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The October speaker for RMCF was the well known Creation astronomer, Dr. Danny Faulkner. In 1979 he received an M.S. in physics from Clemson University. He completed an M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1989), both in astronomy, from Indiana University. He is a prominent speaker for Answers in Genesis.
Dr Faulkner gave us a history of the understanding of the Origin of the Universe, both as seen by the inherent design of God and as seen by evolutionists. In our solar system there are 9 solar planets that orbit around our sun. More than 100 extra solar planets have been discovered to date around other suns. These have been discovered through their subtle Doppler motions. While many creationists are skeptical, the transit of a planet across the plane of the star proves the technique of detection using Doppler shifts.
However, viewing our universe and knowing the relationships of motion and mass, almost all of these extra solar planets are, to say the least, weird. They defy explanation. The big ones are too close to the star where they shouldn’t be. These discovered planets are not a threat to creation and our solar system relationships as we know them.
Using the definitions of Cosmology as the study of the structure of the universe and Cosmogony as the study of the history of the universe we see that much of what we call cosmology is actually cosmogony.
The Big Bang is a cosmogony, albeit incorrect. The early Greeks believed the universe was eternal. They couldn’t envision a beginning. Their gods were not transcendent or capable of creation. This belief system persisted well into the 20 th century. This is inconsistent with Biblical creation.
Our milky way has about 200 billion stars. When you see dark areas in the Milky Way you are seeing a dust cloud. La Place’s Nebular Hypothesis explained the close stars that we could see. Kant’s Island Universe theory explained stars far away. In 1924, Hubble proved the Island Universe Theory to be true by photographing individual stars in the M31 galaxy.
Van Mamen has seen rotation in several spiral nebulae. Since the nebulae were distant galaxies, this rotation wasn’t real. What did he see? What he expected to see. This is the inherent problem with science. We see what we want to see and then explain what we see based on a theory we develop from the data but then use the data to prove the theory we state. This is called circular logic. We do the same thing with geology. The fossils date the layers and the layers explain the age of the fossils.
1. Cosmology according to Newton. While he was a prolific Biblical scholar and wrote ten times as much on the Bible as on science, he concluded that the universe was infinite.
2. Cosmology according to Einstein. His understanding of the universe is seen through his theory of general relativity (GR) where there is a curvature of space and time.
Because an infinite universe must collapse under gravity, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant, ^, so this wouldn’t happen.
3. Cosmology according to De Sitter. Using Einstein’s GR, he showed that in general the universe is expanding or contracting. Hubble, in 1929 discovered that the universe was expanding and that there was no need for Einstein’s ^ constant. An expanding universe is called an Alexander Friedman universe.
4. Cosmology according to Le Martre’s. He believed in a cosmic egg and a universe with a finite age. This cosmic egg was a precursor to the Big Bang. A Steady State Universe is a universe that is eternal where the density remains constant and new matter spontaneously appears. This theory had great appeal well into the 1960’s.
The Big Bang universe is a universe that has a finite age: the density decreases with time and the temperature decreases with time. This is based on our knowledge of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR).
What we see in all these theories is the continued assumptions that the universe is all based on what the person wanted to see. Some of the common misconceptions are:
1. Expansion is a Doppler shift. Not so. Expansion is in the space itself not the stars moving away from themselves.
2. The Big Bang was an explosion into preexisting space and time. Not so. Before the Big Bang there was neither space nor time. As space expands, the Doppler shift of moving space is indistinguishable between star motion and space expansion.
Two modern problems for the Big Bang are the horizon problem and the flatness problem . Distant parts of the universe are at the same temperature yet these regions were never in contact so how could they be at the same Cosmic Background Radiation level? Current data predicts that the universe will expand forever. However, only 6% of the universe is light matter and 94% is invisible. Much of the remaining mass is dark matter (about 75%) with the remainder (about 20%) being dark energy. Our assumptions on the Big Bang are different from those we had 25 years ago. It seems that the more we know, the less we really know.
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