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Originally posted by shaunybaby
it says that when the stars were made adam saw them right away, which is impossible because the light we see from the stars is what has happened millions of years ago, adam could not have seen those stars straight away.
Originally posted by Saint4God
I'm sure a hundred years ago, there is a lot of things that we do on a daily basis that simply 'could not happen'.
www.christiananswers.net...
Some stars are millions of light-years away. Since a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, does this mean that the universe is very old?
Despite all the biblical and scientific evidence for a young earth/universe, this has long been a problem. However, any scientific understanding of origins will always have opportunities for research -- problems that need to be solved. We can never have complete knowledge and so there will always be things to learn.
One explanation used in the past was rather complex, involving light travelling along Riemannian surfaces (an abstract mathematical form of space). Apart from being hard to understand, it appears that such an explanation is not valid, since it would mean that we should see duplicates of everything.
...
Perhaps the most commonly used explanation is that God created light "on its way," so that Adam could see the stars immediately without having to wait years for the light from even the closest ones to reach the earth. While we should not limit the power of God, this has some rather immense difficulties.
zeppscommentaries.com...&E/gods_and_suns.htm
The Old Testament, written at least 2,500 years ago, refers to the stars.
Which means that light from the stars was reaching earth 2,500 years ago, only 3,500 years after the creation of the earth.
Which means that no star in the universe can be more than 3,500 years old, because the light from a star more than 3,500 light years away wouldn’t have reached us yet when the old Testament was written. In fact, the stars had been around for some time at that point, since the bible makes it clear that they existed for the purpose of keeping track of holidays and seasons.
Now, we know that the earth is in a galaxy called the Milky Way, and that this galaxy contains at least 200 billion stars. It may contain as many as 400 billion. The number is big enough that they are still simply counting.
So even if we ignore the fact that we can plainly see other galaxies, which obviously lie outside of our own, it means that a creationist cosmology has anywhere from 3 to 6 stars jammed in each cubic light year of the universe.
Four hundred billion stars all within 3,500 light years would give us a night sky that is blinding pure white. And it would have meant no fourth day of creation, since the earth would have been fried to a crisp.
from your first linkPerhaps the most commonly used explanation is that God created light "on its way,"
Recall that the speed of light cannot change without destroying the very structure of the universe. So as we examine distant objects, we quickly realize that we are seeing objects as they were millions of years ago. As we examine more and more distant objects, parallax becomes more difficult to measure, so we must employ additional methods to determine ages (however, satellites and Very Long Baseline Array measurements have extended the effective range and accuracy of parallax measurements5). The objects in space we observe at billions of light-years away are one of the strongest evidences against a young universe. Young-earth creationists have completely failed to come up with an alternative explanation that has withstood even simple testing.
Originally posted by jake1997
Try this one
www.answersingenesis.org...
Because even stars close to Earth are still at vast distances, to see any appreciable change in their position with respect to the distant background, a considerable change in the observer’s position is required. The greatest baseline achievable for a ground-based telescope is the diameter of Earth’s orbit. By observing stars at a six monthly interval, the change in the observer’s position becomes twice the Earth-Sun distance or 2 Astronomical Units (AU).
Parallax data is collected by photographing the same star field twice, from opposite points of Earth’s orbit, then measuring the annual shift of stars that are relatively close to Earth against the background of much more distant stars. From knowing the angular size of the photograph, the annual parallax of any close star can be calculated. Trigonometric parallax is calculated as half the annual parallax. The angular shift in the nearby star is still very small and is usually measured as a fraction of an arc second Even Proxima Centauri, the closest visible star to Earth other than the Sun, has a parallax of only ~0.8 arc second.
The usefulness of parallax in measuring distance to stars is limited because the parallax angle of even nearby stars is extremely small. The largest trigonometric parallax, for the nearest star other than the Sun, is less than one arc second (0.772”).
In addition, the atmosphere “blurs” stellar images, making measurement of small angles very difficult. In practice, for Earth based telescopes, the limit is about 0.01”, with the result that parallax is good only for the relatively small number of stars up to about 100 pc away. For stars more than 100 pc away the parallax angle becomes too small to measure accurately from the ground.
Other less direct methods must then be used for determining the distances to celestial objects which are more than 100 pc away. However parallax measurements of nearby stars are still vital as they indirectly underpin many of the less direct techniques for measuring distance to remote celestial objects.
Originally posted by TheBandit795
And there is no known evidence for those two explanations. So they still can't back them up.
Originally posted by BlackJackal
Originally posted by TheBandit795
And there is no known evidence for those two explanations. So they still can't back them up.
If we can't accurately measure the distance to the stars isn't it possible that the stars really aren't billions of light years away, but rather only several light years away? If so, then the light from these stars could have been seen on earth in only a few years and definetely be visible today.
Just a thought.
A galaxy cluster is a collection of about a thousand galaxies held together by gravity. Clusters help overcome the problem of galaxy variation because they include so many galaxies. Even if the properties of individual galaxies vary widely, the average properties of all galaxies in the cluster should come close to the average properties of galaxies in the universe. The more galaxies are in a cluster, the more confident we can be that the average properties of all the galaxies in the cluster will match the average properties of all galaxies in the universe.
Originally posted by Zipdot
Yes, and I'm glad that we both agree that such fringe postulations are not possible. Although you stated that there is a possibility that the Earth is only 10,000 years old if we view the very basis of all of our astronomical calculations differently, I get the feeling that you are only saying that because it's not out of the question, rather than you actually believing it.
Well, if we were to fight all of our arguments by conceding things that are not absolutely out of the question, then we would not be able to focus on reality and that which we have a decent understanding of.
Originally posted by BlackJackal
...Trigonometric parallax is the method used by astronomers to measure the distance from earth to a star. Basically Parallax is a simply using the principles of triangulation (Sine, Cosine, Tangent) on a cosmic scale...
...This process works very well for measuring objects near earth but not so well in measuring the distances to the stars or other far off objects. The reason is that the angle at the pinnacle of the triangle created by the earths rotation and the star measured is minuscule. Thus, we cannot be for certain that the billions of light years currently assigned to some stars is accurate.
Originally posted by BlackJackalUnfortunately, measuring the distances to the stars is not as much out of question as it seems. Depending on who you ask Parallax is useless after 20 to 100 light years. After that it's up to luminosity, comparison, and red shift all three of which are inadequate.
The problems with using lumiosity is that we can only accurately measure the luminosity of one star, sol, our sun. The luminosity happens to be 3.85x10^26 Watts. This is the only formula we have to measure the other stars in the cosmos. Seems grossly inadequate when you consider all the different types of stars there are and we are only using one to judge them all by.
The problem with comparision is what do you compare it to? Other Stars? Other Galaxies? We are forced to compare stars with other stars and other galaxies even though the ones we are comparing to are not known themselves.
All the methods have their issues. Even, Cosmologists over the years have changed their calculations of distances just so they would fit their own models. The fact is the universe could be 100 Trillion Light Years across or 10,000 Light years across and still not be in violation of any laws of physics.
Zipdot
Much of science is theoretical, as in, we haven't described the postulations as "laws" yet because we need to gather more data. Hubble's Law about the expansion of the universe is a scientific LAW, rather than a theory.
Calculating the age of the universe is only accurate if the assumptions built into the models being used are also accurate. This is referred to as strong priors and essentially involves stripping the potential errors in other parts of the model to render the accuracy of actual observational data directly into the concluded result. Although this is not a totally invalid procedure in certain contexts, it should be noted that the caveat, "based on the fact we have assumed the underlying model we used is correct", then the age given is thus accurate to the specified error (since this error represents the error in the instrument used to gather the raw data input into the model).
Originally posted by James the Lesser
Age, not distance, determines what we can and can't see.