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

associated with Creation Day Four on Earth, their light arrives during Creation Day Four on Earth regardless of the assumed convention. Therefore, for the above statement to be valid, Lisle must have envisioned, similarly to what we have proposed here, that stellar creation events are just outside the past light cone of Earth’s Day Four. These are precisely the initial conditions required for the ASC model to make the testable predictions that Lisle is describing. It is useful to note that both Humphreys’ (2008) and Lisle’s (2010) solutions posit that God created all the stars and galaxies in a near-instantaneous and supernatural manner at extremely specific locations in spacetime. If the above interpretation of Lisle’s model is correct, then his idea is essentially equivalent to what we are proposing. The main differences are in the way the two solutions are motivated and presented. We believe that our formulation obviates most of the common objections often raised against Lisle’s by clarifying the key issues of synchrony convention and the initial conditions. 4. Addressing potential objections to the CTC solution We anticipate that some of the objections against Lisle’s (2010) ASCmodel may be also directed at the CTC solution. Some of these might have been the result of Lisle’s unclear distinction between the synchrony convention and initial conditions. We clarify this point below before proceeding to discuss potential objections. The initial conditions, which are independent of the choice of synchrony convention, are fundamentally what enable distant starlight to arrive at Earth on Day Four. All that is needed is for stellar creation events to be positioned just above the Earth’s Day Four past light cone. The purpose of the synchrony convention is to prescribe an absolute ordering of these events, so that, for example, all stellar creation events can be reckoned as taking place on Day Four, as God had declared in Genesis 1:19. With the above clarification in mind, let us now consider some potential objections to the CTC solution. Some of these are shared in common with the ASC solution and have already been addressed in part by Lisle (2010, p. 203). We include them here because the responses to these objections become clearer in the context of the CTC formulation. A. Does the ASC model (and by extension the CTC solution) simply define the problem away? Lisle (2010, p. 206) writes: “Moreover, we have seen that there are good reasons to suppose that the Bible does indeed use ASC… Indeed, the problem disappears when we use ASC.” Taken at its face value, the quoted paragraph suggests that the Distant Starlight problem is resolved by simply switching the synchrony convention. As pointed out earlier, however, it is the initial conditions that make the solution possible and not the convention. These two concepts: initial conditions and synchrony convention are often conflated within Lisle’s use of the term “ASC,” which has been a source of confusion, but the CTC solution elucidates the distinction. B. TheASC (and by extension the CTC) is an awkward convention Many have criticized theASC as an awkward convention to use and may apply the same criticism to the CTC. For example, Faulkner (2013) writes: “Thus, astronomers have two time conventions as to when something happened, when it actually happened, and when it is observable on earth.” Lisle (2010, p. 203) expresses the same objection as this: “ASC is more mathematically complex than the Einstein synchrony convention. Therefore, by Occam’s razor, Einstein synchrony is more likely to be correct.” Both objections are logical fallacies. First, the awkwardness or complexity of a convention does not necessarily invalidate it. Second, the convention may be awkward and complex for one purpose but simple for another. A synchrony convention is like the choice of a time zone when reporting times on travel itineraries. For example, an airplane’s takeoff and landing times are typically reported with respect to local time zones. While this may be an awkward convention for computing travel time, it is exactly the convention needed to make hotel and car reservations at the travel destination. C. Does the asymmetric light speed imply that space is anisotropic? It is important to recognize that the ASC is but one of an infinite number of equally valid conventions concerning the one-way speed of light. None of these conventions affects the underlying nature of physical reality. And none of them implies that space is anisotropic. Choosing the ASC means choosing the one-way light speed toward an observer to be infinite and the one-way light speed away from the observer to be c /2 . The CTC convention has a similar implication except “observer” is replaced with “Earth.” Does this asymmetry imply anisotropic properties of space? It is easier to see that the answer is “no” when one realizes that the one-way speed of light is a direct consequence of the synchrony convention and is not therefore an objective physical quantity. D. How can light travel faster than c? This question is related to the one above and has the same answer: the one-way speed of light is not a physical quantity. On the other hand, the round-trip speed of light is a physical quantity and is always c regardless of the synchrony convention one chooses. E. Are the CTCs physically realizable coordinates? CTCs are well-defined time coordinates representing the elapsed time since Creation (Genesis 1:1) at each point of the firmament within the rest reference frame of the firmament. The definition parallels the Big Bang model’s definition of the comoving time coordinates, also known as “cosmological time,” which represents the elapsed time since the Big Bang (our reference of the comoving coordinates from the Big Bang model is NOT an endorsement of that model) in the rest frame an observer who perceives distant stars as uniformly shifted in all directions (Liddle, 2015). In both cases, the time coordinate is defined as the elapsed time at a given location with respect to a well-known reference frame and a well-known initial event. Therefore, any criticisms directed at the construction of the CTCs would also have to apply to the construction of the comoving time coordinates, but the latter have been well vetted by cosmologists. Nevertheless, we present here a procedure according to which a clock in any location in the universe can, at least in principle, be synchronized to reflect the CTC at its location. To keep the description simple, we will assume that the rest reference frame of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is a good approximation of the rest reference frame of the firmament, and we will ignore the relative motion of the Earth with respect to the CMB. We Tenev et al. ◀ Creation time coordinates solution to the starlight problem ▶ 2018 ICC 90