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

massive but thin spherical shell of water, likely in the form of ice crystals, surrounding the visible cosmos. He requires the mass in this thin spherical shell of water to be more than 20 times greater than the total mass of galaxies in the visible cosmos. He equates this water to the ‘waters above the firmament’ of Genesis 1:7 and to the ‘waters that are above the heavens’ mentioned in Psalm 148:4. In this model the mass of this thin shell of water is sufficient to produce a large, negative gravitational potential throughout the cosmos, with values not far from − c 2 /2, the value at which, according to Humphreys, all physical processes stop. Humphreys proposes that on Creation Day Four on Earth God caused a front of star formation to sweep outward from the Earth in all directions toward the bounding layer of the ‘waters above.’ He suggests that the gravitational potential already was sufficiently close to the value − c 2 /2 that the additional mass from the newly created stars caused the gravitational potential to fall below − c 2 /2 just behind this front of star creation. The consequence was that a region of timelessness engulfed everything behind this creation front. Within this region all physical processes, including that of clocks, came to a halt. With the earth at its center, this timeless region, at a moment on Day Four, first enveloped the Earth and then expanded rapidly to include the entire star-containing cosmos. After all the galaxies had been created and engulfed in the timeless zone, Humphreys proposes that God began steadily to increase the tension in the fabric of space, first causing the gravitational potential to rise above the value − c 2 /2 at the outer edge of the cosmos and then causing the boundary of the timeless zone to race inward toward the earth at near the speed of light. Stars just behind this inward racing boundary suddenly began to shine again. Eventually, the gravitational potential in Earth’s neighborhood rose above − c 2 /2 and physical processes on Earth resumed. Clocks on Earth, being stopped, recorded no elapsed time between the instant during Day Four when everything had stopped and when everything resumed. In contrast to a sky devoid of stars when everything on Earth stopped, now the sky was ablaze with light from the Sun, Moon, and stars. That means that the starlight received on Earth on Day Four from stars throughout the cosmos is light the stars emitted almost immediately after they emerged from the timeless zone. By controlling the tension in the fabric of space, God was able to control how long the newly created stars were in the region where the gravitational potential was greater than − c 2 /2 before the potential fell below that value and the stars entered the timeless zone. Hence in his model, Humphreys can dial in time for galaxies, after they are first created, to wind into spiral form, for example. However, Humphreys can just as well choose that time interval to be vanishingly small. With this latter choice, the result is close both to our CTC solution and to Lisle’s ASC model, with first light from all the stars and galaxies arriving at Earth on Creation Day Four and subsequent stellar history unfolding as if in real time. With this latter choice in Humphreys model, subsequent to Day Four, all the stars and galaxies, nearby and far away, track together as if they were created nearly instantaneously along Earth’s Day Four light cone. 3. CTC solution versus Lisle’s ASC model Jason Lisle’s solution (Newton 2001; Lisle 2010) is based on a synchrony convention, according to which light arrives instantaneously when traveling toward an observer but propagates with velocity c /2 in directions away from the observer. He refers to this convention as the anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC). Lisle (2010, p. 201) elaborates, Since we cannot (even in principle) ever measure the one- way speed of light, Einstein concludes that the one-way speed of light is not actually a property of nature, but a choice of man. Before Einstein, we might have assumed that the one-way speed of light (and thus, the corresponding synchrony convention) is a property of the universe—one that we are not clever enough to measure. But according to Einstein, the fact that we can never test a synchrony convention shows us something fundamental about the universe. Namely, it tells us that synchrony conventions are not a property of the universe but are instead a system of measurement invented by man. According to the conventionality thesis, no experiment will ever be able to establish one synchrony convention over another, because synchronization systems are a human invention by which we measure other things—much like the metric system. Lisle (2010) grounds his ASC model upon a face-value understanding of Genesis 1, namely, that God created all the stars on Day Four of Creation Week and that they immediately became visible on Earth. He assumes the anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC) to account for this immediate visibility. Furthermore, he assumes that conventional estimates of present galactic distances, redshifts, and cosmic expansion are basically correct and that gravitational time dilation effects are negligible based on the estimated mass of the visible universe together with the estimated galactic distances. In its essence, our solution is a reformulation of Lisle’s solution (Newton 2001; Lisle 2010), but ours spells out clearly the required initial conditions, without which Lisle’s solution is at best ambiguous if not incomplete. While Lisle does make a distinction between the ASC convention and his ASC model , thus recognizing that the convention alone as insufficient, at the same time he does not adequately delineate the initial conditions associated with his model. Discussion of the initial conditions should have stressed the unique role of the Earth in relation to the stars. Lisle neglects to address this crucial issue. In addition to spelling out the initial conditions, our solution also replaces Lisle’s use of the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) with the CTC-based synchrony convention. The ASC is an observer-specific and hence subjective definition of simultaneity, while the CTC-based synchrony convention is a divinely-prescribed and hence objective definition of simultaneity. The straightforward interpretation of the ASC solution fails to capture the fundamental star-Earth asymmetry described above, but ostensibly suggests that one can simply define light to travel arbitrarily fast between any two points via an appropriate choice of observer. This inherent subjectivity of the ASC has been a source of criticisms and an obstacle to the acceptance of Lisle’s solution. By contrast, our Tenev et al. ◀ Creation time coordinates solution to the starlight problem ▶ 2018 ICC 88