BIG BANG BUSTED
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
When I look up at the heavens, which your fingers made, and see the moon and the stars, which you set in place, of what importance is the human race, that you should notice them? Of what importance is mankind, that you should pay attention to them, and make them a little less than the heavenly beings?
Psalm 8:3-5 NET
This blog is taken from an article by Spike Psarris, a Creation Astronomer.
A few months ago, NASA released the 'deepest' astronomical image ever taken. You can view it here.
As technology improves, we can photograph objects that are farther and farther away. This is the latest in a long-term series of "deepest ever" images released by NASA. Each time a new image has been released - including this one - it has not matched the expectations of those who believe in the Big Bang. Here's why:
According to Big Bang believers, this image contains objects that are 13 billion light-years away. Thus, we're looking at these objects as they were 13 billion years ago. That's just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang itself. (There are major problems and lots of unstated assumptions in this line of reasoning, but we'll ignore them for now.) However, according to the secular model, stars and galaxies could not form directly out of the Big Bang. They needed some time to form.
Before we had space telescopes, astronomers had calculated how long this time would be. But then we started taking deep-field photographs. And we started finding mature objects that weren't supposed to be there, according to the Big Bang hypothesis. Each time a new "deepest" photograph comes out, astronomers have had to adjust their models again. This image is no different. For example, in this article a secular astronomer says, "to our surprise, the results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the universe."
The photographs usually challenge the model in other ways, too. As you'll read in the article I just mentioned, astronomers are still scratching their heads over post-Big-Bang re-ionization. They're also wondering how such objects can seem so bright despite being so far away. This has implications for models of star formation, as New Scientist explained in this article.
Despite all these challenges, astronomers confidently use words like "primordial" and "building blocks" when describing these objects. This reflects their beliefs, not the actual data.
What do we really know from discoveries like this? That the farther out we look, we keep finding more and more to discover. We also see how flexible the Big Bang theory is. Atheists criticize creationists for having a model that can't be falsified, as scientific models must be. To some extent this is true, but it's a hollow accusation, because the Big Bang can't be falsified either.
Next year will mark the 80th birthday of the Big Bang theory (although it wasn't called that until much later). During those 80 years, its predictions have been contradicted again and again. But rather than abandon the model, its adherents have just slapped on layer after layer of bandages.
Thanks to Spike Psarris for this article. For more creation truths in astronomy, go to: www.creationastronomy.com