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

will also assume that time dilation effects, such as described by General Relativity, are negligible. The procedure can be further refined to account for these factors, but at the expense of additional complications, that we wish to avoid here. To accomplish this synchronization, we first establish a clock E local to Earth to reflect the current time since Creation. Using the information provided in Scripture, we can do this with a precision to within just a few decades. (A few decades may seem like a course precision at first but is actually extremely fine compared to cosmological light travel times.) Let t E be the time displayed by clock E once it has been established in this way. Next, consider an observer with a clock X in cosmic space, which ticks at the same rate as clock E . Prior to clock synchronization, the observer must adjust his motion to be at rest with respect to the CMB by, for example, temporarily accelerating along the direction of the perceived CMB redshift anisotropy dipole until the CMB appears equally redshifted in all directions. After coming to rest with the CMB, the observer must send a light signal to Earth, which is immediately returned carrying along the value t E that was displayed by clock E at the time the signal was received. Let τ 1 and τ 2 be, respectively, the emission and reception times of the light signal from and back to clock X as measured by X prior to its synchronization. Upon receiving the returned light signal, clock X should be adjusted to display time equal to t X = t E + (τ 2 − τ 1 ) . Once we have a way to synchronize a clock X in space with a clock E at earth, we can synchronize two arbitrary clocks X and Y with each other by synchronizing each individually with E . F. Does the existence of a special reference frame, as suggested by the CTC convention, conflict with Special Relativity? Special relativity postulates that all physical laws are the same in all inertial reference frames. This fact is not changed by giving a special designation to one reference frame by a choice of convention. In the same way, for example, there is nothing physically distinguishable about the Greenwich meridian, but it has been given a special designation amongst all meridians. This is, however, only part of the answer, because we also claim that our specially designated reference frame can be distinguished by physical observations. Before we respond to this second part of the question, notice that our ability physically to distinguish the special rest reference frame has nothing to do with the adopted convention and so it is not our choice of convention that appears to be the issue here. In fact, the same issue exists when specifying the Big Bang’s cosmological time (Liddle, 2015). The issue is that the Relativity Principle applies to physical laws, which are local. The Principle of Relativity postulates that, based solely on local observations, all reference frames look the same. For example, while traveling in a very smooth train Special Relativity tells us that one will not be able to run any experiments within the train to measure its speed. However, one can do so very simply by looking out of the window, which is a non-local observation. In our synchronization procedure detailed above, we used observations of the CMB redshift to determine the special rest reference frame, which are non-local observations. Nevertheless, our procedure in no way changed the fact that physical laws are local and are the same in all inertial reference frames. G. Humphreys’ (2017) argument that Scripture points to old cosmos In a recent article, Humphreys (2017) points to several Scripture verses, which he claims to require that the distant stars be much older than the Earth. Some of these verses, Humphreys interprets as describing the slow winding down of the cosmos, but a more straightforward interpretation is that of a quick and sudden change caused by God’s judgment. Other verses that Humphreys cites as referring to long ages refer not to the past but to the future end- times reign of Christ. Humphreys explanation of the “falling stars” references in Matthew 24:29 and Revelation 6:13-14 is also problematic. It requires for light to be capable of propagating outside the fabric of space and also for the nearly infinite blueshift resulting from the increased light speed to be almost perfectly compensated by the redshift due to the stars’ recession from the Earth. For these reasons, we find both the Scriptural justification and the cosmological implications that Humphreys offers in support of old distant cosmos to be unconvincing. SUMMARYAND CONCLUSION In this paper, we have described a solution for the Distant Starlight Problem that is based on the synchrony convention implied by God’s numbering of the days in Genesis 1 plus a proposed set of initial conditions that constrain how we infer God arranged stellar creation events in spacetime. In its essence, our solution, based on the notion of Creation Time Coordinates (CTC) is similar to Lisle’s Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) model (Newton, 2001; Lisle, 2010). Our CTC-based solution’s explicit initial conditions adds clarity and points to the same falsifiable predictions, namely that the cosmos should appear young and that the first light from all stars, near and far, appeared on Earth on Day Four. We showed that these predictions are supported both by Scripture and by observations. We also compared our solution to other current ones and noted a strong convergence of thought among creationist researchers pertaining to the arrangement of the stellar creation events in spacetime. That arrangement is the one in which the creation events of all the stars and galaxies, including the stars within our own galaxy, lay very close to Earth’s Day Four light cone when they were created by God. Simply from those initial conditions, first light from all these objects arrived on Earth during Creation Day Four, and the light that has arrived ever since carries the subsequent histories of these objects synchronized in time as measured by clocks on Earth. The proposed solution does not constitute a complete cosmology and relies on a sparse set of assumptions, which makes it suitable for incorporation into a more comprehensive cosmological theory. Furthermore, the solution does not attempt to explain how creation itself might have happened. We are persuaded from the Biblical text that the creation of the cosmos was supernatural, a result of God’s spoken word (Psalm 33:6,9). Nevertheless, the fact that we can see distant stars today is clearly within the realm of the natural. The solution we present attempts to explain how our ability to see distant stars can be consistent with a young creation based on the laws of nature as we understand them today. Tenev et al. ◀ Creation time coordinates solution to the starlight problem ▶ 2018 ICC 91