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

principle, which is an atheistic assumption rooted in the belief that the cosmos is not designed. The Discussion section details both the differences and similarities of our solution compared to Humphreys’ solution. The striking similarities between the two classes of solutions, that is, old-age versus young-age cosmos, are encouraging as we strive toward consensus. In the following sections, we present our proposed solution to the Distant Starlight Problem and the evidence for a young cosmos; we discuss our findings and respond to potential objections; and to close, we summarize and conclude. The appendix contains a primer on Special Relativity that covers the essential concepts used in this paper. PROPOSED SOLUTION We infer a solution for the Distant Starlight problem from a straightforward interpretation of Genesis 1 in the context of Special Relativity (Einstein 1905). It is based on a special choice of initial conditions as well as a new synchrony convention. The special initial conditions enable starlight from distant stars to arrive at Earth between the beginning and end of Earth’s Day Four. We propose that God by his own choice and design constrained the stellar creation events described in Genesis 1:17 to have spacetime coordinates just outside the past light cone of Earth’s Day Four but within the past light cone of Earth’s Day Five. This arrangement ensured that the first light from any such distant star would have reached Earth between the beginning and end of Earth’s Day Four (see Figure 1). The stellar creation events were further constrained such that each was causally independent from all the others. God could have accomplished this, for example, by arranging the creation events along a hyperbolic hypersurface whose slope is everywhere shallower than the slope of a light cone (see the hypersurface of stellar creation in Figure 1). The causal independence of stellar creation events ensures that they can be reckoned as simultaneous as described below. In addition to selecting the coordinates of all stellar creation events in spacetime in this special manner, God also prescribed the synchrony convention by which causally independent events are to be reckoned as simultaneous relative to one another. According to Special Relativity, simultaneity of causally independent events cannot be decided by physical experiments but instead is a matter of convention; it is a subjective choice (see Appendix A). We propose that God’s numbering of the creation days in Genesis 1 defines the synchrony convention for all events in the universe. By declaring that stellar creation events took place on Creation Day Four, God sovereignly prescribed that they should be reckoned as simultaneous with one another and with Earth’s Day Four. The synchrony convention can be stated more generally as follows: the Creation Time Coordinate (CTC) of an event is defined to be the elapsed time between that event and Creation Day Four at the event’s location, plus three days. An event’s CTC is therefore the elapsed time since “The Beginning” of Genesis 1:1. Consequently, two events are considered simultaneous (synchronous), if and only if, they have the same CTCs. The synchrony convention defined in this manner does not conflict with Special Relativity, because stellar creation events are causally independent. It does, however, introduce additional information which cannot be deduced from Special Relativity alone. Our definition of the CTCs parallels the Big Bang’s definition of “comoving time coordinates” (Liddle, 2015). Comoving time coordinates are defined as the elapsed time since the Big Bang within the reference frame of observers who perceive the universe as uniformly redshifted in all directions. Just like comoving time coordinates, the CTCs are defined with respect to a well-known inertial reference frame (the rest frame of the firmament) and a well-known initial event (the Creation). Because of the combination of the special initial conditions and synchrony convention described above, starlight emitted on Creation Day Four according to each star’s CTC also arrives at Earth on Creation Day Four according to the Earth’s CTC. The Distant Starlight Problem is resolved without violating Scripture or Special Relativity. A side effect of our solution is the asymmetric relationship between the Earth and stars. While light from distant stars emitted on Day Four also reaches Earth on Day Four, the reverse is not true. In fact, due to the special initial conditions, a star located a billion light years away from Earth will not receive light, or any other signal from Earth, until its CTC clock strikes two billion years. This asymmetry is consistent with Scripture, according to which God appointed the stars “to give light upon the Earth” (Genesis 1:15) but did not grant man dominion over the stars like He did over other parts of Creation (Genesis 1:28). In other words, Scripture indicates that while stars are causally to affect Earth, the reverse is not true. To understand better the solution proposed here, consider the following example illustrated by Figure 2. In 1987 astronomers observed the explosion of the supernova SN 1987A located about 168,000 light years away from Earth. Based on the distance to the star and the speed of light, astronomers routinely infer that the time of the explosion was about 166,000 BC. At rst blush, this conclusion suggests that the star exploded, and therefore existed, before the Biblical date of creation, which is about 4,000 BC. However, as illustrated in Figure 2, the creation of SN 1987A on Day Four is a causally independent event relative to the morning of Day Four on Earth, and therefore the creation of SN 1987A did not actually happen before the creation of Earth. If SN 1987A did not explode before the creation of Earth, then when did it explode? The date of 166,000 BC is simply a time coordinate that astronomers ascribed to the supernova explosion using the Einstein synchrony convention (see Appendix A) with respect to the Earth’s inertial reference frame. An observer in a spaceship moving past the Earth along the Earth – SN 1987A direction would ascribe a later time coordinate to the explosion because within his reference frame the Earth – SN 1987A distance would be Lorentz-contracted and thus less than 168,000 light years. Therefore, neither of these results reflect objective reality. In fact, Special Relativity alone does not provide a way to determine an objective date for the supernova explosion, but the CTC framework does. In terms of CTCs, one would date the star explosion to be about 4,000 + 1,987 = 5,987 years since creation, assuming creation took place about 4,000 years BC, and the star’s creation to be Day Four since the beginning of Creation. Moreover, as the light carrying the image of the explosion passes through any given location in the heavens, Tenev et al. ◀ Creation time coordinates solution to the starlight problem ▶ 2018 ICC 84