Discerning Truth: Dialog on the Age of the Earth - Part 7

Welcome

to Discerning Truth.

We have been looking at a recent dialogue I had with Old.

Earth advocate Hugh Ross.

This was originally on the Revealed Apologetics webcast with Eli Ayala moderating, and I'd like to

continue looking at that today.

We will wrap up the Starlight issue and go into the Q &A session of the dialogue.

Now in the original webcast, just because of time constraints, only one person was permitted to

answer a given question, and that's fine, that's understandable, but I'm going to take the opportunity now to

say some of the things that I would have said if we'd had more time in that original interaction.

So I hope that this will be a lesson to you.

Let's have a look.

I'm going to give you the partial answer.

You might be assuming that in the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, all light that's sort of directed

toward us is instantaneous.

That's not the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, it's angle -dependent, okay?

And so light that's aimed at a little bit of an angle to you does not travel instantaneously.

It'll still be faster than the round -trip speed under the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, but it's not until it gets deflected

by the galaxy that it is now directed directly toward your line of sight.

And if you calculate, and I give the mathematical angle so you can calculate this yourself to see how long will

it take for the light from this star to reach this angle, it's about a year different between the two angles

based on the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention.

And again, this is all discussed in the article that I wrote previous to this where I'm

responding to the critic Peter, and I gave the formula as c over 1 minus the

cosine of theta.

That's the value of the one -way speed of light in the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention.

That's how I knew Hugh Hanton read that, which he admitted here.

So when you do that math, you find that it's perfectly consistent with the observations that we have of

the Refsdell supernova and the more recent one as well where the time difference is tiny.

So the error in reasoning that Hugh Ross has committed in this segment is called the confirmation

bias, and that's where you assume that your own particular hypothesis is demonstrated

to be true by showing it's consistent with the evidence, and you assume that the alternative is false

while failing to consider that the alternative might make the same prediction.

In this case, they do.

And in fact, in terms of what actually happens in space, the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention and the Einstein

Synchrony Convention always make the same predictions about what happens in terms of light

from one source reaching its destination before another source and so on.

You have to get the same answer because they're both describing the same universe.

They're just using different coordinates to do it, and once you understand that, you realize the Synchrony Convention

is just that.

It's a convention, and you cannot falsify a convention by observations.

It'd be like trying to disprove the metric system.

It's like, well, I have some observations that disprove the metric system.

That makes no sense whatsoever because you have to use a system, whether the metric or the English system, in order to make

your observations.

That's the nature of a convention.

And by the way, that would have to be the case because the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention is a coordinate system, and in general

relativity, tensor equations are not affected by coordinate systems.

A tensor that's valid in one coordinate system is valid in all coordinate systems, and so that's why it will be impossible to refute

the conventionality of distance simultaneity, and that's going over the heads of a lot of people, but I hope

you'll take a look at that article, and if you have a reputation, text me.

I'll respond to it, okay?

All right.

I do apologize.

We have reached the hour and a half mark, and this is the point of the show where we take questions from those who have been

listening in.

So again, both of these gentlemen have written a lot in this area, and of course, they're

referencing some of the scientific material.

Where can people access these articles, these peer -reviewed articles?

Well, you can go to the NASA website, because they actually have an archive of all the

published research papers in the physical sciences.

My colleague Jeffrey Zwierink is also an astrophysicist.

He's written about this on our website, so you can get that at reasons .org, and incidentally, any

watcher or viewer can get three chapters of my books at reasons .org slash

Ross, including the book I wrote, A Matter of Days, on how the Bible, if you

read it consistently and literally, really does sustain an old earth interpretation.

All right.

Just the articles that I mentioned, you can find them online, but a book that summarizes all of them, it's written

by Max Jammer, and it's called Conventions of Simultaneity, or

Concepts, Concepts of Simultaneity from Antiquity to Einstein, something like that.

So it's by Max Jammer, and it actually summarizes a lot of the technical articles, which you can then look up.

If you really want to understand synchrony conventions, and why it is that it's

impossible to measure the one -way speed of light, that there can be no conceivable experiment to measure the one -way speed of

light, it is helpful to be familiar, you need to be familiar with the technical literature on this topic.

And granted, not everyone wants to wade through a lot of technical literature, I understand that, but a book that summarizes it, which I

mentioned here, the full title is Concepts of Simultaneity from Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond.

It's written by Max Jammer, and it is a wonderful summary of the technical

research.

It's written at a mostly layman level, it gets into a little general relativity in the last chapter or two,

but it's written at a layman level to help you understand what we mean when we talk about

synchrony conventions, conventions of simultaneity, and how do we synchronize clocks separated by a distance,

because the subject is not as cut and dry as a lot of people think, and a lot of people

think that Einstein came up with the one correct synchrony convention.

Einstein himself did not argue that, he believed that synchrony conventions were conventional, and we've looked at that in his

book.

But that's the book you want to get, Concepts of Simultaneity from Antiquity to Einstein and Beyond, as well as my book, The

Physics of Einstein, where I talk about these concepts, and I have at least two, maybe three

chapters on the alternate synchrony conventions, the fact that you can't measure the one -way speed of light, and why,

and why that would have to be the case from relativity.

And so, I would argue that people who argue against the conventionality thesis, for the most

part, they don't know relativity, and I'll grant there might be a few exceptions, but for the most part, they don't understand the physics

that Einstein discovered.

A very foundational one was written by John Winnie in the 19, I think it was 1970.

It's a two -part technical paper, and it's called Special Relativity Without One -Way Velocity Assumptions.

It's a great paper.

And then there's another one written by Wesley Salmon.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

It's spelled like the fish, so I'm assuming that's how it's pronounced.

He kind of summarizes some of these things as well.

So, Wesley Salmon, he's actually written a number of different papers

on topics relating to relativity, including the conventionality thesis.

I think the paper I was thinking of in particular is called The Conventionality of Simultaneity, and it was

published in 1969, which is kind of amazing, because that's before John Winnie's seminal paper on this

topic.

1969, published in The Philosophy of Science, volume 36, pages 44 through 63.

So, if you wanted to get kind of a summary of the research on this topic up to 1969, and

there's been more since that has confirmed the conventionality thesis, but Salmon's article is a good

kind of summary article, and I think, as well as Max Jammer's book, which

comes up even in the more modern times as well.

The Sarkar and Stachel paper is interesting, because they use the same convention that I use, where the inward directed light is

instantaneous.

So, they're using the past light cone as the surface of simultaneity, and they're not creationists.

They just do it because it has certain interesting conveniences.

So, Sarkar and Stachel, and that was published in 1999, and they also refute Malament, who thought.

That he could measure the one -way speed of light.

Just real quick, before we get into the audience questions, I just have a quick question for you guys

that might be helpful for people.

Dr. Ross, and then Dr. Lyle, for someone who wants to pursue this in more detail, but

perhaps is not an academic, what is the best book on the defense of old earth creationism, as you understand it, and it can

be one of your own books as well, that you would suggest for people who want to get a.

Fuller grasp of your position?

Paul would be Navigating Genesis and A Matter of Days, the second edition, for offering free chapters

of both books.

Okay, I can look into it.

Reasons .org slash.

Ross.

They can get a free chapter of each book.

Okay.

All right.

What about you, Dr. Lyle?

What is the best?

And put the Bible down just in case.

You knew I was going to do that.

You knew I was going to do that.

All right.

Jared, I'm a positionalist too.

So with regards to apologetic methodology, I do side with Dr. Lyle.

So I know very well the joke, what's the best book?

And of course, the preceptor always looks like he's got the upper hand because he holds up the Bible.

But I understand that you hold to the Bible as your ultimate authority as well.

And we could all appreciate that,.

Even though we have these differences here.

But everyone likes to think he's got the Bible on his side.

But the fact is the Bible is not amenable to just any interpretation.

The Bible is self -interpreting.

If the Bible is your ultimate standard, if you really believe it's the authoritative word of God and more

foundationally true than anything else, then the way in which you interpret scripture has to be

determined by scripture.

I know that sounds circular to many people and perhaps there's a degree of circularity there, but the Bible is clear enough

that we can understand its main meaning on the first pass.

And then when we go back through it, as we read the Bible, our theology improves.

We read it again with better theology.

Our theology is corrected by scripture.

That's what we need to do.

There's this hermeneutical spiral where we read the Bible multiple times and each time we get a clearer perspective of what

it's teaching.

But it's clear enough, I think, even on the first pass to understand its main and plain teachings.

I contend that when people say, well, you know, that's your interpretation, my interpretation is this,

that's irrelevant.

The question is, what does the Bible mean?

And there's only one meaning.

The meaning is what the author intended to convey.

And of course, the Bible is unique in that all its books are co -authored.

One of the authors is God, and that is unique.

But what is the intention of Moses and the Holy Spirit as they pen the

words of scripture?

What is the intention?

And I would argue there's only one.

I mean, there might be layers upon layers.

I get that.

But there's only one primary meaning to any passage of scripture.

And therefore, when people say, well, that's just your interpretation, mine differs.

They're not really saying anything meaningful.

They're just, they're just indicating that one of you is doing hermeneutics wrong.

And so I, the book, Understanding Genesis, the whole point of this book really is to

ask the question, how should we interpret the Bible if we're following its own instructions?

How does the Bible interpret the Bible?

That's the question.

And if that is the way you answer questions of interpretation by saying, how does the

Bible interpret itself?

Then you cannot hold millions of years.

You can't.

Because the Bible interprets the Bible.

The Bible interprets Genesis as literal history.

There's no hint in scripture that creation was anything other than six days,

each of which bound by an evening and a morning with a number with each one.

There's no doubt scripturally what God's saying, but you see people get intimidated because of the secular

scientists who need billions of years because they need evolution to work.

Not that it really would, even in billions of years, but that's the motivation behind that.

It's not because that's a natural reading of scripture.

It isn't.

And by the way, the books that Hugh Ross mentioned, Navigating Genesis in a Matter of Days, I've refuted both of

those in my book, Understanding Genesis.

I point out that if you follow the Bible's method of interpretation, you cannot come to the conclusions that Hugh Ross

comes to.

And one other thing that I'll add, when Hugh Ross was asked that question, what book do you go to to get the billions of

years?

I don't think it even occurred to him to go to the scriptures.

I don't think any, I don't think it would occur to anyone, right?

If you ask an old earther, what's the best resource to defend your position?

I don't think any of them would say the Bible, because the fact is they know that on a straightforward reading of scripture, there's no way you'd come to the conclusion of

billions of years.

It's just not.

There.

With respect to the defense of the young earth perspective, what book other than the Bible, which of course,

obviously, would be a good place for people to go, it can be your own book, where the young

earth perspective is defended biblically and scientifically?

Yeah, there's several good ones.

I would like to push my own book.

It's called Understanding Genesis.

And in this book, it's basically presuppositional hermeneutics.

That's what the book is.

If we take a high view of scripture, if we let scripture be its own best interpreter, how do we

interpret scripture?

And it's more than just Genesis, but I do focus in on Genesis.

And I also respond to some of the chapters that you wrote, Hugh, in your Navigating Genesis, which I've read.

So I'd encourage people to get both.

I'm giving you free publicity, Hugh.

Get Hugh's book, Navigating Genesis, and then get Understanding Genesis, and go to the Bible and see which one.

Matches up best.

Here is a question for Dr. Lyle.

How does Dr. Lyle demonstrate that his hermeneutical principle to be the correct way to interpret

scripture?

That's actually not to be too self -promoting, but that's what the book's all about.

The book is about if we want to get to the author's intention, what are the rules that we

would have to follow to get to the author's intention?

And some of them are pretty obvious, but should we take outside information?

Do we look at the author's own words?

Because there are some views that are just ridiculous.

There's the view that every reading of a text is a misreading, and so you can

never get to the author's intention.

Deconstructionism is the term that just escaped my mind at the moment, but that's the view that every reading of a text is a

misreading, and therefore you can never really understand the author's intention, so why would you bother writing a book about it?

And people that hold this view write books about it, but why would they bother?

Because if you could never get to the meaning of the author, why would you bother writing a book where you assume that people

can understand what you're saying?

So that's what the book is all about.

It's about establishing the rules of hermeneutics that would be logically necessary in order for communication between two people

to be possible.

So what conditions would have to be true?

What rules would I have to follow in order to understand the author's intention?

Now students of presuppositional apologetics will recognize that type of reasoning as a

transcendental argument.

What I'm doing is I'm asking about the underlying preconditions necessary to correctly interpret a text to get to the author's

intention.

That's a transcendental argument.

And so what I'm really doing is employing the presuppositional epistemology to hermeneutics.

And if you really understand the presuppositional argument, you recognize it's not just about proving the existence of

God.

Don't get me wrong, it does that, and it's been used masterfully to prove the existence of God, but it proves the existence of the biblical God.

And that means everything that goes along with God, everything that's in the scriptures.

It's an argument for the Christian worldview, which of necessity includes a correct interpretation of

scripture.

You can't get to the Christian worldview if you read the Bible incorrectly, imposing, for example, your own ideas on texts

that are contrary to their actual meaning.

And so what this book really is about, understanding Genesis, it's really presuppositional hermeneutics.

How do we read the Bible in such a way as to get to the meaning?

So a brief answer that presuppositionalists will appreciate to the question that's been asked here, how do I know that

my method of interpretation is the right one, is by the impossibility of the contrary.

And so, for example, when words have multiple meanings, what do we do?

Because most words, even in English, most words have more than one meaning.

And so how do we determine which one's the correct one?

And, you know, and obviously context is going to have something to do with that.

And the book gives many examples as well.

But that's basically, and also the other thing too, we can look at scriptural examples

of where the apostles, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, interpreted Old

Testament passages.

And we know they're going to do it right because the Holy Spirit inspired the original passages in first place.

So that's really what the book is about.

It's about how to read the Bible to get to.

The intention of the author.

Okay.

All right.

Did you want to speak to that at all, Dr. Ross?

Well, there's 300 theologians who spent a decade trying to codify the

appropriate hermeneutical principles to apply to scripture.

It was the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy.

And incidentally, all of their deliberations are archived at Dallas Theological Seminary.

They wrote about a thousand pages on this.

And we had reasons to believe wholeheartedly endorse all their affirmations and

denials with respect to the hermeneutic approach to scripture.

Correct hermeneutics, correct interpretation of scripture is more than

simply affirming biblical inerrancy.

I do hold to biblical inerrancy.

That's great.

But if Hugh Ross and I can look at exactly the same text, declare it to be the inerrant word of God, but

have totally different interpretations of what it means, one of us is wrong.

One of us is not following biblical hermeneutics.

I mean, the text only has one meaning.

Moses either meant to convey that he created in six days or he meant to convey billions of years.

He didn't mean both, right?

And I would argue that if you allow the Bible to be your ultimate standard, if you get your

principles of interpretation from the text of scripture, which I contend is clear enough on the first pass that you can get the main

and plain right there.

If you get your principles of interpretation from the text of scripture itself, you can't come away with Hugh's view

on Genesis.

It just won't work.

It's not, it's very obviously not true.

Hugh's view is very obviously not true to the author's intention.

And there are folks who would reject six days of creation who nonetheless would argue, but yeah, no doubt

that's what Moses intended.

People who are scholars in Hebrew would say, there's no doubt Moses intended to convey that he created in

six days, a global flood and so on.

But they would say, we don't believe that for scientific reasons.

Not really.

I mean, there really aren't scientific reasons to go against that as we've seen.

But nonetheless, if you're getting your principles of interpretation from the scripture, interpreting, letting the Bible be its ultimate

interpreter, you can't hold to.

Hugh Ross's view.

You got to believe God created in six days.

That's actually up on our website.

People can see the principles that we hold.

And again, I think the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy did an outstanding job

researching together as to what the appropriate hermeneutics is.

Actually, they get into this whole idea of evidentialism and presuppositionalism.

I think you both would really enjoy that.

And a couple of years ago, I participated in a Four Views book on creation,

evolution, and intelligent design.

And I was the only one of the four authors that endorsed the International Council of Biblical Inerrancy.

But which of the four authors.

Had interpretations of scripture that matched the Bible's interpretation of scripture?

Isn't that the more important issue there?

I'm fine with people getting together and having councils and discussing doctrines.

I think that's great.

That's wonderful.

But I believe in sola scriptura.

I believe the Bible is the only God -breathed document that we have in our possession

today.

It's the only infallible, inerrant, God -breathed document.

And therefore, it must be its own interpreter if we're going to come away

understanding the.

Author's intention.

Ken Ham, for example, who defended the Young Earth position, refused to endorse those statements.

But that's something we've always held.

That there are reasons to believe.

But the more important point is that Ken Ham would agree with the Bible's interpretation on

Genesis.

Ken Ham would agree with Jesus Christ's statement that from the beginning, God made them male and female,

not billions of years after the beginning.

That's referring to the creation of Adam and Eve.

And they were there at the beginning on the first creation week toward the end of that week, but nonetheless, not billions of years after

creation.

Do you want to have God's stamp of approval or man's stamp of approval?

Because usually you can't have both.

And there's nothing wrong with human beings getting together and discussing issues and codifying

a document that summarizes their position on things in light of Scripture.

I think there's tremendous value in that.

And so I'm not anti -creed.

I'm not anti -confession.

I'm very pro -confession, very pro -creed.

But the thing we need to remember is creeds and confessions are not Scripture.

We need to keep that in mind.

You might get a lot of value by reading the Westminster Confession.

There's some good stuff in there, stuff that aligns very well with Scripture.

But you might say, but you know what, this one point, I disagree with that.

And you're free to do that because it's not the Word of God.

The Word of God is the Word of God.

You have the 1689 London Baptist Confession.

A lot of Christians hold to that.

But somebody might say, but you know, there's one point here that I would take issue with.

You can do that because it's not the Word of God.

The Word of God is the Word of God.

The real question is, do you agree with what Moses wrote on the pages of Scripture?

So I'm not sure that it's legitimate to criticize somebody because they don't agree to a man -made written document.

I do think it's fair to criticize someone when they don't agree with the pages of Scripture.

And I would argue that Hugh Ross is not reading Genesis as the author intended.

He may affirm biblical inerrancy, but in practice he denies it because he doesn't believe in the time scale that the Bible really.

Does provide.

All right, thank you.

Dr. Ross, how can the planets in our solar system have magnetism when some don't have molten cores,

therefore they can't recharge?

How can they.

Be billions of years old?

Well, not all the planets have magnetism.

The earth does.

The Jupiter does.

Actually, all the planets except Venus have a magnetic field.

Mars lacks a dipole global magnetic field that has remnant magnetism and all the other ones have magnetic fields.

So that's a very common feature.

And magnetic fields naturally decay with time and they decay exponentially, meaning you start up here and then it

kind of slows down, but it's very rapid at first.

And to run the equation backwards then and go back in time, you'd find that the magnetic fields would have to

be ridiculously high if you go back even a million years.

For the earth's magnetic field, I think pushing it back even 60 ,000 years makes the magnetic field stronger than a neutron star.

And so magnetic fields are evidence of recent.

Creation, biblical creation, a few thousand years ago.

What I see in young earth creationism is this idea that there's a linear decay in the magnetic field of the

earth.

I'm not aware of any young.

Earth creationist who believes that the decay of earth's magnetic field is linear.

I'm not aware of even one.

Certainly it's not the mainstream position.

Creationists have written on this topic, Dr. Russ Humphreys has written on this topic, the decay of earth's magnetic field.

It is an exponential decay, perhaps perturbed during the flood year by plate tectonic

motion and so on, which would disturb it and cause local oscillations.

But it is overall, the energy is decaying in a way that's exponential.

By the way, if it were linear, it wouldn't be a problem for billions of years necessarily.

Because the reason it's such an issue is because it's an exponential decay and therefore when you go back in time, it

gets really strong really fast, something like 20 times stronger than it is today at

creation 6 ,000 years ago.

And you go much beyond that and it gets ridiculously strong.

It's not a linear decay and I'm not aware of anyone who.

Holds that view.

And that is incorrect.

It's more of a sinusoidal effect.

The field will decay but.

It builds up again.

Okay, what about a sinusoidal magnetic field?

So yes it decays but then it just builds up again.

How?

Magic?

I mean energy tends to go from a more organized state to a less organized state.

Entropy increases in energy.

And so how would the magnetic field recharge itself?

There are ways to do it.

You can recharge a magnetic field.

The alternator in your car does something similar to that.

It charges your battery.

It's electricity.

It's related to magnetism.

It takes mechanical energy and turns it into electrical energy and charges your battery.

Could something like that happen in the earth?

Well the alternator in your car is a pretty sophisticated mechanism.

It takes a lot of engineering skills to be able to build a device that takes mechanical energy and turns it

into electrical energy or in the case of the earth, magnetic energy.

But we don't, there isn't any known mechanism that could do that on the earth.

My secular colleagues believe, because they have to, because they believe the earth's 4 .5 billion years

old and they recognize that the magnetic field today is decaying, they have to believe that somehow it occasionally

recharges itself.

But again there's no, there's really no mechanism that would do that.

They would argue that there's, it's something like the dynamo that exists on the sun where this, well the sun rotates

differentially and that causes it to have toroidal magnetic fields in addition to a dipole.

And those somehow maybe get converted back into a poloidal field, a dipole field,

thereby flipping the sign.

So we know that the sun does it.

It flips its global dipole axis every 11 years.

Could something like that happen in the earth?

Well you need differential rotation for that to happen.

At least that's the theory.

And we don't have that in the earth.

The earth rotates like a solid.

A lot of it is solid.

Granted some of the mantle and the core could be liquid.

Part of the core we know is liquid.

But it rotates as if it were solid.

It has the same angular rotation throughout.

So there's no mechanism that would generate a dynamo on the earth.

And I haven't seen a good model that could explain how earth's magnetic field can magically recharge itself.

What about sinusoidal?

There is evidence that during the flood year, due to rapid plate tectonics,

that would cause currents that would temporarily change the orientation of the magnetic field, causing it to flip back and

forth rapidly.

But there's no mechanism today.

Because today plate tectonics is minuscule.

It's a snail's pace today, smaller than that.

And so there's no mechanism that would cause such reversals.

And by the way, we think that even during the flood year, we do think that the magnetic field flipped during the flood year.

There's evidence of that.

That it happened quickly, not over millions of years.

But there's no reason to think that that recharges the energy in the earth's magnetic field.

It could cause it to decay even faster.

So in terms of energy, as far as we can tell, the earth's magnetic field has simply been dropping.

Now the sign of the field may change during the flood year.

We don't think that's going to happen again.

But the energy seems to have been dropping since creation.

And based on the rate, it would have to have been a few thousand years ago that the magnetic field was created.

It can't be millions.

Or billions.

Based on an exponential decaying, not a linear one.

And this is well understood with the interior physics of the sun.

I'm actually writing a book on this right now.

And so here,.

Hugh is simply parroting the secular view that the earth must be doing what the sun does.

Because the sun flips its magnetic field due to its differential rotation and the complex gases and magnetic fields and so on.

Earth doesn't have that.

It doesn't have the differential rotation.

It doesn't have the complex magnetic field structure that the sun has.

Earth's magnetic field is pretty close to a simple dipole.

And so that's not going to work for the earth.

It's commonly believed by secularists because they require billions of years in order to accommodate evolution.

But in terms of just physics, you'd never come up with the idea that the earth's magnetic field magically

recharges itself over eons.

There just isn't any evidence for that.

We do think it flipped rapidly during the flood year, but that just caused the energy to decrease even faster, if

anything.

There's no reason to think that.

Would recharge it.

Basically, by the way, I would agree or argue that the magnetism that we see in the

earth is something that testifies a supernatural design.

To have a planet as small as earth with such a strong and steady magnetic field

is nothing short of miraculous.

So I'm arguing that that's a part of the supernatural evidence we have for God designing the earth

for our benefit.

The earth's magnetic field is a design feature,.

But it's also indicative of recent creation, biblical creation.

Dr. Russ Humphreys published a model decades ago that explained how you

can account for earth's current magnetic field on the basis that we know the earth was originally made from

water.

Water has a certain magnetic property to it.

It's got a magnetic moment.

So if you have the molecules aligned, you're going to have a certain magnetic field.

Then if God transforms some of that water into other materials, then you're going to have the magnetic field that the

earth currently has.

Pretty ingenious, really.

So that's a model that's consistent with the evidence that we see and is confirming a biblical time scale of

about 6 ,000 years.

Okay.

Can Dr. Lyle expound more on distant light travel issue with the Big Bang naturalist model?

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

The Big Bang has a light travel time issue.

It's not a starlight issue per se, but it's called the horizon problem.

You can read about this in any good secular textbook.

They're generally very honest about it.

Some of them think it's solved by inflation.

If you've heard of inflationary models, that's an attempt to solve the horizon problem.

But the idea is, just to summarize the issue, when the universe is very, very small, it's supposed to have hot

spots and cold spots.

And that's caused by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

And then the universe balloons out at an incredible rate, faster than the speed of light.

And yes, space is allowed to expand faster than light, according to Einstein.

And today, when we look at space and we see these cosmic microwaves, the cosmic microwave background,

there's a characteristic temperature associated with those microwaves.

The wavelength tells you something about the temperature.

And they're all very similar in temperature.

And so the question is, how did, you know, initially they started with enormous differences.

How did they come to the same temperature, when obviously they had to dump some energy from the hot spot to the cold spot to

even out the temperatures, right?

I mean, you put your ice cube in your hot coffee, eventually you'll end up with sort of room temperature coffee, because

things come to the same temperature over time.

And yet there hasn't been enough time in the secular view, even given the 13 .8 billion years for

light to travel from the hot spot to the cold spot even once, because they could be on opposite sides of the visible universe, and the light's

just now getting here, assuming the secular model.

And if you've heard of inflationary models, that's an attempt to say, well, the universe expanded at a faster rate, and then it

slowed down somehow, maybe symmetry breaking or something.

And then that has issues of its own, such as the graceful exit problem and so on.

So that's the inflationist's attempt to solve the horizon problem.

Most secular astronomers would hold to an inflationary view, but not all of them.

Some of them see that it has problems of its own.

So that's basically a summary of what's called the horizon problem.

The horizon problem really is a very serious defect in the Big Bang model.

Now, I recognize that most secular astronomers believe they've solved that issue by invoking

inflation, but that's really very ad hoc.

Why would the universe just suddenly start to expand at a different rate, and then suddenly stop, and so on?

Very ad hoc, and no really good evidence for it.

And it has problems of its own.

And so they're slapping a Band -Aid on a very broken model.

And I realize, of course, just by Hugh's reaction, the way he was nodding, he would assume that inflation is true as well, because he

goes along with whatever the secular astronomers say on that issue.

His belief about origins are virtually identical to theirs.

But it really is an issue.

And I would suggest that if you're a biblical creationist, you don't need to have these kind of problems.

You don't have these kind of problems.

So anyway, I think we'll call that a close for today.

I hope that's been enjoyable to you.

I hope it's been informative.

And we'll continue with at least one more session on the Q &A section of this dialogue next time.

And we'll see you then.

God bless.