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

to a recently created cosmos with the Earth near its center, as a straightforward reading of Scripture implies. For plausible choices of parameters, Hartnett was able to find solutions that displayed vast amounts of time dilation in the distant cosmos during Day Four on Earth (Hartnett 2007). After Carmeli’s death in 2007, Hartnett helped publish Carmeli’s final book entitled Relativity: Modern Large-Scale Spacetime Structure of the Cosmos (Carmeli 2008). In the process, Hartnett became more conscious of deficiencies in Carmeli’s theory, especially the difficulties of melding both time and velocity dimensions together in a consistent manner. As Harnett (2015c) reflected later, Carmeli’s theory does not need  the fudge factors of dark energy and dark matter  for it to fit observations, but it does need this new [velocity] dimension... What is a velocity dimension? I do not know… [Carmeli’s] Cosmological Special Relativity theory I believe is fundamentally flawed. It has problems which I could not see how to overcome. In 2011 Hartnett wrote a detailed, generally favorable review (Hartnett 2011a) of Lisle’s ASC solution to the distant starlight problem (Lisle 2010). Since early 2015 Hartnett has expressed close to unqualified support for Lisle’s ASC model and has even proposed enhancements for it, including a mechanism for redshift. He now refers to this model in a title of a paper as “A Biblical creationist cosmogony” (Hartnett 2015a). In a synopsis of that paper he writes, “I now place this model at the top of my list even ahead of my own time-dilation model” (Hartnett 2015d). The difference between the solution for the Distant Starlight Problem that we propose here and Lisle’s ASC model (Newton 2001; Lisle 2010) is that we spell out the required initial conditions, without which Lisle’s solution is ambiguous and incomplete. As such, using different initial conditions is admissible within Lisle’s ASC model; hence, distant starlight might not arrive at Earth at all during the time of the Earth’s existence. Our solution is presented in the following section titled “Proposed Solution.” The new formulation also addresses the common criticisms against the ASC model, some of which are arguably due to misconceptions, but a few are substantive. Our solution is motivated by our conviction that the distant cosmos is young, a conviction based on Biblical as well as observational evidence. Much of the observational evidence for a young cosmos has already been detailed by Lisle (2010). To this evidence, we add here our investigation and further development with corrections of Davies’s argument (Davies 1994) based on the paucity of supernovae remnants (SNRs). This investigation is presented in the section titled “Evidence for Young Cosmos.” Despite our disagreement with Humphreys concerning the age of the distant cosmos as we view it from Earth (Humphreys 1996, 2008, 2017), we find a notable agreement with his proposition regarding the position in spacetime of stellar creation events in relation to Earth’s Day Four light cone. That proposition also leads to the conclusion that distant galaxies appear of to be equal age, which is identical to our own conclusion on this issue. We also fully endorse Humphreys’ (1994) rejection of the Cosmological Tenev et al. ◀ Creation time coordinates solution to the starlight problem ▶ 2018 ICC 83 Figure 1. Special initial conditions involving the events of Genesis 1:17 offer a solution for the Distant Starlight Problem. We propose that God arranged the stellar creation events (Genesis 1:17) in spacetime along a hypersurface just outside the past light cone of Earth’s Day Four and inside the past light cone of Earth’s Day Five. Furthermore, these events are causally independent from one another and from Earth’s Day Four. Such arrangement can be accomplished, for example, by choosing a hyperbolic hypersurface of creation whose slope is everywhere shallower than the slope of the light cone. Light emitted by a star on its Day Four arrives at Earth sometime between Earth’s Day Four and Five. The x coordinate represents distance from the Earth, while the ct coordinate represents time scaled by the speed of light c .