The Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism (2018)

itself. We would improve in the “what stuff is made of” department from a woefully bad F to a barely respectable C+ (or possibly an A+). 2) The Copernican Principle, for all the weight it carries in the modern mind, is an unproven assumption, and a handful of researchers have recently set out to prove it (Caldwell and Stebbins 2008). In the words of Hubble (1937): [T]he statement that all observers, regardless of their location, will see the same general picture of the universe… is a sheer assumption. 3) Accepting the apparent spherical redshift distribution as real does not require a return to the medieval picture with the Earth stationary at the precise center of the universe. The vast scale of the universe implies that if the center of the redshift distribution were as far away as the nearest galaxy, for example, we would still be at the “center” of the universe to within one part in a million. 4) Our unsavory association with a special space-time event is an unavoidable fact of nature. Postulating an expanding universe in order to remain consistent with the Copernican Principle simply substitutes a unique location in space with a unique point in time (the so-called Coincidence Problem). Of course neither choice should pose a particular philosophical problem for a creationist, whether young universe or otherwise. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank Ryan Rippee, Emily Johnson and the reviewers for their comments. REFERENCES Barceló, C., S. Liberati, and M. Visser. 2011. Analogue Gravity. Living Reviews in Relativity 14, no. 1:3 [159 pp]. Berzi, V. and V. Gorini. 1969. Reciprocity Principle and the Lorentz Transformations. Journal of Mathematical Physics 10:1518-1524. Caldwell, R. R. and A. Stebbins. 2008. ATest of the Copernican Principle . Physical Review Letters 100: 191302 [4 pp]. Dicke, R. H. 1957. Gravitation without a Principle of Equivalence. Reviews of Modern Physics 29, no. 3:363–376. Faulkner, D. 2004. Universe by Design . Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books. Frank, P. and H. Rothe. 1911. Über die Transformation der Raumzeitkoordinaten von ruhenden auf bewegte Systeme. Annalen der Physik 34, no. 5:825-855. Genov, D. A., S. Zhang, and X. Zhang. 2009. Mimicking celestial mechanics in metamaterials. Nature Physics 5, no. 9:687-692. Hartnett, J. 2007. Starlight, Time and the New Physics . Powder Springs, Georgia: Creation Book Publishers. Hubble, E. 1937. The Observational Approach to Cosmology . Retrieved September 20, 2017 from http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept04/ Hubble/frames.html. Hubble, E. and R. C. Tolman. 1935. Two Methods of Investigating the Nature of the Nebular Redshift. Astrophysical Journal 82:302-338. Humphreys, D. R. 2008. New time dilation helps creation cosmology. Journal of Creation 22 (3):84-92. Lisle, J. P. 2010. Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem. Answers Research Journal 2:191–207. Lubin, L. M. and A. Sandage. 2001. The Tolman Surface Brightness Test for the Reality of the Expansion. IV. A Measurement of the Tolman Signal and the Luminosity Evolution of Early-Type Galaxies. The Astronomical Journal 122, no. 3:1084-1103. McMillan, P. J. 2011. Mass Models of the Milky Way . Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 414:2446-2457. Sandage, A. and L. M. Lubin. 2001. The Tolman Surface Brightness Test for the Reality of the Expansion. I. Calibration of the Necessary Local Parameters. The Astronomical Journal 121, no. 5:2271-2288. Setterfield, B. 1987. The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time. Retrieved January 7, 2017 from http://www.setterfield.org/report/report.html. Whitham, G. B. 1965. A General Approach to Linear and Non-linear Dispersive Waves Using a Lagrangian . Journal of Fluid Mechanics 22:273-283. THE AUTHOR Bryan obtained a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from LeTourneau University in 1996 and worked for 3.5 years at Northrop Grumman as a Systems Engineer before going to graduate school. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005, spent two years as a post-doc in the Astronomy Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 2007. He is married with 7 children, currently resides in Livermore, CA, and attends Trinity Church East Bay. Johnson ◀ Young universe cosmology ▶ 2018 ICC 51