Starlight Logic

7/31/2019 Starlight Logic

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Starlight and time

"Scientists have discovered a galaxy 12 million light years away."

How many times do you see statements like that appear on the news or scienceand astronomy magazines? According to the mathematicians, the universe issupposed to be in the region of 13-15 billion years old. Light from distant starsare supposed to have taken so many magnitudes of years to reach us that thewhole universe must be so old, the scientists preach to us. Of course they havepowerful telescopes and in-depth scientific know-how, so they must be tellingus the truth, right? The truth?

If one took the Hebrew scriptures as they are, and using the normal rates as weknow them, add up the years from the beginning of creation until now, based ona seven day creation, man being made on the sixth day, and the genealogies thatproceed from them, you would get an age of around 6000 years. If you were alittle loose round the edges, maybe you'd come up with about 10,000 years. Butaccording to the scientists of our day, the light from some distant stars must takemillions of years to get here. They don't state it as possible, or in a tentativeway. It is portrayed in the media as fact. Any doubt is confined to those elitegroup of scientists or the philosophers of science.

So what is it then? Is the universe between 6,000-10,000 years old? Is that apreposterous, incredible, unbelievable idea just based on myths written by a pre-scientific people just imagining their origin in a primitive way? Is the universereally 13.7 billion years old, as the scientists tell us?The way it is measured

Astronomers, the people that study stars and planets, use different ways to try tocalculate the distance to the stars. For people like me, the question comes to

one's mind: how can you measure the distance of something you cannot touch,something apparently so far away?

Here are some key terms and their definitions for the purposes of the essay. Ilike to get definitions clear in my head before I start talking to anyone.

You may have heard of the term, "light-year". It is the distance that light travelsin one year at its current speed in a vacuum (not a vacuum cleaner!). That speedis about three hundred thousand kilometers in a second. Now that's fast. At that

speed, a light year is 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. Remember, itis a distance. It is like saying "so-many miles long", and as you hopefully will


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see later, it doesn't logically follow that it means "it took so many years to gethere".

Now there are numerous methods used to calculate how far stars are. You can

find out on the internet or in science books what these methods are. I will justmention them here.

The most direct method is parallax, where you measure the position of a star,relative to stars "behind" it that act as a stationary background. You will findthat some stars appear to slightly change position throughout the year in a back and forth motion. It is generally accepted that this is because the earth goesround the sun and our viewpoint of the star is supposed to change as our"planet" orbits the sun [4]. Based on the diameter of that orbit around the sunand some trigonometry, the approximate distance of the star can be calculated. Itmust be noted that the movement of such stars are very small, the numbers usedto calculate those distances are very small too, so error can creep in. Thedistances measured by parallax are not in the order of millions of light years, butabout 100 light years. This is way too small to make a good argument against arelatively young universe.

Other methods are used, as can be seen in my reference number [1]. Theyinclude the amount of redshift in a star, where the energy of light from a star isreduced, and it is assumed that this is because of how it is speeding away fromus, or its distance. Also, there are other methods involving the absoluteluminosity/brightness of a star and comparing it with the brightness we see here,based on the assumption that we actually can find out the absolute luminositywithout being anywhere close to the star. There are methods that involve theidea that we can get distance from changes in brightness of certain stars, or thesurface temperature of certain stars. A lot of these are dealt with by other peoplea lot more qualified by me. For example, see page 7-15 to 7-19 of the book in

my reference number [2].But there is a more fundamental problem when talking about lightspeed andstarlight and time. For all these methods, we may be dealing with symptomsrather than the actual root problem that makes all these attempts to measure thedistance of stars and the size of the universe, based on light very questionable.Logical problems

I believe there is a logical fallacy committed by those who interpret the notion

that the stars are billions of light years away as meaning that the light took billions of years to get here. The fallacy is this: the way things work NOW in


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the completed universe does NOT tell how things were created. Example: wecan figure out all the properties of the materials that make up a computer, butthat will not tell us how the computer is formed. We cannot use those sameprocesses and properties in a formed computer to tell us that these processes

have been going on for a long time.

Another example of this is rock. You know that if we had no experience of rocks, and just found one, hard and inert on the ground, we wouldn't be able tosay how it was created. We probably wouldn't have a clue that it may havestarted as some high temperature liquid that came from inside the earth, andwhatever it was before then. The present properties of something does notnecessarily or inevitably lead us to the story of its origin, and withoutexperience, we could only give ideas about its age. We would be dwelling in theland of speculation.

In the same way, just because we know the speed of light now, that does NOTtell us the speed of light during creation. We don't even know definitively how itwas created, but unless one already believes in the eternity of natural laws (thelaws that appear to govern the way nature works) as some scientists and non-scientists appear to believe, which is an untestable hypothesis, star light and(calculated) star distances cannot tell us how long the star has been up there.

To put it another way, let me simplify it a little for you. The scientists canmeasure the speed of light now. They agree that it is a constant. Notice, it is thatthey agree, not that it actually is, since there is some evidence against that.Using that speed, they could probably tell us how far light can travel in a certainmaterial, like air or a "vacuum", in about a year. Now, if, and that's a big IF, thestars are really the distance they say, then what you have are all the naturalingredients to make a conclusion. But there is an ingredient missing. There is apiece of knowledge that makes a huge difference in the interpretation you gain

for that natural information.You don't know if those natural laws and agreed-upon constants has alwaysbeen working in the same way always. You don't know if, during the creation of light, whether it was by a big undirected bang/expansion or Deity, it behavedthe same way as it does now or once it was originally and fully produced. Sosome scientists make an untestable assumption:

that Natural law has, for the past millions or billions of years, nay, even an

eternity, has always held constant and thus we can get an approximate time thatit took the light to get here, say millions or billions of years.


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Thus after making this assumption which indirectly cuts out any possiblesupernatural activity, they determine that the time light took to get here wasapproximately so long. But they have no idea whether their assumption is true in

reality. They can moan and complain that other agreed-upon constants of theuniverse, which they may also hold as having some eternal quality, wouldchange and things couldn't happen or we couldn't tell heads nor tails of what isgoing on. But that is the problem with the eons of time in the past and mega-distances, no matter how you try to measure it. It is out of reach of humanexperience, and it is cloaked in darkness. And all we have are theories aboutthose distances and about that distant past that may seem consistent, theoriesthat incorporate that assumption. But let's be honest. As long as we don't reallyknow what really happened, can we or should we put such value on what, atbest, is "educated" guesses, "educated" because what real education do we haveabout the past without any record to verify it? Why do believers in scripture,something that claims to be true and from somebody who was there throughoutall time, compromise their scriptures over "educated" (more accurately,uneducated and speculative) guesses?

So to put this all in simpler terms, there are two points that need to beunderstood with regards to light, its speed, and its use as a means of measuringmega-time.

The processes and rates at work now do not necessarily tell us how thingswere created.

The processes and rates at work now do not necessarily tell us the processesand rates at work at creation.

Because of the above two facts, any huge length of time given by scientists canonly be taken as speculation and not as factual.

And note that this is not even taking into account the fact that throughout thehistory of the study of the speed of light, it has not been conclusively,experimentally shown that the speed of light has been constant during thehistory of our world. In fact there is even experimental evidence that the speedof light has decreased, meaning that it was faster in the past. This means thatdistance measurements using the speed of light may be unreliable.Conclusion

In the end, due to dogmatic, all-encompassing naturalism (methodological orphilosophy) [5], science has become a game of tricks with mathematics and


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convoluted explanations and hypotheses based on one rule: "lets see how farnatural forces alone can take us without invoking Deity". It is a game that is notbased on reality, but on their presuppositions about science which they imposeupon reality. The sort of naturalism amongst the majority of scientists today

makes a limitation of science into a limitation of reality. If science is aimed atonly natural causes, then reality must also depend on natural causes alone. Butthat is not a logical progression. A belief or philosophy is not reality. A methodof viewing the universe is not reality. It is just a belief and a perception.

When someone tries to tell you that a star is so far away in light years that maybe true. No human knows for certain. But when they tell you that because of thisthe universe must be so many billions of years old, you can know that that is abelief based on some questionable assumptions, not fact. Scientists can playtheir games with their preconceived theories and assumptions and beliefs aboutthe way they believe the universe works. But I just want you to know that youdon't have to let their absolute statements cause your worldview to be shakenapart. They have not declared truth, since modern science cannot speak truthwith regards to such huge times and distances which are outside our collectiveexperiences.

Starlight and lightyears are not the irrefutable evidence that we live in a multi-billion year old universe for scientific and logical reasons.References

1. The ABC of Distances

2. Truth in the Balance - Chapter 7: How Did the Universe Get to Its PresentCondition?

3. Parallax

4. Although heliocentrism is generally accepted and any thought against it seento be a sign of stupidity, backwardness, and religious ignorance, and is harshlyridiculed, general acceptance of a notion does not mean "THE truth". It is ahistorical fact that heliocentrism did not win against geocentrism because of directly observed facts, but because of arguments and interpretations of certaindata, and some faulty thinking. This was aided by the fall in respect for thechurch, and the growth of hatred for ideas linked with "religion", and mythsabout people such as Galileo (see Scientific reconsideration of geocentricity)

and Copernicus. It did become popular and generally accepted, but it cannot beproven and geocentrism disproven. There are those who still give scientific and


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logical evidence for geocentrism, although they are in the minority, andgenerally ridiculed.

5. Naturalism is the philosophy that nature is all there is. There is no

supernatural. It becomes a method when you say that you are only allowed touse natural causes and effects to explain anything and everything.

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Starlight Logic