Southern Bread » earth age

Star Light and Time

Dave — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:47:00 +0000

Wow! It’s been over a week since my last post. My bad. I’ve been swamped with work lately. I have been thinking about something other than work though. I was listening to last week’s STR broadcast when the topic of the age of the universe came up. As I have stated in my bio, I am pretty committed(although I’m open to good arguments) to a young earth creation so this was of particular interest to me, since Koukl is inversely committed to an old earth creation. He went over some of his reasoning and it gave me a little clearer picture of where he’s coming from with his thinking on this issue. In particular, he was very taken with an old creation based on the light from distant stars.

The argument goes like this: We see the light from stars that are millions of light-years away. It takes a year for light to travel one light-year. Therefore, the light we are seeing from those stars now was originally given off by that star millions of years ago. Got it? It’s a very simple and compelling argument and I’ve given it a lot of thought over the years. I have a couple of thoughts on it that I think are solid, although with anything technical I am always open to correction, so feel free to send hatemail.

First, I want to say what I don’t believe. I do not think that God created stars, and at the same time created all the light between here and there. I think Koukl’s star light article deals a fairly crushing blow to that argument. I do believe that the speed of light is not constant and has fluctuated with time, but I do not believe that it was so significantly faster in the past as to have made star light get here really fast. That argument is just too far out there beyond what is provable for me to be comfortable with.

Instead, I think that the expansion of the universe must have something to do with this issue. When my wife and I took an astrophysics class in college we were told that the expansion of the universe is best pictured as a balloon with dots on it(the dots represent galaxies). As you blow up the balloon the dots get farther and farther apart. But my thought was, if you also draw lines connecting all of the dots to one another then as you blow up the balloon the lines stay connected. These lines would represent the streams of light being emitted from the galaxies. I don’t want to misuse the balloon analogy and I hope I’m not doing so but it makes sense to me.

So here is one possible argument:

The big bang happens 10,000 years ago.
The universe begins rapid expansion and star formation.
As the universe expands the light waves from the stars expand with it.
The stars continue to get farther and farther away by expansion but we still see their light due to that same expansion.

The one thing I’m sure of in this argument is that if the universe is expanding then it can’t be just stars that are affected. The light coming from those stars must also be affected by the expansion. I’m not sure of much beyond that since I’m no physicist but it makes sense to me. I heard a theoretical physicist on the Discovery channel one day say that when it comes to space itself following the laws of physics, all bets are off. When space itself moves(as in expansion) then who knows what effect that has on the objects themselves that reside in that space.

Soft-Tissue in T-Rex “Fossil” (Followup #2)

Dave — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 12:47:00 +0000

All the buzz in the paleontology community last week was about some newly found evidence that is supposed to be the first to actually link dinosaurs and birds in the evolutionary scheme. What you probably totally missed is that this evidence came out of the story that I posted about last year dealing with a soft-tissue discovery inside a T. Rex fossil.

Original Post: Link
Followup #1: Link

So this is basically the end-game for this story as far as the scientific community is concerned. They evidently have no problem with soft tissue surviving for 68 million years. Excuse me?! Meanwhile… in the real world, real people know that’s totally absurd. Talk about blind faith in evolution. This has to take the cake. As I watch some roadkill vanish into dust after only a few weeks of driving to work, I’m starting to think the presup. guys have the right idea. It’s pretty obvious from this that bias is enough to blind anyone to the truth, no matter the evidence.

The very first question asked while reading this story should have been, “How the heck do you get a collagen protein from a 68 million year old fossil?” But evidently they aren’t too concerned with that. Sheesh! David over at Creation-Evolution Headlines has some good insight as always:

“How can they completely ignore the big question? Don’t just tell us this stuff did survive for millions of years—tell us how it could.”

“Read these articles in disbelief. Notice how nothing in secular science is fixed in stone except for faith in evolution and its requirement, “geological time.””

–David Coppedge, crev.info

If you haven’t done so already, you should really add the crev.info RSS feed to your news tracker. They do great work. The link is on the blogroll.

3 Yr. Old Girl-A-Saur

Dave — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 15:52:00 +0000

The latest “astounding” evolutionary fossil find is the skeleton of a “3 year old female” version of Australopithecus Afarensis. As usual, the media is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what will stick. I get suspicious though whenever a claim is made about finding an “almost complete” skeleton, yet the only pictures you see in the article are of the skull. Turns out that the actual find, while very neat, was a lot less impressive than stated. Most of it is still encased in sandstone. Here is what was actually found:

“The fossil find includes the complete skull, including an impression of the brain and the lower jaw, all the vertebrae from the neck to just below the torso, all the ribs, both shoulder blades and both collarbones, the right elbow and part of a hand, both knees and much of both shin and thigh bones.”

The debate over “Lucy” has always been about whether or not it was just a mottled together ape skeleton, or some type of early hominid. This new find so far does almost nothing to change that debate. From the waist down, only a few fragments were found, so you can’t really say what they indicate. The upper body, on the other hand, strongly indicates ape-ness:

“The shoulder blades resemble those of a gorilla rather than a modern human. The neck seems short and thick like a great ape’s, rather than the more slender version humans have to keep the head stable while running. The organ of balance in the inner ear is more ape-like than human. The fingers are very curved, which could indicate climbing ability, “but I’m cautious about that,” Spoor said. Curved fingers have been noted for afarensis before, but their significance is in dispute.

A big question is what the foot bones will show when their sandstone casing is removed, he said. Will there be a grasping big toe like the opposable thumb of a human hand? Such a chimp-like feature would argue for climbing ability, he said.

Yet, to resolve the debate, scientists may have to find a way to inspect vanishingly small details of such old bones, to get clues to how those bones were used in life, he said.”

This line blows me away though:

“Judging by how well it was preserved, the skeleton may have come from a body that was quickly buried by sediment in a flood, the researchers said.”

Creationists have held for years that the fossil record clearly indicates a world-wide cataclysmic flood event. Call it Noah’s flood if you like. Every ancient culture has a world-wide flood myth, not just Christians and Jews, but for some reason nobody believes there was a world-wide flood. Many dinosaur sites around the world show signs of rapid flood burial. We have sedimentary fossils of fish schools 1000’s of feet up in the Sierra mountains, yet there was no flood?

More good stuff about this find can be found here.

Refutations of the Population Rate Argument

Dave — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 11:30:00 +0000

I stumbled upon this pair of refutations of the young-earth population rate argument. The population rate argument is primarily against evolution, not the age of the earth, though it is often employed by young earthers to show that their position is reasonable. Their are actually two parts to the argument, the latter of which is often ignored, and they go like this:

Given a historically lower than average population growth rate, we can arrive at the earth’s current population rate in a time frame that fits into the young-earth timeline. Usually anywhere from 6,000-10,000 years.
If man has been around for 2.5 million years or more, todays human population should be so absurdly big that the earth could not sustain it.

That seems like a very reasonable argument to me if the math holds up right. Let’s tackle the second part first.

First of all, we start with the general scientific consensus that man is at least 2.5 million years old. It may be more, but it’s certainly not less. From what I have found, they are dating flaked stone tools back 2.5 million years so it’s a pretty safe bet those were homonids making them. The other thing we need to know is what the human population was at it’s earliest estimate. The best I could find was that the human population around 8000 BC was 5 million. I got that figure by looking at as many human history timelines as I could find; and 5 million seemed to be a pretty consistent estimate.

With this data in hand I run into my first problem with this account of human history. In order to believe that in 2,492,000 years we only got up to 5 million humans, you would have to accept that the human population only netted 2 new humans per year for over 2400 millenia. That’s pretty hard to swallow. It would seem that growth rate for an emerging new species would have to be robust at first in order for that species to gain traction. Also, if it’s not robust then why is the evolution happening in the first place? According to the terms of natural selection, a new species is selected when it develops a characteristic that conveys an evolutionary advantage on it. Why would a species with an evolutionary advantage over it’s peers have such a terrible, terrible growth rate?

Not only that, but in the 10,000 years since you would require a nominal growth rate of no more than 0.07% to avoid going over the current population of 6 billion. Again, this seems very hard to swallow. Those 2 growth numbers are just ridiculously low. And if you bump the growth rate up to 0.08% (just 0.01% more), you have to expect a modern population somewhere around 14 billion. If you go up to 0.09% then you are left with a modern population of 40 billion. That’s nearly 7 times the current global population and we aren’t even at 1% yet.

So summing this up: A modern understanding of hominid history would require that from -2,500,000 BC to -8000 BC, the human population only grew by 2 people per year, and then from -8000 BC to present, the average growth rate was only 0.07%. This hardly seems sustainable for any animal population. Modern species with a growth rate of only 2 per year are probably at the top of the endangered list, yet we are to believe that humans maintained those paltry numbers for 2,502,000 years.

More later.