Discerning Truth: Dialog on the Age of the Earth - Part 5

Hi folks,

Jason Lowe here with Discerning Truth, the podcast of the Biblical Science Institute. We've been taking a look in previous podcasts at the recent dialogue

I had with Old Earth advocate Hugh Ross, and we've just started to go into some of the scientific issues, and in the section of the dialogue we're going to look at today, we're going to get to what

I think is really the heart of the scientific side of this debate, namely presuppositions.

The debate is not so much over the evidence in terms of evidence for an

Old Earth or a Young Earth, but rather how evidence should be interpreted, and what are the presuppositions we use when deciding what the evidence means.

And I think you'll see here that Hugh Ross has not consciously reflected on his own presuppositions, because he's actually reasoning in a circle.

We started with a little bit of this section last time, where he was starting to argue that stars look old, and of course that's a reification fallacy.

You cannot see age. You can see characteristics that you assume are proxies for age, but how do you know they're proxies for age?

And well, he would say, well because we know that's what a 4 .5 billion year old star looks like, but how do you know it's 4 .5

billion years old? Well because it looks old. But how do you know what an old star looks like? Well it looks like that star, which is 4 .5

billion years old. But how do you know that that star is 4 .5 billion years old? Because it looks old, and so on.

So it's really just a vicious circle. I think you'll see that play out in this session. So let's get right to it.

I mean, we're not being deceived. It's impossible for God to lie or deceive. And so God could do all those things, but now we're looking at a deceptive

God, and the Bible explicitly tells us it's impossible for God to lie or deceive.

The only thing that would be deceptive is if he told us in his word that he didn't do it that way, right? Because you can't see age.

You look at a star and you say, here's what I think. I think that it takes a certain amount of time for the star to come to these conditions.

But unless God told you that, he's not being deceptive to make a star as it is. What about the first trees that God made that were supernaturally made?

Did they have rings in them? I don't know. But if they did, you'd say, well God's deceptive. No, it's just part of the structure of the tree.

You got to start somewhere. And you always can assume that a particular structure like a tree came about from a sapling, but the first trees were not made that way.

They were made bearing fruit already. Adam was made as an adult. You might say, well, God's deceptive making Adam as an adult.

No, because you got to start somewhere. It wouldn't make sense for him to start as a baby. No, but God's not going to put false signs of age on Adam.

Ah, but what are signs of age? That's the question. Now, with human beings, we have some experience with this, because we've seen how human beings age, at least today.

How old did Noah look when he built the ark? Right? Because by the time he entered the ark, he was 600 years old.

How old did he look? What does that even mean? How did people age back then?

How old did Adam think that he looked when he was first created? Do you think he would say, oh,

I look about 20, 25 years old? Of course not, because he had no experience with that. See, the problem is you cannot see age.

You can't. And so we're going to find as we go on in this dialogue that Eros is committing the reification fallacy, the appearance of age.

There's no such thing. What we see are proxies. A proxy is something that represents something else.

And so height, human beings tend to get taller with time, up until they reach adulthood.

And so height could be an example of a proxy for age, at least up to a certain point. Hugh will bring out certain other things like liver spots, which tend to occur primarily on older people, though not necessarily.

And so that would be an example of a proxy of age. But the problem is Hugh has no idea what a proxy for age on a star would be, because he's never seen an old star.

No one has. But if you look at me, you'll see signs of age. They're on my face.

You'll see liver spots. And I could argue, well, God just put that there to make you think that I'm really old when in fact

I'm not. And my argument is God doesn't behave that way. He's not going to put liver spots on Adam to make you think he's 30 years of age.

I believe that if we were there on site, we would measure his cholesterol and his bloodstream.

It would be 60 milligrams per liter. It wouldn't be the 120 of an adult. We wouldn't see chipped teeth.

We wouldn't see gray hair. He would have been brand new. Now here Hugh has made a mistake in reasoning called cherry picking.

And this is when you have a hypothesis and you only look at the evidence that is consistent with your hypothesis while ignoring the evidence that is inconsistent with your hypothesis.

And so in this case, he's looking at proxies for age in Adam, what we think Adam might have looked like.

And he's pointing out that the proxies would indicate a very, very young age for Adam. He looks brand new according to Hugh.

But that's because he's only looking at some of the proxies. Things like liver spots and gray hair and things like that.

And I agree, those are generally found in older people and would not have been found in Adam. So there you go, brand new. But there are other proxies that would indicate a much older age in Adam.

For example, today, people who are adults, people who are older have fewer vertebrae than newborn infants, for example.

So a newborn infant has 33 independent vertebrae and then some of those fuse as you get older.

So the sacral vertebrae, for example, there's five of those that fuse into one. And that doesn't even begin until you're a teenager.

And sometimes it's not over until you're around 30. So assuming that Adam had fused sacral vertebrae, we would say, well, he has to be at least 20 years old, probably closer to 30 years old.

You see, if you use that as a proxy, you get a very different answer. Or the fact that Adam probably had a closed cranial plate, right?

Because babies don't. Babies have that soft spot because the cranial plates have not yet closed.

And that's so they can pass through the birth canal. It's a design feature. But then as you grow up, obviously those plates close.

So Adam has to be at least a year old or something like that. He can't be brand new if you look at that proxy.

So again, he was only looking at the proxies that would give an age estimate consistent with what he wants, which in the case of Adam is a very young age.

But then when he goes out into the universe, he does the same thing but in the opposite way. He's just on the other end of the cherry orchard at this point.

He looks at those aspects that he thinks are proxies for age in stars. But there's an even bigger problem.

We don't know what a proxy for age in a star would look like. Because see, in people, we have a large sample.

We have people of different ages and we can look and we can say, okay, this particular proxy is characteristic for this particular age and so on.

But with stars, well, biblically, they're all the same age. They're all made on day four of the creation week. So we don't know what a star would look like if it were billions of years old because we've never seen one.

I mean, the difference is that Adam did not come from a woman, since he didn't come from a woman.

He was created. That's my point. That's my point. And don't confuse age with proxies for age, things like liver spots and so on.

The only reason you associate that with age is because you've seen a lot of people, and we all have, and you know that certain people have certain ages and you say, oh, that's characteristic of that age.

But if, hypothetically, Adam had liver spots, it would not occur to him to think of that as an indicator of age, right?

Because he has no experience with that. He has no experience with how people age. And so if you ask

Adam, how old do you think you look? He'd say, well, apparently this is what a one second year old looks like. Do you think he had scar tissue?

Do you think he had worn teeth? Say again? Do you think Adam had scar tissue? Do you think he had worn teeth?

No, I don't. But my point is, we have experience today because we can compare lots of different people and we can say, oh, here's certain things that are proxies for age, but you can't do that with the universe because we only got the one.

So it's not like you can say this universe looks about 13 billion years old, because when I compare it with all these other universes of various ages, it looks most like this other one that's 13 billion years old.

Oh, my God. Yeah, we got stars, we got galaxies and astronomers. Yes, I believe that God supernaturally created those, and I think that's the difference between us.

You hold a kind of a naturalistic view when it comes to star formation, do you not? Well, why do we see stars that appear to span an age range of one to 13 billion years?

I have to point out, Hugh didn't answer my question. I asked him, you kind of hold to a naturalistic view of star formation, do you not?

And he changed the topic. Interesting. So maybe even he realizes that he has some naturalistic assumptions in there.

And that's my point. God supernaturally created the first stars. There's no doubt about that. He spoke them into existence on day four.

If Hugh follows the secular model, I think he does, then stars were not supernaturally created. They formed at many different times over millions of years as gas clouds collapsed in under their own gravity and somehow was able to get rid of the angular momentum and the magnetic field and so on.

Why do we see stars that appear to span an age range of one to 13 billion years?

They all look about 6 ,000 years old. Now, the reason I said that is not because I think that you can genuinely see the age of a star,

OK? Because that's a reification fallacy. But I intentionally said it that way because I wanted Hugh to see that it is fallacious, that you can't tell how old something is, especially like a star, just by looking at it.

Because you don't know what the proxies for age are for a star. For a human being, we kind of know what the proxies for age are.

We kind of know what people tend to look like within certain age ranges.

But you can't do that with the stars because they're all the same age. According to Scripture, they're all made on day four of the creation week.

Now, OK, we can have a debate with that in front of the community. You're confusing ages with proxies.

You can't see age. You're making a presupposition that the secular evolutionary stellar evolution is right.

And therefore, you look at the star and say, OK, it must be this far along its cycle. But I don't assume that. I just assume that God created the stars kind of like they are.

They've changed a little bit in 6 ,000 years, not too much. Some of them have blown up. Well, if all the stars are, in fact, just 6 ,000 years old or younger, wouldn't they all look the same?

Oh, what an absurd argument. If they're the same age, they should look identical. Can you imagine a husband and a wife that are the same age?

But why do we not look identical? No, God can create differences. I mean, there are animals that, you know, you pick two animals, a horse and a beaver, and they're the same age.

Well, why don't they look identical? God's created diversity in his universe. There's no reason to arbitrarily assume that the differences that we see in stars are age -related.

And an interesting example of this, I should have brought this up in the dialogue, but again, it was kind of hard because we were going back and forth pretty rapidly there.

But when the main sequence was first discovered, the main sequence, it turns out if you plot the luminosity, the brightness of a star against its color, which indicates its temperature, surface temperature, there's a trend where most stars will fall along this kind of path, which we call the main sequence.

And so the blue stars tend to be very bright, and the red stars are very faint. The sun's kind of in the middle. Now, some stars are not on the main sequence, but a lot of them are.

When that was first discovered, many astronomers assumed that it was an evolutionary sequence, that it was a time sequence, that stars started off here as the bright blue ones, and then over time, they got cooler and fainter, like a chunk of coal, and then they finally get down to the red stars.

Now, the funny thing is, no one believes that anymore. The main sequence is not a time sequence, and I'm not aware of any astronomer who holds to that position.

We now know that it's a mass sequence. The reason we have this pattern, it has nothing to do with time, it has to do with mass.

The stars that are the most massive are the ones that are the hot blue ones, and the ones that are the least massive are these little red dwarfs that we have.

That's why you have a main sequence. It has nothing to do with time. It has to do with mass. Just because you find a pattern in nature, you can't assume that it's an evolutionary pattern.

And it's really secular presuppositions that have driven people to all kinds of false conclusions on these issues.

They don't. They don't. They all have signatures of age that spans... If stars were made 6 ,000 years ago,

God would make them different, because God says one star differs from another in glory. You know, the animals were all made on the same day, but they don't look identical.

I mean, that doesn't make any sense. Well, I can see him making them all different colors, but why would he make them look like they all had different ages?

I don't. Perception. Hugh Ross is not epistemologically self -conscious.

He is not aware of his own epistemology, how we know what we know. He's not aware of the presuppositions that he brings to the table when he looks at a star and does this little calculation in his head and says, that must be millions of years old.

Because in order to do that, in order to arrive at that conclusion, you have to assume naturalism and uniformitarianism.

You would never conclude that if you assumed supernatural creation, along with the allowances for catastrophe, at least in Earth's history.

They don't look like they have different ages. Well, every astronomer I know of says they do. The sound got cut out there a little bit, but what

I said was, I'm an astronomer, and I don't agree with you. Hugh Ross likes to appeal to authority.

You know, all the astronomers say this. Well, first of all, most astronomers are secularists. Of course, they're going to agree with them. They need the deep time because they need evolution, because they don't want to believe in the biblical

God. But the fact is, you know, again, when Hugh gets backed into a corner, he appeals to authority, because he can't provide evidence that the stars are millions of years old.

There isn't any. So, I mean, for example, we look on the Earth and we see the isotopes of plutonium decay, but there's no plutonium on the face of the

Earth. And we look at those isotopes, they tell us that the rate of plutonium decay, when plutonium was present on the

Earth, is identical to what it is right now. Well, we do find evidence of radioactive decay in nature, and even there's evidence that it happened in the past as well.

Certain crystals, you'll find things called fission tracks, where there's a radioactive source in the middle, and when radioactive material decays, it releases various energetic particles that can damage the crystal, and so you get these fission tracks.

But does that mean the rate's been constant? No. There's no reason to assume that.

That doesn't tell you anything about the rate of decay, other than there's actually evidence that it was faster in the past, because these fission tracks are destroyed eventually under heat and pressure.

And so if this really had taken place over millions of years, all this radioactive decay, then the history of it would have been erased by now under the pressure and the temperature that tends to reduce, that tends to eliminate fission tracks.

But I think even more compelling evidence is what we find in certain rocks that have little bits of uranium in them, and there's certain biotites where you'll have uranium in there, and uranium is radioactive, and it decays into lead.

I think it's lead 206. And it will, in that process, it will change into other atoms all the way down to lead 206, and that's stable.

And in that process, the uranium releases helium nuclei, basically.

So, and for every one uranium atom that changes into lead, you get eight helium nuclei.

And the interesting thing is, we do find a lot of evidence of helium trapped in these rocks, indicating a lot of radioactive decay has happened.

And so someone like Hugh might say, well, there you go, it takes millions of years at today's rates. Yes, it does take millions of years at today's rates, but how do you know the rate was constant?

There's evidence that it wasn't, because if it were, if that, if those helium nuclei had been produced over hundreds of millions of years, helium is a gas, and it can escape through rock.

Rocks are porous, and the helium will eventually diffuse out of those rocks, but almost all of it's still there.

And this is one of the results of the rate research project, where several physicists and geologists got together and did some studies on radioactive decay, and found there's good evidence that the radioactive decay rates were faster in the past.

So, far from arguing for constant rates, I think just the opposite. I think the evidence is that the radioactive decay rates were much faster in the past.

I mean, why would God supernaturally just make it all look like that plutonium that disappeared billions of years ago, if in fact the

Earth is only thousands of years old? Again, you're arguing for a deceptive God. I would say that you are, because the universe doesn't look old.

You're taking secular assumptions about how things age, secular assumptions about radioactive decay, assuming uniformitarianism, and you're saying, and see, we get a result that's older than the

Biblical age. Well, of course you do. You've assumed that the Bible's wrong, in terms of its time scale, and then you conclude that the

Bible's wrong. That's a Bible that teaches a uniformitarian principle. It tells us that the laws and... In fact,

Peter specifically argues against uniformitarianism in 2 Peter chapter 3. It's the scoffers that say all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.

They deny a global flood. He's not referring to the law of gravity, for example. I never said

Peter was referring to the law of gravity. He was confusing uniformity with uniformitarianism.

These are different. Uniformity has to do with the basic consistency of laws of nature, and I would agree that the laws of nature have been basically consistent since creation, or at least the fall, but God can, of course, intervene.

God can suspend a law of nature and do what he wants. That's not a problem, but I do believe in the basic uniformity of nature, but that's different from uniformitarianism.

Uniformitarianism would say that rates and conditions have been consistent over millions of years, that the majority of Earth's features have been produced by the slow, gradual processes that we see today, and therefore that there was no global flood.

And that's exactly what the Bible is arguing against in 2 Peter 3.

2 Peter 3 is discussing those scoffers who are arguing for uniformitarianism by denying a global flood.

It says, 2 Peter 3 verse 3, Know this first of all, that in the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying,

Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.

For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago, and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water.

So the Bible indicates that it's the scoffers, the mockers, that deny catastrophism, that deny that there was a global flood that affected the features that we see on the earth today.

Uniformitarianism is exactly what Peter is discussing in his second epistle. Specifically, he's referring to the denial of the global flood, which was a geologically catastrophic event, where all the high hills under the whole heavens were covered with water, as the

Bible says. That's what Peter says people would deny in favor of uniformitarianism. All things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.

All right, I'm going to interrupt real quick. Why don't you give a little bit more of your positive case, and perhaps

Dr. Ross can interject at points where he disagrees, and give the reasons why. Okay, and as I pointed out earlier, my primary reason for believing in a young universe is because we have the record of God's Word, which

I interpret grammatically, historically, exegetically, and I believe that when you do that you get about 6 ,000 years.

You can't put an exact date on it, but you get something like that. In terms of the science, the kind of argument

I would make would tend to be a reductio ad absurdum. I would assume for the sake of hypothesis naturalism and uniformitarianism, and show that leads to an inconsistent result.

And if I could expand a little bit on carbon dating, which I mentioned earlier, that is mind -blowing to me. That everything we find in the fossil record, no matter how far down it is, if it's got carbon in it, it's got

C14 in it. You can take chunks of coal. Coal beds are supposed to be 100 million years old in the secular timeline.

You will find carbon in them, C14, half -life 5 ,700 years, and there should be zero

C14. Go ahead. Uranium and thorium, potassium in the crust of the earth. So in the interior of the earth you get carbon -14 being made continuously.

So you're going to get a background level of carbon -14 no matter what you date. No, no, no. And the reason for that, that's something that was looked into by the rate research project.

A number of different sites look into that. And they found that, by the way, that in principle what you're saying could happen if we had about 100 ,000 times more radioactive elements on earth than we actually have.

And just as a matter of clarification, I got the number wrong. I apologize for that. The actual number is 13 ,000.

Not that it affects the argument, really. So in order for Hugh's explanation to work, there would have to be 13 ,000 times more radioactive material in the earth in order to generate the amount of C14 that we find in coal if the earth were really billions of years old and if the decay rates have been constant, as Hugh asserts.

Basically, you can think of the carbon decay, C14 decay. Think of a milk carton and I cut a big hole in it and the milk's just gushing out.

It's got a fast decay rate. And you can think of these other forms, potassium, argon, rubidium, strontium, and so on, as a milk and I poke a little hole in it.

And so the milk just drips out. It's got a slower decay rate. And so the question is, why do we still have milk jars that are half full if they've been gushing for millions of years?

It wouldn't make sense. And what Hugh has suggested, and it could work in principle if there were more radioactive elements, is that while there are so many milk jugs that have these little streams that they fill into the carbon one, so they replenish it.

And so basically, if you have a lot of very slow streams, you can replenish one major stream.

And it would work if there were about 100 ,000 times more radioactive elements in the Earth than are actually there. But in fact,

C14 is in the upper atmosphere where it's produced by cosmic rays. And the Earth, once you get down deep into the crust of the

Earth, it's totally shielded from cosmic rays, which is why they do the neutrinos experiments underwater. Yeah, it's shielded from the cosmic rays, but you know there's plenty of radioactive material there.

And the real point was the nitrogen. They now realize there's significant quantities of nitrogen in the crust of the

Earth. So it's completely consistent with the interior of the Earth being billions of years old. If there were 100 ,000 times more radioactive elements.

We don't need 100 ,000 times more. The Earth, as you probably are aware, is super endowed with uranium, thorium, and potassium.

We got about 630 times as much thorium as other rocky planets. So there's plenty of radioactive material there.

The question is, is it there in the right place? The latest research papers tell us it is in the right place.

The nitrogen is there, and therefore getting a background level at 57 ,000 to 58 ,000 year carbon -14 date.

And incidentally, you only need a very minuscule amount of carbon -14 to get that kind of a date.

So that explains why ancient diamonds, ancient zircons, all come up with the same carbon -14 date.

It's simply the background radiation that we would anticipate given the interior of the Earth. That is simply wrong.

And that was already, that study has already been done. The rate research team did look into that.

And in particular, nitrogen and the recharging of nitrogen, the conversion of nitrogen into C -14 by thermal neutrons.

It can happen. But you would need 13 ,000 times more radioactivity in the

Earth than we have. And so I'm very glad that we don't have that amount. We would be glowing right now if we had that kind of radioactivity.

So no, that just doesn't work. The results have been published in Radioisotopes and the

Age of the Earth. Volume 2 is the one that has the discussion of background radiation and its inability to recharge

C -14. And the relevant chapter, well, it's pages, page 614 through 616 are the relevant sections.

Maybe I'll read a little bit of that later. But basically, the way that C -14 is created is when cosmic rays, they actually create a spray of thermal neutrons, basically a high -velocity neutron.

When that high -velocity neutron strikes a nitrogen atom, it's able to convert it, in some cases, to C -14.

And the primary way that's produced is in the upper atmosphere. Can you get a little bit of it deep down in the

Earth? Yeah, but only about one out of 13 ,000. It's 13 ,000 times less efficient than the production that you have in the upper atmosphere.

So it can be done. Now, there is one other way, and I didn't mention this in the dialogue. There is one other way that Hughes' explanation would actually work.

And that is if the heavier elements, if their radioactivity had been sped up by a factor of millions.

In other words, if accelerated radioactive decay is true, then that will actually recharge some of the

C -14 in these rocks that we have. And we think that actually has happened. But then, if you believe in accelerated radioactive decay, then you have no evidence for billions of years at all, because the ages that we find, the estimated ages, are consistent with the biblical time scale, if you allow for accelerated radioactive decay.

But as they are, if you assume the uniformitarian standard of billions of years, radioactive decay rates have always been what they are today, then you cannot account for the amount of C -14 that we find in things like coal, especially when they're not close to any kind of radioactive sources.

You can't make sense of that. We would need 13 ,000 times more radioactive elements than we actually have.

And even that's a lower limit, by the way. So it actually could be much higher than that in terms of the amount that's required to generate the current amount of C -14 in an

Old Earth time scale. C -14 is a very strong evidence for Young Earth. It really is.

You're trying to fill a mug that's gushing out with little dripping, and it's not going to work.

The rate of radioactive decay of these heavier elements is very slow, and that's why it can't recharge the

C -14 amount in any significant amount that could be detected, unless there were a lot more of it. Or alternatively, if the radioactive decay rates were much faster in the past.

And that is something that the rate research group looked into, and they found that there's good evidence for that. I've read the rate book.

You need to look at the latest research papers on the interior physics of the... It's not going to change the physics cue.

You can't recharge a fast decayer with slow decayers, unless you had millions of times more of them.

I mean, it's not going to change the physics. A good argument is a good argument. It's not going to change over time.

Now, could they discover new evidence that would overturn the rate research? Yeah, they could discover that there's actually 13 ,000 times more radioactivity in the

Earth than we currently think. But that's very unlikely to occur, because again, that would be pretty dangerous to have that level of radioactivity.

So the research that the rate group did is good, and it has stood the test of time. Now, I realize secularists don't like that, and they've come up with all sorts of explanations.

But the fact is, you cannot recharge a fast decaying process like C14 with slow decayers, unless you had so many more of the slow decayers that, you know, that the number would make up for the lack of speed.

But that's not what we have in the Earth's crust, and new research has not overturned that. The rate study is quite old right now.

What does age have to do with it? First of all, the rate research. I think it was 2005 that it was published, or around there.

It's not that old, really. But is something unreliable simply because it's old?

I mean, maybe I should have asked Hugh. I said, you know, Hugh, you're a lot older than I am. Does that mean you're a lot less reliable? Actually, I think he is less reliable, but not for that reason.

The rate study is quite old right now, and incidentally, the rate study itself said, if the radiometric decay rates don't dramatically change at the front or the fall or both, then the

Earth and the universe must be billions of years old. That concession is made repeatedly in the rate study.

Now, I probably wouldn't have said that in the same way that the rate researchers did, but that's okay.

Let's accept for the sake of argument, for the sake of hypothesis, that their statement is true. That if the decay rates have always been constant, then the

Earth is billions of years old. Now, what conclusion should we logically draw from that?

If we're a consistent Christian, if we have a high view of Scripture, what conclusion can we draw? Well, premise one, if the decay rates have been basically constant throughout history, then the

Earth is billions of years old. Premise two, we know from Scripture, the Earth is not billions of years old.

Conclusion, therefore, it is not the case that decay rates have always been constant throughout history, which is to say, there's been accelerated decay.

And so you see, if you have a high view of Scripture, and your reasoning from the data that has been provided by the rate researchers, the conclusion you should draw is that radioactive decay rates have been accelerated in the past.

We know scientifically that, I mean, we can do that in a laboratory with certain kinds of radioactive decay.

The rhenium -osmium reaction, we've been able to speed that up by a factor of a billion in a laboratory. Of course, if we can do it, of course

God can do it. He can do it in different ways that we can't even think of. But if you have a low view of Scripture, or alternatively, if you have a higher view of men and their ability to understand evidence than you do in the clarity of God's Word, you're going to come to a different conclusion.

So, premise one, if the decay rates have been constant, then the Earth is billions of years old. Premise two, most secularists believe that the decay rates have been pretty constant.

Conclusion, therefore the Earth is billions of years old. And so you see, the conclusion that you draw will differ, not because of the first premise, but because of the second.

And the second will depend on whether you have a high view of Scripture, or whether you tend to get your ideas of truth from secular scientists.

Well, we think it did change at the flutter, at the fall. And that doesn't mean the laws of physics had to change, but there are certain things, you know, the strong nuclear constant, you change it just a little bit, it has an enormous effect on the rate of radioactive decay.

That's in Eugene Shaffer's book. If you measure the radioactive decay rates in the past, you may refute what the ratebook says.

I do measure stuff in the present. Apparently, Hugh has a time machine, because he can travel back in time, and he's measured the decay rates in the past.

Well, I'm sorry, but the rest of us don't have that time machine. We can only measure the decay rates in the present. There is evidence that in the past they were faster, because what we can do is we can compare the rate of helium diffusion with the rate of radioactive decay from uranium to lead, and we find there's an inconsistency, which means one of them changed.

And since our bodies depend on things like chemistry being pretty consistent, it makes more sense to think that the nuclear decay rates were quicker in the past.

There's good evidence for this. You can only measure stuff in the present. You can make some assumptions and make a guess about the past.

You can't measure the past. You can measure the past. In astronomy, you can only measure the past.

I don't know that... Because you're assuming the Einstein Synchrony Convention, and you're assuming that Earth's the reference frame. And as I've already explained to you, from light's point of view, every trip is instantaneous.

If you ask a photon, how long ago did you leave that galaxy? The answer would be zero. Are you aware of this? Well, let me ask you this.

Now, at this point in the dialogue, I began to suspect that perhaps

Hugh Ross's knowledge of physics is not what I had assumed it was. I had assumed that he would have a basic understanding of the physics of Einstein, of relativity.

That's something that would be covered in an undergraduate physics class. When I was a sophomore, as an undergraduate, that's when

I was introduced to relativity, at least in terms of my formal education. And so, that's why

I asked that question. Are you aware of the fact that, from the photon's point of view, the trip time is zero?

And you'll notice he didn't answer. I've double -checked. I think his PhD is actually in astronomy, not astrophysics, so he might have a little bit of a blind spot there.

But the fact is, in relativity, times are relative.

Space is relative. It depends on the reference frame of the observer and on the synchrony convention.

And so, you can't just say, well, it takes the time between here and here, the time between when the light was emitted and the

Earth, that's billions of years, period. You can't say that in relativity, because it depends on the reference frame. It depends on the motion of the observer, and likewise for distance.

There is a combination of distance and time that is the same for all observers, and that's called the space -time interval.

And I would agree that the space -time interval for all light -like events is zero. But the fact is, you can't say that it takes billions of years for the light to get from there to here, not objectively.

The only way you can do that is to assume a synchrony convention and the reference frame.

And I mentioned that earlier in passing, thinking that Hugh would then agree to that and then try to argue that the

Earth must be the reference frame and the Einstein synchrony convention must be the correct synchrony convention. But he didn't go that way, maybe because he's not aware of it.

I don't know. Well, I think that's a good stopping place for today. And so, we'll pick it up next time,

Lord willing, where we'll start to get into the distant starlight issue, which a lot of people think is a thorn in the side of young Earth creationists.

It really isn't. It's not a problem at all, as we'll see. I hope this has been enjoyable to you. I hope it's been helpful.