and the natural (the SN/NB) is necessary for the formation of a valid model of astronomical origins. Readers will more quickly understand the rationale behind a proposed cosmogony if the proponent explicitly identifies the claimed line between the miraculous and the physical. And they'll be better prepared to evaluate a model when the proponent offers evidence or at the least the reasoning for why he has so demarcated the proposed SN/N boundary. For example, the creation of Adam vs. Adam's hunger, might be seen as:
   1st: creation of matter including dust of the earth
   2nd: creation of Adam out of that matter;
whereas the steps that resulted in Adam's hunger might be seen as:
   1st: creation of matter including dust of the earth
   2nd: creation of Adam out of that matter
   3rd: Adam grows hungry within a couple hours of his creation by natural bodily processes;
At this level of detail, the steps that produced Adam's hunger can be described with SN/NB = 2nd/3rd. That is, the third and final step of the process that made him hungry was a natural process, whereas the creation of Adam himself, was a two step process, both steps of which were supernatural. Drilling down, however, to a closer inspection of the creation of Adam, if we change our perspective to look at the "obtaining" of the matter for Adam (rather than its "creation"), then because the matter was already in existence by Day Six, the obtaining of that matter did not necessarily require a miracle, whereas the rapid formation of that matter into an adult human form did necessitate a supernatural act. For these purposes, let's define a natural act as an act that did happen, or could have happened, apart from divine intervention. So, depending upon the level of encapsulation used, whether a high level overview perspective or a more detailed step-by-step consideration, the stages of creation may themselves alternate between supernatural and natural acts.

The Three Resources: Of the resources that thinking human beings can use toward discovering to the best of our ability the methods that God used to create are:
- considering all the pertinent information available from His written record
- observing the physical universe and the discovered natural laws
- seeing the Creator as a person whose actions are not arbitrary but meaningful and so, to some extent, discernable.

Because God is a person who made us in His likeness, we can think God's thoughts about creation after Him (as Johann Kepler is paraphrased). Brilliant scientists have literally "thought their way through" to major discoveries that predated the actual physical observations that confirmed those discoveries (see realscienceradio.com/math#einstein). Thus, the methods that God used in His earth-bound creations of Days 3, 5, and 6 might provide insights to the methods He used for his creation of the heavens on Day 4. Further, Ockam gets credt for an age-old razor, a rule of thumb which recommends a preference for the simpler explanation rather than a more complex explanation. And a tautology inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle points out the obvious, that while searching for a cause, as you eliminate impossibilities, the truth lies somewhere within the narrowing, remaining possibilities.

Appearing Full Grown: Consider the different methods of creation which God may have used during the creation week. If a camera crew had been filming, its video possibly would show a different method of bringing animals into existence than the method that God used with plants. For example, when God made Adam of the dust of the ground, it is not claimed by creationists that Adam was first formed as a single cell and then rapidly passed through the zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, childhood, and adolescent stages to, only moments later, open his eyes as an adult. Rather, it is generally believed that God took raw matter from the dust of the ground and from that formed Adam directly as an adult  and then breathed life into him. This contrasts with the way in which God possibly created plant life. For the plant kingdom God may have used the dust of the ground to created the germs of life, that is, seeds, and then, rapidly and supernaturally, caused them to grow to maturity within moments or hours, within a single day of approximately 24 hours. That camera crew would have recorded Adam, birds, turtles, camels, and everything made on days five and six, not as growing from embryos nor developing within eggs and then hatching, but as appearing fully formed.

Appearing Growing: Yet we propose, as a parallel to God filling the universe with starlight, that the grasses, flowers, and trees made on day three would not come into existence immediately as mature, but would appear as growing rapidly, from seeds to maturity, supernaturally, in less than a single day. When "God planted a garden eastward in Eden" and then on the sixth day of creation placed Adam therein, a natural understanding is that He planted the garden, and then supernaturally caused it to grow rapidly. For "out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow" (Gen. 2:8-9). If this perspective is correct, then when we read (Gen. 1:11), "Let the earth bring forth grass" (Heb. literally, sprout sprouts), God was "pulling" the growth out of the seeds, so to speak, supernaturally. Looking at the end of the day at the intertwined roots and the branches of the trees, and the stems and twigs of other plants, it would have appeared as if they had been growing up together for months or years, but for the trees, even for decades or centuries.

From Nothing vs. from Newly Created Matter: God created matter from nothing, that is, ex nihilo. This is not, however, the "nothing" of atheist physicists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss, who deceptively use the term nothing to refer to something. Rather, God, who is spirit, that is, non-material, created matter by the sheer force of His will, out of absolutely nothing physical. Because God could make matter from nothing, He also could have made plants and animals from nothing, calling into existence brand new matter in the form of plants and animals. But instead, the Scripture seems to indicate that He used the matter that He had created just days earlier to make plants and animals. With Adam, "God formed man of the dust of the ground." Likewise, God could have made Eve ex nihilo, making her of brand new matter specially created from nothing. Instead, the Bible records that God took a part of Adam's body to make Eve. Also, God caused "every tree" to grow "out of the ground," and so too He formed every land animal, and every bird in the same way. For Genesis says that, "Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air..." God may also have made fish in the same way, not out of brand new matter but of the matter (in this case, the water) that He had created just days earlier. For while English translations often read along the lines of, "let the waters abound", a secondary sense of the Hebrew comes across in the King James translation, "let the waters bring forth," (Gen. 1:20). The New Testament says that, "there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds" (1 Cor. 15:38-41). And while there is the same biochemical basis for the flesh of fish, birds, and cattle, there are also differences of implementation, as the experience of backyard barbecue chefs attest. If God in fact made fish out of water, as He apparently made land animals out of the ground, this then would parallel His creation of plants: "Let the earth bring forth grass" (Hebrew: let the earth sprout sprouts).

God Liked Using Materials that He had Made Days Earlier: The text also indicates that God was pleased with His creation, undoubtedly seeing as "good" and "very good" the physical properties of what He had created. Thus it appears that given the opportunity, God, liking His creation, preferred using material that already existed (via His creation of matter only days previously), rather than repeatedly making brand new material to accomplish each of His creative tasks. If this is an actual preference on God's part, then creationists are justified in proposing that the supernatural steps of creation were not maximized by God, but minimized. For example, Jesus supernaturally made wine, but not ex nihilo, for He turned water in wine.

The Origin of Physical and Spiritual Laws: As a related matter, consider the origin of the physical and spiritual laws, beginning with the spiritual laws. God did not create, but He only revealed, the fundamental moral laws. Do not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Do not steal. Do not covet. Such laws were not created ex nihilo and are not aribtrary. God being righteous, could not have declared such laws otherwise. The fundamental SHALL NOTs of moral law could not have been SHALLs, such as, Thou shall bear false witness; Thou shall covet; Thou shall worship other gods. Rather, the fundamental spiritual and moral laws flow from a description of God's own nature. And God is Truth. (For more on this see rsr.org/euthphryos-dilemma.) Moral inconsistency is an absolute determinant for wrong. Truth is non-contradictory and therefore cannot include falsehood. Something cannot be true and false at the same time and in the same way. To the atheist who asserts that absolute truth does not exist, we ask, "Is that absolutely true?" Morality is likewise non-contradictory, and some particular action cannot be both moral and immoral in the same way. Simultaneously embracing opposing sides of a moral issue means to be immoral. Thus as truth cannot include falsehood, morality cannot include immorality. Any view that permits truth or morality to be founded upon arbitrariness fails. The moral laws above describe relationships and interactions between beings. To falsely accuse another is to attempt to harm others and to thereby, of a certainty, harm oneself. To worship other gods is to steal what rightly belongs to the true God. And while secondary, incidental and symbolic laws could be arbitrary (on which day to circumcise, avoidance of fabric blends, etc.), the primary spiritual laws are objectively necessary reflections of God's moral character. Theists who have disagreed and thereby promote ambiguity bear some guilt for for the selling of indulgences, for moral relativism, and for prompting the atheist to wrongly characterize Christian teaching as: "good and evil exist only at the whim [arbitrary command] of the deity, thus anything goes as long as the deity wills it, and Christians will defend any wickedness they perceive as committed in the name of God, making their morality fundamentally meaningless."

The Origin of Logical and Physical Laws: The non-arbitrary nature of the fundamental moral and spiritual laws parallels the case for the laws of logic, and likely also for physical law. The laws of logic are not mere conventions as desperate atheists sometimes claim, and their argument that scientists adhere to them merely "because they work" begs the question. The laws of logic, like those of morality and spirituality, flow from the nature of the Creator. For He is Truth (John 14:6). Conceptually, the laws of physics could be different than they are, although of course they are fine tuned, uncanny, and explicable. Laws describe the functioning of reality, whether logical, spiritual or physical. Though we could conceive otherwise, perhaps reality constrains the laws of physics, so that like the laws of logic and spirit, they could not be different than they actually are. Law is not invented, but revealed and discovered. God could have created a different kind of physical universe, but here at RSR we assert that this universe required these laws. God created non-moral creatures, like worms, but there is no wiggle room regarding the application of morality to moral creatures. Theists who claim that God could have decreed the laws to be otherwise, whether physical or spiritual, might be clouding man's understanding of reality. It is possible, that the universe God made, with its matter and energy, must have the laws of our universe.

Supernatural to Natural Boundary: Creationist theorists should prefer boundaries between the supernatural and the natural that are earlier rather than later. Consider a given creative task with a supernatural to natural boundary, and its possible sequential steps 1st, 2nd, & 3rd. Within the constraints of revealed history and natural law, the theorist might be wise to propose a threshold for the SN/NB as far as possible to the beginning of that series. So that, a SN/NB between the 1st and 2nd steps is prefered to a boundary between the 2nd and 3rd steps, or even later. For example, those who explain the world, solar system, and universe by claiming their own ad hoc proposed supernatural interventions long after the original creation have an inherently weak position.

Creation of the Matter vs. the Making of the Stars: As God created plants, animals, and people out of the matter He had made only days earlier, likewise, our RSR cosmogany proposes that God did not create ex nihilo the stars and the galaxies, but that He used the matter which He had indeed made from nothing on Day One to form those stars and to stretch out the heavens. This observation may help to explain the often repeated scriptural description of God "stretching out the heavens." Eleven times in five books of the Bible, including in the earliest book written, the Scriptures teach that God streched out the heavens (Job 9:8; Ps. 104:2; Isa. 40:22; 42:5; 44:24; 45:12; 48:13; 51:13; Jer. 10:12; 51:15; Zech. 12:1). Considering that the substance that God spread out to form the stars and galaxies of the cosmos had previously existed, for the first few days of creation, it is therefore more natural then to refer to His spreading out of this material as "stretching", because this then indicates that previously this matter was not stretched, but had existed earlier in a more densely compacted space.

The Light of the First Three Days:

[Please check back on June 1, 2013 for more of this written description, which will continue with a summary of Walt Brown's explanation of the source of light in the days before the Sun and stars were made, and a consideration of what supernova remnants at stage two might tell us about God's stretching out of the heavens. Also, the following material will be worked into the report...]

It could be suggested that God might have pulled the light of the universe, not radially, but only in the direction of the earth. Conceptually this is possible, and it could be theoretically proved or falsified by showing the amount of radiation from the universe that falls upon objects located a great distance from the Earth. That necessary distance would depend upon how narrowly, in this scenario, the Creator focused the light that He pulled from throughout the universe. In late 2012, at more than 11 billion miles from the Earth, NASA's Voyager spacecraft appears on the verge of leaving the solar system. However, that distance is too small to provide an observation of what the universe is like outside of the narrow swath traversed by the Earth. [Check to see whether voyager is headed out in front of the path of the sun, or behind.] Because it is estimated that the Earth is moving, by the addition of velocities, at approximately 1.29 million mph as it orbits the Sun, the Milky Way, and our local group of galaxies, it has traveled about 70 trillion miles since creation. Because there is no evidence that the night sky has become brighter over the last 6,000 years, nor is there documentation that the light of previously unseen stars have been becoming visible, it can be estimated that God pulled the light of the solar system, at the very least, in a broad enough path to light the solar system in our travels through 70 trillion miles. Further, apart from the Fall and the curse it unleashed on the cosmos, God had created the Earth to last forever. It is therefore not expected that, given enough time, 50,000 years, or 100 million years, or more, that the Earth would venture out of the light and into a dark zone of the universe. Thus, the RSR starlight and time proposal is not that God pulled light out of the galaxies to light a narrow band of the cosmos, but rather, that He radially stretched the light of the firmament to fill the heavens. For He is light. And the heavens declare the glory of God. Thus, the physical light of the cosmos illustrates the metaphor that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness.