The Man Who Discovered the Universe

Edwin Hubble (1889-1953)

During the Great Depression, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble made two of the most important discoveries in the history of the human race.

Using the 100-inch telescope at Mt. Wilson in California, Edwin Hubble discovered that many small, fuzzy 'nebulae' in the sky are actually galaxies of stars completely separate and vastly distant from our Milky Way. This discovery forced humans to realize the Universe is far larger and older than ever imagined.

By carefully observing these galaxies, Edwin Hubble made an even more astounding observation. The Universe is not is not static and is not eternal. Every galaxy Hubble observed is moving away from ours at high speed; and the farther away the galaxy, the faster it is moving away. The galaxies Hubble first viewed from the 100 inch telescope at Mount Wilson, California told a story never conceived, described or predicted by any astronomer, scientist or theologian.

This discovery was made solely because Edwin Hubble chose to open his eyes. By doing so, Edwin Hubble opened the eyes of all humanity.

The full text from which the summary below is excerpted can be found here. Comments on the text are in italics. The comments are not intended to disparage the author, who is probably a very nice gentleman, but are directed solely to the substance of the document.

The words below are what some people would like to force our public schools to teach the Edwin Hubbles of the future.

THE CURRENT STATE OF CREATION ASTRONOMY

DANNY R. FAULKNER, Ph. D.
P. O. BOX 889
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA - LANCASTER
LANCASTER, SC 29720 USA
Presented at the Fourth International Conference on Creationism
Pittsburgh, PA, August 3-8, 1998
Copyright 1998 by Creation Science Fellowship, Inc.
Pittsburgh, PA USA - All Rights Reserved

"Among creationists there is much disagreement about the age of the earth and the age of the universe."

"The creation model of geology is basically a flood model, that is, the antediluvian world was totally obliterated by the flood to the extent that virtually all geological features that we see today were formed in the flood and its aftermath."

No evidence exists to support the 'flood model.'

"Creationists are often criticized for having rigid preconceptions that do not permit reevaluation of our ideas. Anyone making this point has obviously not considered the case of creationist geology.

The author means that creationists disagree among themselves on the exact details of the 'flood,' but all agree it occurred several thousand years ago and is responsible for all geological features we see on Earth. No evidence for the 'flood' exists.

"Unfortunately the situation in astronomy is not as good. As with biology and geology, astronomy has become permeated with evolutionary assumptions and conclusions. Unlike those other disciplines, there is no overall theory or, if you will, paradigm, of astronomy from a creationist perspective. Part of the problem has been the lack of researchers in the field. Most people see the obvious effect that evolution and long time scales have had on geology and biology, and this has attracted Christian young people to pursue these sciences. The result has been that while evolutionary thinking has come to dominate much of astronomy, this has escaped the notice of most creationists."

The author appears to be saying that for the past century, creation 'scientists' have considered astronomy an unimportant branch of science. Big mistake.

Charles Darwin said his theory of evolution can only be valid if the Earth is extremely old. Since Darwin said this, nearly all of the most important scientific discoveries regarding the age of the Earth have been made by astronomers. For the past 2.5 millenia the most important scientific discoveries regarding the size, structure and age of the Universe and the Earth have been made by astronomers. Astronomy is by far the world's oldest empirical science.

In 500 B.C. the Egyptian astronomer Eratosthenes calculated to within 5 percent accuracy the circumference of the Earth using only two physical measurements and basic principles of geometry. In 1054 A.D. Chinese and Korean astronomers noted, charted and carefully observed the Supernova now known as the Crab Nebula. This Supernova was so bright it could be seen in daylight in the northern hemisphere for nearly a month, yet was never reported by Europeans, whose church said the heavens were eternal and unchanging.

The invention of the telescope by the Italian astronomer Galileo allowed him to observe the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, proving they were very different than stars. The observations and mathematical calculations of Copernicus showed the Earth revolves around the Sun, disproving centuries of religious doctrine.

In the 1930s, American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed the Andromeda 'nebula' was actually a galaxy outside ours and was 1.7 million light years from Earth; and showed the Universe is far larger and older than ever thought. Since 1919, virtually all of the key experiments testing and confirming Albert Einstein's equations for special relativity and general relativity have been made by astronomers. These astronomical discoveries offer the most complete refutation of 'creationist' theories of the age of the universe, the solar system and the earth.

"A second cause for the lack of creationist astronomy is the lack of Biblical specifics. Genesis 1:1 mentions the creation of the heavens, and many understand that to refer to the creation of space. But space (astronomical heaven) was not filled with what we understand to be astronomical bodies (the sun, moon, and stars) until the fourth day of creation (Genesis 1:14-19). What, if anything, existed in space between these two events? Does the "whole creation" of Romans 8:22 include the astronomical world? That is, did the fall have an effect upon astronomical bodies? If so, what? Did the flood have an effect upon the astronomical realm? Some have offered speculations on this, but with the lack of Biblical specifics, these are not much more than conjecture.

"Any model requires the input of facts or data to guide the construction of the theory. In many cases a fact involved is the problem that needs to be solved. In this case, the big bang theory was developed to explain the observed expansion of the universe."

Read the above two paragraphs again. The same author who wrote the first paragraph also wrote the second.

The Man Who Found the Beginning of Time

Physicist George Gamow (1902-1968)

"Some sources list the expansion of the universe as a prediction of the big bang model. It is not; it is, however, something that is well explained by the model. This topic urgently needs to be further developed by creationists."

The author here is chiding other 'creationist scientists' for getting completely wrong the sequence of two of the most pivotal scientific discoveries in the history of humankind. These are the 1930s finding by American astronomer Edwin Hubble that the Universe is rapidly expanding -- and the mathematical equations derived in the 1940s by Russian physicist George Gamow which formalized Hubble's observations (now called the "big bang model").

During the 1920s and 1930s astronomer Edwin Hubble looked through the 100 inch Mount Wilson telescope and observed thousands of distant galaxies ('island universes') stretching out as far as the telescope could see.

At this time, all scientists and all religions assumed the distant heavens were eternal, immovable and static. Edwin Hubble discovered all distant objects in the heavens are moving rapidly away from each other.

Albert Einstein was shocked by Hubble's findings. Fifteen years earlier, Einstein deliberately 'fudged' his mathematical equations for general relativity because they allowed for an expanding Universe, a collapsing Universe, but not an unchanging, eternal Universe. Einstein believed then, along with all other human beings, that the Universe is static and eternal. Albert Einstein later told George Gamow that altering his original equations was the 'greatest blunder' of his life.

By simple logic, Hubble's observation that the Universe is expanding meant that in the past it was much smaller, and in the very deep past even smaller. He showed the history of our entire Universe has a clear and measurable beginning.

By looking through a telescope, Edwin Hubble did what no saint, king, or pope had ever done before. He found empirical evidence of Genesis.

A decade later, Russian nuclear physicist George Gamow and colleagues used Einstein's equations and quantum physics to construct a model of the Universe which incorporated and explained Hubble's observations. Gamow's mathematical model showed that at billions of years ago -- a time more ancient than any previous estimate of the Earth's age -- the Universe began as a tiny four dimensional dot of space-time which rapidly expanded. Skeptics dubbed Gamow's mathematical model 'The Big Bang theory."

In 1964, after 20 years in which Gamow's theory was debated and often ridiculed, new astronomical observations confirmed specific predictions made by his equations. Subsequent efforts by the most powerful observational tools on Earth, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have further reinforced Edwin Hubble's astronomical observations and George Gamow's mathematical equations to explain them.

"There are several problems with the creationist approach to the big bang however. First, it is obvious that in some papers creationists have improperly stated the big bang model. For instance, some have assumed that the geometry of the universe is Euclidean, while others picture the big bang as having been an explosion of matter and energy into preexisting space and time [1], [2]. The standard model actually assumes non-Euclidean geometry, and the big bang is not so much an explosion of matter into space as it was an explosion of space and time as well. In other words, there was no space or time before the big bang. Others deride the standard cosmology by asking such questions as "how can an explosion give rise to complexity?" What is missed in this is that the name "big bang" is a bit of a misnomer, and that the standard model has never actually been proposed as an explosion. A few years ago a popular astronomy magazine held a contest to give a better name for the standard cosmogony - no one won [8]. If a creationist misunderstands these basics of the big bang model, then would any of his conclusions regarding the big bang be valid?"

"A third problem is our lack of an alternative. Even if we succeed in destroying the big bang, do we have a model with which to replace it? There have been several cosmological models that creationists have put forth (e.g. West's polytropic model [55]), but only one cosmogony model has been proposed. This is the Humphreys white hole cosmogony [30], which will be discussed later."

"A much more fruitful argument is the one for a young creation. The universe is usually assumed to be between ten and twenty Gyr old, with the solar system and the earth having formed about 4.6 Gyr ago. Of course this is based on evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions. Our model places an age of only a few thousand years for the earth and everything else in the universe. Thus a very clear distinction between the creation and evolution models exists."

The author holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, teaches astronomy at the University of South Carolina and has published numerous technical papers on stellar evolution in professional astronomical journals. His curriculum vitae can be seen here. Now read the statement he just made, noting that "Gyr" is an astronomers' abbreviation for one billion years:

"The universe is usually assumed to be between ten and twenty Gyr old, with the solar system and the earth having formed about 4.6 Gyr ago. Of course this is based on evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions."

This is not even wrong. The estimated of the age of the Universe, the Earth and solar system has absolutely nothing to do with evolution or 'evolutionary' assumptions. The age of the Universe was first estimated by Edwin Hubble using the laws of gravity, light and motion set forth by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and the laws of atomic and quantum physics set forth by Marie Curie, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, George Gamow, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Schrodinger, Paul Dirac and many others. These laws of physics have not even the remotest connection to theories of biological evolution.

Even if Charles Darwin's theory of biological evolution were proven wrong tomorrow, this would have absolutely no effect on the physical laws used to determine the age of the Universe, the Earth and the solar system. The author, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, knows this full well . He uses the exact same physical laws in his own professional research on the spectra of stars and teaches these same physical laws to his undergraduate students.

The term "uniformitarian" refers to a broad spectrum of geological thought used during the early 19th century to explain the character of various rock formations found on Earth. The term arose as an alternative to "catastrophism" which held that all features of the Earth were created several thousand years ago by the flood described in the Bible.

During the 19th century, no scientific method existed to determine the Earth's age. Geologists in the 19th century were like a person locked in a room with no clock or windows and the lights on 24 hours a day. How could you know how many hours or days had passed? If it 'seemed' like an hour, day or week had passed, could you be sure? How could you be sure? Geologists had to wait until World War II for atomic physicists to experimentally confirm the physical laws used to independently determine the age of the Earth using radioactive elements found in meteorites and in the rocks of the Earth. Geologists had to wait until Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July, 1969 to acquire the rocks necessary to determine the age of the Moon (approx. 4.6-4.4 billion years).

Geologists do not determine the age of rocks. Physicists determine the age of rocks, using the same laws of atomic physics which have allowed the successful development of nuclear fission weapons (the atomic bomb) and nuclear fusion weapons (the hydrogen bomb). These same physical laws explain the nuclear fusion reactions which create the Sun and all of the stars visible in the Universe.

The key physical laws which allowed two atomic bombs to detonate over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan in 1945 are the same laws which allow physicists to determine the age of rocks on the Earth, the Moon and the solar system.

If these laws of atomic physics do not work for dating rocks, then the nuclear fission bombs which annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not explode.

These physical laws, developed and tested 50 years after the term "uniformitarianism" had become obsolete, are how we know the age of the Earth and the solar system.

The author, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, knows this full well . He uses the exact same physical laws to conduct his own professional research on the spectra of stars and teaches these same physical laws to his undergraduate students.

"Evolutionists have countered that due to changes in the earth's surface due to plate tectonics, the distribution of ocean floor and continental shelves has varied with time. Much of the tidal braking that causes lunar recession occurs in relatively shallow water near coastlines, so it is conceivable that the rate of lunar recession has an additional time dependence [52, pp. 146-148]. This explanation requires that we live in a time of unusually large lunar recession rate. However, several studies of varve and fossil coral growth have suggested that the current rate of tidal evolution has been nearly constant for several hundred Myr. These studies have generally been dismissed, but a recent new study of varves spanning the past 900 Myr [48] present strong evidence that the average rate of lunar recession over that interval closely matches the current rate. Note that this agrees with DeYoung's contention, that the 1/r6 produces a nearly constant rate for the past 900 Myr. One could argue that the unusually high rate has coincidentally prevailed for nearly 1 Gyr, but with the shuffling of plates that should have occurred in that time, this seems extremely unlikely. It must be noted that recent creationists reject the age and perhaps the interpretation of the varves in this recent study, but evolutionists are generally not in a position to do so. The topic of lunar recession has not been fully explored by creationists. A full discussion that goes beyond the relatively simple ones thus far is badly needed."

In support of his argument that the Earth is a few thousand years old, the author repeatedly cites published geological data describing events on Earth which occurred 900 million years ago. This is like trying to prove there is no planet called Mars based on evidence from rocks collected on Mars.

Rocks on Mars, December 2004. These are volcanic rocks composed of basalt.

Welcome to the World of Creation Science. In Creation Science you are allowed to disprove a rule of science by temporarily asserting the rule is right so long as you later say it is wrong.

From this we can derive the Four Theorems of Creation Science:

1. All rules are wrong.

2. A wrong rule can be declared temporarily right if done to prove another rule wrong.

3. A wrong rule can always be declared temporarily right if done to prove the same rule wrong.

4. All wrong rules declared temporarily right to prove themselves or related rules wrong must be later declared wrong to ensure no rules are left right.

Am I making this up? Not according to the author, who states: "It must be noted that recent creationists reject the age and perhaps the interpretation of the varves in this recent study, but evolutionists are generally not in a position to do so."

In other words, it is perfectly acceptable for creationists to assert the validity of geological studies of 900 million year old sediment cores in one paragraph and then declare the same studies to be completely false in the next paragraph. The author states correctly that 'evolutionists are generally not in a position to do this.'

"Let us now turn to some problems that creation astronomers face today and examine where work should progress. We have talked about the solar system and the universe as a whole, but we have talked very little about the "middle ground" of stellar astronomy. Stellar astronomers have developed very compelling evolutionary theories to explain the origin and diversity of stars as well as the elements. In the only creationist critique of stellar evolution, Mulfinger [37] argued for the rejection of all of stellar evolution theory. A possible problem with this approach is that the theory has a very strong basis in physics, a situation very different from biological evolution. Faulkner and DeYoung [23], who cautioned that creationists must be prepared to give strong physical arguments for rejecting stellar evolution, noted this."

"While many Christians have entered the fields of biology and geology to combat evolution the takeover of astronomy by evolutionary thinking has scarcely been noticed, and there are few qualified creationist astronomers. Creationists need to do much more work in stellar astronomy."

"It has long been known that a cloud of gas is generally stable against collapse to form a star. The reason is that the gas pressure present in the cloud will resist the compression. If some agent condenses the cloud to a certain point, then the gravitational force of the cloud can lead to a star. The theoretical difficulty has been to identify a natural process that can bring an originally diffuse cloud to this point."

The author suggests that because of the "theoretical difficulty" in explaining the birth of stars it is possible that all the stars we see were created by God several thousand years ago. Unmentioned is the speed of light. Visual counts of stars and galaxies show the Universe contains at least trillions of stars. The author knows this because he earns he studies these stars and publishes papers in professional scientific journals about these stars. Because the speed of light is a physical constant and is approx. 186,000 miles per second, if all the stars and galaxies we see were created 6,000 years ago, they should all be less than 6,000 light years from us, or we could not see them.

This would mean the entire visible Universe must occupy a sphere less than 6,000 light years in diameter. This would mean all the distant galaxies we see are smaller than individual stars. Since individual stars can be readily seen in even the smallest of these galaxies this would mean the stars we see in the smallest galaxies must be smaller than Rhode Island. The discovery of a galaxy of bright, luminous stars each smaller than Rhode Island would win any astronomer a Nobel Prize. Why the author has not published this discovery in a professional journal and claimed the Nobel Prize is unclear.

If all the trillions of stars visible from Earth were in a sphere only 6,000 light years in diameter, and most were about the size of our Sun, this would violate Olber's Paradox. Olber's Paradox states there cannot be an infinity of stars in the sky because each and every point in the sky would be occupied by a star, making the night sky infinitely bright. If all the stars we can see in the heavens were about as large as the Sun (whose size we can accurately measure), their collective light when contained in a sphere only 6,000 light years in diameter would make the night sky so bright to burn out our retinas.

The only other explanation for trillions of stars and millions of galaxies in a Universe only 6,000 light years in diameter would be the speed of light is not a constant. Several paragraphs from now, the author himself will say this is not possible

"Several agents have been proposed to initiate the process of proto-stellar collapse. Two of the more popular, shock wave compression and cooling by radiation from dust, will be briefly mentioned here. It has been suggested that a superdeca explosion near a gas cloud could cause the cloud to be compressed to a size that would allow gravitational contraction to occur. Alternately, for a given size and mass, a cloud could be caused to contract if it could shed some of its heat. This could be accomplished by the radiation of dust particles embedded in the cloud. Both of these mechanisms suffer from the same problem: they require that some stars must exist first. A superdeca explosion obviously requires at least one preexisting star, but evolutionary theories of the universe demand that the elements found in dust particles could only have been produced by stellar nucleosynthesis and that the dust grains themselves could only have been formed in the atmospheres of red giants. This presents the obvious problem of where the first stars came from."

In the preceding two paragraphs, the author is apparently claiming no physical force exists to draw particles or objects closer together in space, which means there is no mechanism pull a cloud of objects together to form a star. The physical force which attracts particles toward each other is gravity. In the full text of this paper, the author extensively cites of the law of gravity to show why the Earth cannot be more than a few thousand years old. In this one and only instance the author denies the existence of the gravity because it would allow for the creation of stars. cf. The Four Theorems of Creation Science.

"In passing it should be noted that some creationists believe that the formation of a star violates the second law of thermodynamics [37], but this is not true. If one starts with a sphere of gas of larger radius and contracts the sphere to a smaller radius, then the simple application of gas equations does seem to suggest a decrease in entropy."

If you are keeping score at home, the author has just correctly explained the mechanism which creates stars; a mechanism which he had just previously said does not exist. cf. The Four Theorems of Creation Science.

"The Light Time Travel Problem"

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

'Creation Astronomy' confronts a wall called Albert Einstein. A German Jew, Albert Einstein was a very religious man driven out of his native country after threats on his life by the Nazis. When discussing physics, Einstein referred to God as "The Old Man," and described his work in physics as an attempt to learn what the "Old Man" was thinking when He made the Universe. Einstein's equations hold that the maximum possible velocity in the Universe is that of light in a vacuum (approx. 186,000 miles per second). This constant, "c," is the most exhaustively studied physical principle known to the human species. The speed of light confirms that some objects visible from Earth today are at least 8 billion years old. This is why 'creationists' who claim the Universe was created a few thousand years ago refer to Albert Einstein's achievements as "the light travel time problem."

"The last problem that we will discuss is probably the single biggest problem that recent creationists face today: the light travel time. Simply stated, if the universe is billions of light years in size, then how did the light from most objects get here in a few thousand years?"

"Extrapolating the much higher speed of light into the past could produce a speed that was near infinite in the early universe and would permit the light from the most distant objects to have reached us. In the past 15 years there has been much debate among creationists over this issue, with some insisting that the effect is real and others convinced that it is not. A mini-symposium on this topic appeared in the Creation Research Society Quarterly a few years ago. The early measurements provide the greatest evidence, but are also subject to the greatest error. It is most curious that the decrease seemed to end about 1960. There are some theoretical problems as well. The speed of light is not a constant that can be arbitrarily changed. It depends upon some fundamental constants that have an effect on the structure of matter. If the speed of light is changed, the structure of matter will be dramatically changed."

"Most creationists have adopted the concept of a fully functioning universe as the best explanation for the light travel time problem. In the garden Adam would have been a particularly healthy male. If we could go back in a time machine and examine him we might have concluded that he was 20 to 30 years old. Of course we would have been wrong, because Adam was created only a few days before. In other words, creation implies some sort of apparent history. It is argued that in like fashion, for the stars to serve their intended purpose (for the marking of time and seasons) their light must have reached earth in time for Adam to see them two days later. Thus God must have created the light in transit."

"But did Adam bear the scars of past history, such as injuries that never happened? When the fossilized remains of large extinct and previously unknown creatures were unearthed over a century ago, some Christians responded that the fossils were created in the rocks and that the creatures never existed; they just appeared to have existed. Most people would reject this as absurd. Yet the creation of starlight in transit raises a similar philosophical point. In the spring of 1987 a superdeca was observed in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Since that time the progress of the explosion and its aftermath have been carefully observed. We have been able to piece together many fine details of what happened. But if the notion of light created in transit is correct, then none of the observed events happened. How is this different from God creating fossils in the ground? This idea also has no predictive power like the other two suggestions above, which relegates it more to a philosophical idea rather than a scientific one."

Read the above paragraph again. The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a small galaxy attached by gravity to our Milky Way galaxy, much like the moon is attached by gravity to Earth. The LMC is approx. 170,000 light years from Earth and only visible in Earth's southern hemisphere. In 1987 a massive star exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud and was easily visible by telescope. This Supernova was the closest every seen from Earth since the 1600s and the first nearby Supernova to be observed by the full battery of 20th century tools. The last Supernova in our galaxy was seen on Earth 300 years before the steam engine. The author is saying that if the 'creationist' model is correct, the thousands of astronomers who studied the 1987 Supernova saw nothing and their equipment detected nothing because nothing was there. Why? Because the 1987 Supernova is 170,000 light years from Earth. It exploded 170,000 years ago and the light from the explosion only reached Earth in 1987. According to creationist astronomy, the 1987 Supernova observed and studied by the author and thousands of other astronomers around the world does not exist. Read the author's paragraph again. He says "How is this different from God creating fossils in the ground?"

"The important point is that through relativistic effects, time proceeds at very different rates in different parts of the universe. While only a few thousand years elapsed near and on the earth, billions of years could have elapsed elsewhere. This would allow light to travel millions or billions of light years to reach the earth while only a few thousand years occurred on the earth. This all happens because of the different rate at which time passes in different reference frames in general relativity. Not only does this cosmogony purport to answer the light travel time problem, it also provides creationists with a Biblically based cosmology as well."

Einstein's equations for special and general relativity do not allow for 'time to proceed at different rates in different parts of the universe,' in the way the author asserts. The velocity of light travelling from a distant star has absolutely no effect on the rate of time for an observer on Earth. Special and general relativity only allow time progress noticeably "slower" on Earth [as judged by an observer not on Earth] under two conditions: if the Earth is travelling close to the speed of light; or if the Earth was in close proximity to an extremely massive black hole. If the first case were true, the Earth would be ripped apart; and if the second case were true, the Earth would be ripped apart. The author said earlier: "If a creationist misunderstands these basics of the big bang model, then would any of his conclusions regarding the big bang be valid?"

"So what is the state of creationist astronomy? We have seen that it has some good points to make. We have also seen that there have been some false starts and some problems. We must go beyond arguing what is wrong with evolutionary models. What is needed is an overall model or paradigm to describe the universe. A formation and history of the solar system must be explored. A particularly important question to address here is when and how the cratering that we see in the solar system occurred. Did the cratering occur during creation, at the fall, during the flood, or at some other time? A few authors have begun work on this question [25], [39].

"If we are not satisfied with stellar evolution, then we must provide physical arguments against it and supply our alternative. For the universe as a whole we must explain the light travel time in a plausible way."

To the author's credit, he finishes his paper with two very correct statements.