Dissecting YEC – Science and Light (Part 4)

In my last post I laid out the case based on the Bible alone why the young earth creationists are wrong, Genesis 1-2 cannot be 24-hr days. I’ve also shown how YEC have elevated themselves and their biases to be the orthodoxy that everyone must be measured by. We can pray for them but I don’t think they will ever change. They are like some of the early Church Fathers who clings to a flat earth because they claim to have the only correct interpretation of the Bible. Lactantius (c. 250–325 CE) is the most direct example of a Church Father explicitly rejecting a spherical Earth and leaning on biblical language to mock the “pagan philosophers” who taught otherwise. He would rely on verse like Psalm 104:5, Isaiah 40:22 as direct evidence the earth is flat. YEC are the Lactantius of our time. YEC are hiding behind their fear of secular atheism and Darwinian evolution, they have lost all objectivity not only of science but even the Bible.

So while I have proved that Genesis 1-2 is not a modern concept of a 24-hr day. It begs the question, then how long were the days. That is simple. I don’t know. The Bible doesn’t say how long the days are so I can’t tell you. What I could do is look to the book of nature that God has created and see what that says. Studying the book of nature has the same problem as we have in studying the Bible. The problem is us. With the added problem that science is not inspired by God or God breathed. Therefore, we hold all scientific truth as provisional, subject to change with new data.

Given our current scientific understanding of the age of the earth and the universe, it is about 4.5bya and 13.5bya respectively. Sometimes the human mind just fail at grasping such deep time scales, which might have contributed to our disbelief of an old earth. Although we should not have a problem of apprehending how trivial this time scale is. As Christians we believe God exist outside of time and space. He created everything out of nothing. We will live with Him forever in eternity. It is like infinity is a concept in mathematics but not a number. In the same way while 4.5byrs seems like an unfathomable long time but compared to infinity? It doesn’t even register.

Back to the age of the earth. We get the age of the earth through geology and physics. Honestly, I am not an expert in these fields but I am most familiar with physics and is something that I’ve study the most. I am just going to put forth some of the evidences with respect to each field and I will expand on the ones I am most familiar with.

Geology:

1. Stratigraphy (Layering of Rocks)
2. • Principle: Sedimentary rock layers accumulate over time, with the oldest at the bottom and youngest at the top.
   • Evidence:
     • The geologic column shows a sequence of layers spanning billions of years.
     • Fossil succession matches the order expected from long-term biological evolution.

2. Plate Tectonics and Mountain Building
3. • Principle: Continents drift and collide over vast time scales, forming mountains and ocean basins.
   • Evidence:
     • Rates of seafloor spreading and continental drift (cm per year) imply processes operating for hundreds of millions of years.
     • Ancient mountain belts and supercontinents (e.g., Pangaea) are dated through these processes.

3. Erosion and Sedimentation Rates
4. • Principle: Geologic processes like river erosion or sediment deposition happen at measurable, slow rates.
   • Evidence:
     • The thickness of many sedimentary sequences implies tens to hundreds of millions of years of accumulation.
     • Erosion of major landforms (e.g., Grand Canyon) aligns with ages in the millions of years.

4. Fossil Record and Geologic Time Scale

• • Principle: Fossils appear in a consistent chronological order in rock layers.
  • Evidence:
    • Index fossils and radiometric dating together allow precise dating of strata.
    • Major transitions (e.g., Cambrian explosion, dinosaur extinction) mark well-dated time boundaries.

Physics:

1. Radiometric Dating of Rocks
2. • Principle: Unstable isotopes (e.g., uranium, potassium) decay into stable daughter isotopes at known rates (half-lives).
   • Evidence:
     • Oldest terrestrial minerals (zircons in Australia) are ~4.4 billion years old.
     • Oldest rocks on Earth are ~4.0 billion years old.
     • The ratios of parent to daughter isotopes (e.g., uranium–lead, potassium–argon) in Earth rocks and meteorites yield ages of billions of years.
     • Meteorites (which formed with the solar system) consistently date to ~4.54 billion years, giving a minimum age for Earth.

2. Thermodynamics and Cooling of the Earth
3. • Principle: A hot body cools over time according to physical laws (heat conduction and radioactive heating).
   • Evidence:
     • 19th-century physicists (e.g., Lord Kelvin) estimated Earth’s age from cooling alone — but their numbers were too small because they didn’t know about radioactive heat, which slows cooling.
     • Modern thermal models including radioactive decay match a multi-billion-year-old Earth.

3. Orbital Mechanics and Solar System Formation
4. • Principle: The physics of planet formation and orbital stability follow Newtonian mechanics and gravitation.
   • Evidence:
     • Models of planetary accretion and orbital evolution show Earth and other planets formed ~4.5 billion years ago.
     • Solar system evolution (e.g., cratering rates, asteroid belt structure) matches this timeline.

4. Stellar Evolution (Astrophysics)
5. • Principle: Stars evolve in predictable stages based on nuclear fusion and energy output.
   • Evidence:
     • The Sun’s age is about 4.57 billion years, determined from stellar evolution models and radioactive dating of meteorites.
     • Earth must be slightly younger than the Sun, aligning with the 4.5-billion-year estimate.

5. Cosmology and Background Physics
6. • Principle: The universe has a measurable age (~13.8 billion years), providing an upper bound for Earth’s age.
   • Evidence:
     • The physics of nucleosynthesis, cosmic microwave background, and star formation sets a consistent cosmic timeline in which Earth formed naturally about 9 billion years after the Big Bang.

I’ve already presented geological evidence that I am familiar with in the post on Noah’s flood. And as for the evidences in nuclear physics, it is really strong and indisputable. YEC only counter to this and most other sciences is “were you there”. Which is a really silly argument. At times when they try to offer something more substantial like, science can’t prove the decay rate is the same in the past. First, neither can the YEC prove the decay rate was different in the past. Second, why would it be different? What evidence do you have it was different in the past. Institute of Creation Research (ICR) and Creation Research Society (CRS) two prominent young earth creationist organizations, worked on a research project named RATE for Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth. In their paper they have concluded that the earth has more than 500 million years of radioactive decay. Beyond that the decay rate was a billion times faster making the earth much younger. In the conclusion of their paper, they claim that radiometric date confirms a 6,000-year-old earth.

Now just at a glance I don’t know how they can affirm 500 million years of radioactive decay and still affirm a 6,000-year-old earth. But YEC are used to cognitive dissonance, I guess. In any case a critique of their paper is here. It shows the flaws in their project including unrealistic test conditions such as experiments in a laboratory environment compare to those in the wild.

• Star Light
  • At 300,000km/s take billions of light years to reach us
• Ice Cores-like tree rings
  • Melt/freeze each year bands up to 800,000 years
• Continental Drift
  • 1”/year
• Coral Reefs
  • Coral reefs are not formed by the immense pressure of a flood, but by tiny sea creatures (called coral polyps) … When they die, their limestone “skeletons” remain behind, and, over tens of thousands of years they form corals

I honestly do not care that YEC are wrong in their hermeneutics or their misunderstanding of science. What bother me the most is their weird ad hoc arguments on science give Christianity a bad name. It is a hindrance to the gospel.

One other YEC erroneous argument I want to briefly expose here is Jason Lisle’s anisotropic speed of light. I’ve talked about this in a previous post. YEC do not have a comprehensive answer to science, but they will cherry-pick anomalies or isolated instances in science and poke holes in it. As if by poking a few holes can complete invalidate the whole of science. This is the case of Jason Lisle. Lisle received his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After receiving his degree, he immediately went into full-time apologetics ministry. He wrote a number of planetarium shows for the Creation Museum, including the popular “Created Cosmos.”  Basically, Lisle has not worked a day (24-hr day) as a professional astrophysicist. He’s made no real contribution to the science of astrophysics. He got his degree to promote young earth creationism. Well done.

Why did I bring this up? Lisle has promoted the “idea” of anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC). Remember back in our physics class when we learned about Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein’s relativity theory has destroyed simultaneity with respect to different inertial frame. If you have two clocks at the same spot and they are synchronized to the exact same time. The moment you start moving one or both those clocks away from each other then you will never be able to synchronize them again due to special relativity. And speed causes time dilation and throw in different reference frames it becomes a mess. As a result we can only measure the round trip speed of light. In Einstein’s field equation it is necessary for him to choose a coordinate system. He chose the convention of isotropic or synchrony convention where the speed of light is the same in both directions. Meaning the speed of light moving away from us is the same as the speed of light coming toward us. Because of the clock synchronization problem.

As an example, if we bounce a signal from earth to moon and back. The time it takes would be between 2.4 to 2.7 seconds with an average of 2.56 seconds. If you use 2.4 second as the round trip time. Lisle would say there is no reason why we cannot adopt the ASC with the speed of light traveling to the moon at c/2 and c=∞ from the moon to us. As far as we know this is exactly the case because we cannot measure the one-way speed of light. Therefore, all these stars and celestial objects that are billions of light years away and Lisle acknowledge their distances. The lights from all these objects arrives to us instantaneously. We are looking at the universe in real time. He then get really smug about it.

to get the light from the most distant galaxies uh to the Earth in which case we’re actually seeing the universe in real time and I believe that’s the convention the Bible uses so distant Starlight is not a challenge for a young universe and for people who are experts in physics they know that it’s the laymen who you think they know something about physics um that think that that’s a powerful argument

Can you really call yourself an expert in physics if you have never worked a single day as a physicist? Who never contributed anything of value to the field of physics? Now he comes out with this bluff about asynchronous speed of light. This is the kind of loophole YEC like to engage in. I am not going to engage in a scientific refutation of his idea here. If you want a slightly technical refutation of Lisle’s name game you can look here, and here. 

Suffice to say, what he is proposing is a coordinate system change to Einstein’s equation. He is right that mathematically it is allowed. Changing the coordinates on the metric tensor is not a problem for the math result. However, that does not mean the coordinate change represent the underlying physical reality. The geometric of Minkowski spacetime prevents the speed of light to be instantaneous, because the constant c is the invariant link between time and distance. When Lisle set t=0 he creates a spacelike separation that cannot be crossed by a signal. If he was able to make that separation, it would break spacetime.

That is all I will say for now. I actually have a much simpler example to falsify his cute little “idea”. If his idea of one-way light speed is true the result is not what he expects. The out going light will not be c/2, it will be c=∞ in both directions. How do I know this? If light from a distant star reaches us at infinite speed. But what if we are on the moon? Are we looking at star light in real time there? Of course, we’ve been there and the astronauts report seeing the stars the same. What does that mean? It means the earth is not universe-centric. We are not in a unique vantage that light only come to us at infinite speed.

So what you may ask. That means we can assume that from any reference frame in the universe, incoming light will have the speed c=∞. What does this mean for Lisle’s cute little shell game? We have sent rovers to Mars. We have spacecrafts that we sent out beyond our solar system. When we send radio signal out to these spacecrafts it take time why? Consider the rover on Mars. From the reference frame of the Mars rover, any signal from Earth toward it, is incoming light signal at c=∞. It doesn’t matter if Lisle thinks that it should be heading to the Mars rover at c/2. The rover frame is instantaneous, c=∞. The response from the Mars rover to Earth is incoming light signal and that is also c=∞. Therefore, our communication with all these spacecrafts should be instantaneous but it is not. The underlying physical reality proves Lisle’s little shell game is nothing more than a scam. Einstein might have arbitrarily picked his isotropic convention but it is the only one that works.

One more thing with Lisle’s little shell game. Even if everything he said about ASC is right. He has proven NOTHING. All he has done is to show that EFE convention is not necessarily the correct convention. Lisle’s ASC has not and will not be able to show any proof that ASC is the correct convention. By his own admission we can never know what the one-way speed of light is. Worst than that why should ASC work as he claims. It could just as easily be incoming light speed is c/2 and outgoing light is c=∞. Lisle has succeeded in making the universe twice as old instead of young. Well done, astrophysics Ph.D who has never worked a single 24-hr day as a professional physicist. But that’s OK, Lisle is also a lousy apologist.

I just remember another brag he pumps his chest and boast about and it is so stupid. In this video he claims We Predicted This. When It Happened, It Left Evolutionists STUNNED

“The secularists made some predictions on what the James Webb Space Telescope would see. They were expecting that there should be fewer galaxies at great distances. I posted an article where I made some creation-based predictions that really are the opposite of these. The James Webb Space Telescope took its first images. What did it find? It found this galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies. It’s funny cuz sometimes secularists will say, “Well, if the universe is only thousands of years old, why does it look much older?” I’m thinking, I don’t know what  universe you’re looking at, but it doesn’t look billions of years old. It looks thousands of years old. You just don’t know what to look for.”

Why? Why do YEC do this? This is the reason I could not be a YEC anymore. If you are going to criticize those you disagree with at least have the intellectual integrity to represent them accurately. I don’t want to accuse him of lying, but is he that ignorant about what science said about this. Or is this just another case of someone who has never worked a day as a physicist pretending to be one. 😒

I don’t know of any physicists who is saying the universe looks old when it was only a few hundred million years old. This is why atheists ridicule Christians, because YEC have earned it for us.

Here is what actually is going on with JWST. When the JWST is looking at a deep field image (e.g., SMACS 0723)

Not everything in that image is redshifted at z ≈ 11. Most of the brighter stars are at 0.5-2, with the present at z=0. A real astrophysicist would understand this. The issue with the current theory on galaxy formation is that at around ~400–600Myr after the big bang galaxies should not be well formed. But when JWST scan that deep field and push into an area with z ≈ 8–11, it did find a few galaxies that are well developed. Albeit smaller than what a normal galaxy would be, more like dwarf galaxies. The fact that it found any was the surprise. Furthermore, standing in front of an entire church audience and bragging about something that was false is just inexcusable.

He said he made some creation base predictions that JWST would find galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies. First, I wish he would have said he made YEC based predictions so the rest of Christianity don’t get dragged into his erroneous predictions. Second, no JWST did not find galaxies upon galaxies upon galaxies. It found very, very, few galaxies at the early universe. What it found was rare. It is estimated that at ~400–600Myr redshift at z ≈ 8–11 after the big bang there might have been at most 10⁷ to 10⁸ galaxies compare to present time 2-6 X 10¹². That’s is on the order of thousands of times more. So in fact, what JWST found was the opposite of what Lisle predicted based on his YEC model. But by all means don’t let me confuse him with the facts.