Interesting Take on the Starlight Issue

I don't know much about Dr. Hartnett, but this book seems to present some compelling arguments with regard to the starlight issue which we've been discussing here.

Dr. Humphreys found that if you assume the universe has a center, and that God stretched it out (rapid expansion) during creation week, that there would have been a time dilation event near the Earth that would slow down time on Earth to a standstill while time passed in the universe at normal rate. This would result in a few days of time (creation week) passing on Earth while billions of years worth of time pass in the rest of the universe. This explains how the starlight could have gotten to Earth in a few Earth days.

Paradoxically, it also means the Universe is both 6000 years old and billions of years old, depending on the location of the clock.

Check out the review if this is of interest to you.

Summoning Plantinga's Help in Responding to My Own Starlight Argument

Some time back, I posted an argument against the young earth view of creation. In that post, I stated that if young earth creationism is true, then we can see stars which are millions of light years away which never existed until most of the light years necessary for the light to reach earth would have already transpired. At its most basic level, my argument asserted that the Young Earth model of creationism yielded a God whose world is not epistemologically discernible. If, I argued, God has caused the stars in the sky to have the appearance of having existed at a time when they did not, then foundations for knowledge are undercut. The very first act in the universe appears to have had intertwined with it, a deception.

Others have argued – and this is perhaps the most persuasive argument possible – that God created the light already in transit. In response, it is first important to note that the argument is not that God could not create the light already in transit. That is not in question. What is in question is the implications for general revelation and knowledge in general if God causes things to appear a certain way when they are not (or were not) actually so. This argument tells us that, though the speed of light is basically constant, it was created in transit to earth...My basic argument is that if one wants to deny that the stars which are millions of light years away existed as we see them, then they are not epistemologically justified in believing in the existence of the sun.

Well now, as some of you who follow Bring the Books regularly know, I am a newly minted Young Earther myself. How - it must be asked, do I respond to my own views with regard to the issue of Starlight and its implications for epistemology?

What is most apparent to me, with regard to my starlight argument, is that it proves too much. If, in fact, it destroys knowledge and science (for God to cause something to happen which is contrary to the observable natural order) then we are left with a Bultmanian task of de-mytholization or else a gross unwillingness to follow our principles where they lead.

Until recently, I did not have a very well thought-through philosophy of the relationship between miracles and epistemology. But in Alvin Plantinga's newest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, he discusses precisely this issue.

Miracles are often thought to be problematic, in that God, if he were to perform a miracle, would be involved in "breaking," going contrary to, abrogating, suspending, a natural law. But given this conception of law, if God were to perform a miracle, it wouldn't at all involve contravening a natural law. That is because, obviously, any occasion on which God performs a miracle is an occasion when the universe is not causally closed; and the law says nothing about what happens when the universe is not causally closed. Indeed, on this conception it isn't even possible that God breaks a law of nature. For to break a law, he would have to act specially in the world; yet any time at which he acted specially in the world would be a time at which the universe is not causally closed; hence no law applies to the circumstances in question and hence no law gets broken.

Loc. 1259-65, Kindle Edition

Here is where Plantinga's thoughts help us regain our footing in dealing with the supposed negative epistemological ramifications for a model of creation which involves God's violating the natural order. The original creation of the universe was not done while nature was a closed system. As a matter of fact, the creation itself was an open event which was already contrary to the natural laws as we commonly think of them. It follows that the starlight which we see, if it was created 10,000 years ago (give or take) originated in an open system and not within a closed system. Science is not able to credibly rule on whether the universe is an open or a closed system since that would be a metaphysical claim which is outside of its purview.

If Plantinga is right, and it is technically not possible for God to break the laws of nature then we must dispense with this whole idea that an act of special creation ought to reflect the fingerprint of something created within an open system (i.e. not everything in the universe should not necessarily be expected to look less than 10,000 years old). It may not be possible for us to tell the difference between God's common work and what we often know as the miraculous. Another way of looking at it is, we ought not to reduce God's work to "within nature" and "against nature." Just because starlight was created rather recently does not mean that it is incumbent upon God to let the light take the billion-odd years that are supposed to have been taken for it to reach earth. Nor does it render science or knowledge impossible. Although we deduce from the speed of light and the distance of the stars that it has taken billions of years for this light to reach us, this is only a valid deduction if we understand all of the circumstances related to the creation of stars and light. The circumstances of the Creation, however, are far more mysterious than we would often like to admit. As has been argued to me by many young-earthers, it is no more contrary to the laws of nature for God to create light "in transit" than for God to create in the first place.

If the old-earth defender wants to dig his heels in here, he must be able to account for the fact that God's existence (given an orthdox understanding of God) means that nature is not a closed system. How does an old-earther argue for an old universe based on the speed of light without painting himself into a Bultmanian view of nature which requires natural consistency from beginning to end, ala the closed system model? I'm not sure. Perhaps someone will offer me an answer in the comments.

Becoming a Young-Earther After 12 Years

12 years. I've been an old-earth creationist for twelve years. More precisely, I've held what is often called a Day-Age View of creation. While refusing to believe in evolution, I have often scoffed at the idea of being a young earth creationist. And so, I have stood by Hugh Ross and his interpretation of Genesis since as long as I can remember.

This began ages ago. I was once an atheist. While I was in high school, I defaulted to atheism because I did not like my parents' religion, and frankly, I didn't like the idea of God and was embarrassed by the tongues-speaking, word-of-knowledge loving, 700 Club watching Christianity of my father. When I was 17, however, I had a change of heart. It was the Spirit of God changing me and making me into a new person, though I just thought it was my own great idea at the time. One of the tools God used was Hugh Ross' books The Fingerprint of God and The Creator and the Cosmos. These books not only affected the way I looked at the universe, but they opened me up to the truth that I was created by someone and that I could not live my life as a rebel against Him and expect to escape unscathed. I will never forget Hugh Ross, and I hope someday to meet him and thank him for his ministry at Reasons to Believe. I know that many young-earthers demonize his ministry, but he was used of God to change my life.

In becoming a Christian, I was never asked to put away my old presuppositions about the universe (especially the age of it). In fact, the beauty of Ross' approach to apologetics was that it met me where I was at and showed me that, in my view of the universe, I still had to acknowledge a creator. It disarmed me without my permission, yet never asked me to lay down my arms. For me, it was never a question of science vs. revelation. I always saw them as complementary.

Early on in my life, and even after coming to faith, I was exposed to the ministry of Kent Hovind. I remember bits and pieces, but what I do remember was embarassing. I saw a wild-eyed guy who, in my mind, took some facts that he learned from reading Stephen Hawking, put a Christian twist on them, and then spent most of his time arguing that old-earthers like me were wrong. He followed up his presentation by claiming that the Loch Ness Monster (Nessie) was real, that there may still be dinosaurs alive today, and even showing slides of people and dinosaurs living side-by-side. I also remember a suggestion on his part that at one point men may have domesticated dinosaurs (complete with a slide of a man riding on a saddled triceratops).

Ludicrous. Just ludicrous. I was an intelligent, thoughtful, scientific person, and I knew a crackpot when I saw one. In truth, I remember little of Hovind's ministry. I only remember the crazy parts that I recalled here. The point of this is not that I want to defame a godly man like Kent Hovind. The point here is to explain that my old-earth views which I have held for a dozen years were a combination of unabandoned presuppositions and reaction against a brand of fundamentalism which I found ugly and embarrassing.

My exposure to young-earth ministries since meeting Hovind's has not faired much better. Earlier this year our church hosted a speaking engagement with Jonathan Sarfati which I found to be far less than compelling. Like most creationist ministries, Sarfati's ministry seemed to be more focused on showing old-earth Christians that they were wrong than with meeting evolutionists in battle. This is still my perception of most creationist-focused ministries.

In the last couple of years I decided to revisit my assumptions about the book of Genesis, and one thing which I came to believe was that the Day-Age view of Genesis which I held did not stand up to the reading I was giving to it. For one thing, my interpretation of Genesis required the creation of stars (including the sun) on day one, while on day four I merely understood God's "making" the sun to be a revealing of the sun through some sort of primordeal mist. To my mind, this did not do the text justice because pulling back a mist is not the same thing as "making" the sun.

I did not hold to any sort of de-chronologized reading of Genesis, and so generally the order of the events in the text began to bother me, from my old-earth perspective. Perhaps my project to make science and scripture comport could not stand up to the scrutiny. Within the last year I turned towards the Framework view of Genesis and for a time was pleasantly surprised that many of my problems seemed to disappear with the Framework view. After all, the Framework view is not about science. It does not claim to know how old the earth is because the Framework view of Scripture does not understand the Bible as even speaking to the age of the universe. I found the chiastic structure between day 2 and day 5 to be quite compelling. I found the dual triadic structure of days 1-3 (creation kingdoms) and days 4-6 (creation kings) to be very insightful. I found Meredith Kline's argument that Genesis 2:5-6 establishes that creation happened through normal providence to be devastatingly helpful. In the end, I was ready to hold and defend the Framework view. The only thing is, I realized that I could appreciate the chiastic structure of the days of creation without actually de-chronologizing Genesis. I also knew that there were ways of reading Gen. 2:5-6 from a young-earth perspective that seemed perfectly acceptable, exegetically speaking. To make it simple, I realized that I wasn't being dragged kicking and screaming by the text towards the Day-Age view or the Framework view. It was the Young-Earth view which I was being dragged kicking and screaming towards.

In a conversation with my pastor, he asked me a pointed question. Though I don't remember the exact wording, he asked me essentially whether there was something prideful or stubborn that was keeping me from accepting the plain reading of the text. Although I have never found the argument that the plain meaning of the text is the right meaning compelling (it isn't) his question cut through a lot of the issues and got to the state of my heart, which is what I needed. The truth is, I was resisting a young-earth reading of Genesis because I was too proud to be a part of the Kent Hovind crowd. I was so judgmental and proud all these years against Kent Hovind's weirdness that I kept myself from what I now believe is the most sensible and accurate reading of the words of Genesis.

I have come to believe, after all of these years, that God did, in fact, create in six literal 24-hour days. I resisted holding this view for negative, rather than positive reasons. I was sinning these many years by judging my fellow Christians who I deemed to be less sophisticated than me because they held to a literal, 24-hour view of creation, and I suppose this blog is as good a place as any for me to repent of my sinful attitude.

Let me add a postscript here and just say that I do not believe that day-agers or frameworkers hold to the views they do because of the reasons I did. I am not interested in imputing any motives to those with whom I used to agree on this issue. The truth is, we are all complex creatures, and if it took 12 years for God to root this single strand of pride out of my heart, I would not presume that the issue is the same with others.