# Star events "happening"



## chuckd (Apr 28, 2016)

I love looking at photos taken from the Hubble. Beautiful, natural paintings in the sky.

Many of these photos depict stars exploding. This, for example, was taken from the Kepler showing a star exploding from 700 million light years away.

It got me thinking, how can we properly say this "happened." Considering this "occurred" 700 million years ago and we're just now witnessing it.


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## JP Wallace (Apr 28, 2016)

Chuck

I'm not a scientist or astronomer, but have a bit of an interest in astronomy. I work on the basis that the scientists have correctly calculated the speed of light, and that it _appears _therefore that the light did indeed leave the star all those years ago. However I also believe that their calculation of time depends on a more or less constant speed of light (I'm not sure any calculations could be made without assuming a constant).

I believe there are therefore two ways for us to understand this.

On the basis of a young earth theology, that the speed of light cannot have been constant, but at some time either has went through a massive acceleration and slowing process and/or the distance between earth and the star/s have massively changed. 

I think it more likely is the latter and there may even be a text to support that position.ESV Isaiah 42:5 Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk in it:


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## Ask Mr. Religion (Apr 28, 2016)

From a six-day literal view,

"Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them (_moon, sun, stars_) in the firmament of the heavens to give light (_light of the moon, sun, stars then and now upon the earth_) on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness."

Hence, whatever we may now understand about the speed of light, the mechanism was not operative in that same manner at the time God spoke them into existence.


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## chuckd (Apr 28, 2016)

Ask Mr. Religion said:


> From a six-day literal view,
> 
> "Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them (_moon, sun, stars_) in the firmament of the heavens to give light (_light of the moon, sun, stars then and now upon the earth_) on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness."
> 
> Hence, whatever we may now understand about the speed of light, the mechanism was not operative in that same manner at the time God spoke them into existence.



I'm not following. The star in my OP, when did it explode?


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## johnny (Apr 28, 2016)

There are many theories by creation scientists on this.

http://creation.com/a-new-cosmology-solution-to-the-starlight-travel-time-problem

We have seen creation scientist Jim Mason explaining some of these problems when he comes to Australia on his regular circuit trips but it mostly goes way over my little head. (my wife loves this kind of stuff)

Here is a link to Jim Mason's bio,
http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist

Just a quick caveat here,
I lean towards a Geocentric position and many of the creation scientists do not.
When I read the material on their sites I keep this in mind.


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## Contra_Mundum (Apr 28, 2016)

For all the disparagement given it by moderns, the "appearance of age" still strikes me as one of the simplest and least problematic explanations available.

The objection: that such an explanation is "deceptive" on God's part, overthrows not just the miracle of creation of the universe, but almost any miracle one can think of. Was Adam formed a fully grown man? If so, wouldn't this be "deceptive" if the implication was that he should have been a zygote at an earlier time? If he had a "belly button," would that be further "deception?"

The apparently finely-aged wine at Cana, created by Jesus in an instant: was that deceptive of him? Was he obliged to send word to the master of the feast (Jn.2:9-10) that his impression was false? Similar questions could be formulated for any miracle of the Bible. Why did the iron ax-head float? Did its molecular nature shift? Did something happen to the water's density? If there's no "scientific" explanation, must we doubt the event? Must we develop an explanation in each case that is consistent with our present understanding of physics, chemistry, math, and time (to name a few), or relegate the story to the realm of mythos?

The violation of natural laws or limits is the very nature of miracle. Forming a world and the universe containing it, where the existence of distance supplies the helpful conditions for various activities such as navigation--this is perfectly compatible with the goodness and wisdom of God. A distant supernova, that would have exploded so many millions of years ago *if the universe of time was as old as that* is no more incredible (or deceptive) than a woman formed from Adam's rib. All appearances are subject to an authoritative explanation, or revelatory limits.

Furthermore, we simply do not have all the information we might like to have, regarding the manner and mechanisms God used in forming the observable universe; or his reasons for including this or that phenomenon. How many intricacies have men discovered, for which the one explanation seems to be: _because it's cool, that's why_? The secret things belong to God; the things revealed, to us and to our children.

The lights in the sky actually have a given _telos,_ they were set up for "signs, seasons, days, and years," Gen.1:14. From this I know one certainty: the supernova previously referred to was ordained to exist as a sign from God, I know not what for other than to bear witness to the Creator; but perhaps for some other specific reason also but unnamed. I know this by corollary: that this supernova was not the product of purposeless chance, plus matter and motion, no matter when it began to be according to man's reckoning of time; it did not *come to have* another meaning imposed on it by men due to its discovery by them. And it most certainly does not mean that Gen.1 is an explanation for our reality imposed on brute facts.

Hope this is helpful.


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## Afterthought (Apr 28, 2016)

chuckd said:


> It got me thinking, how can we properly say this "happened." Considering this "occurred" 700 million years ago and we're just now witnessing it.


According to scientific standards, it actually exploded sooner than that time due to the expansion of the universe. I don't want to do the calculation; it's not too hard, just a tad unpleasant to do.

We can say with empirical certainty that the star exploded, and so with empirical certainty, the explosion "happened," and that is how we can properly say it happened.

Because of the time delay, many also use the word "happened" in the sense that "this is what we are seeing now," so sometimes one hears that a supernova happened some years ago, rather than ages ago when the light from the explosion first left it, since the some years ago is when we saw the event.



chuckd said:


> The star in my OP, when did it explode?


If one wants an empirically based answer, I have given it. If one is asking an historical question, it obviously did not explode before the world was created. But seeing how no satisfactory map has been given between the historical data of Scripture and the empirical models that we have, no one knows when it historically exploded. Probably, it is in principle impossible to determine. So the empirically based answer has some use to it, including along the lines that Rev. Buchanan has mentioned.





Contra_Mundum said:


> For all the disparagement given it by moderns, the "appearance of age" still strikes me as one of the simplest and least problematic explanations available.


I think this is the case too. However, isn't the problem usually not with "appearance of age" but rather "appearance of events happening that never happened; or appearance of objects existing that never existed?" Or maybe you view this as a distinction without a difference?


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## Contra_Mundum (Apr 28, 2016)

Afterthought said:


> isn't the problem usually not with "appearance of age" but rather "appearance of events happening that never happened; or appearance of objects existing that never existed?"


Is the "object that never existed" in this case: a star, which _had to have_ (by some reckoning) spatial (x,y,z) coordinates, composition and magnitude; which existence is presumed from the residual glowing gasses?

I think its a distinction without much difference. Additional terms have simply been introduced, which seem to demand even further rigor in justifying the observed phenomena.

All these aspects do is insist on some prior ontological criteria, to justify what may be observed in the present. An adult Adam "presumes" the events of the life of a child-Adam, which never happened according to special creation of the first man. The same is true for Eve.

No one has suggested the Bible proposes there were drawings of Adam's "parents" tacked to the nearest tree; nor their bones that could be dug up from a nearby "graveyard," containing numerous generations of "ancestors." And yet, those putative "bones" are actually called for by theistic evolutionists. And the fact the Bible doesn't mention the bones makes its story myth to them.

So, either something is missing, or something is present, to falsify the story as it is presented. The heavens, with all its wonders, is presented to man as part of the scene, the givens of the starting conditions. The vastness of space is actually _taught_ to man (and the consequent superior immensity of God to anything he created) by including "evidence" of a supernova, which light would by natural means take unfathomable ages to arrive. The idea that there "had to be an exploding star that first grew into the mass that finally exploded" is all presupposition. It isn't required by the narrative of what Genesis says took place.


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## chuckd (Apr 29, 2016)

Contra_Mundum said:


> For all the disparagement given it by moderns, the "appearance of age" still strikes me as one of the simplest and least problematic explanations available.



I agree, especially with the plethora of examples you have given. My question is more or less how to properly describe what I'm seeing - a star exploding (because it never did). It's more akin to Adam having a memory of his childhood that never took place. "What is that?" my child asks. That's a star exploding. But that's a false statement. That's what a star exploding would look like had it happened? That's just confusing.


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## Contra_Mundum (Apr 29, 2016)

The only difference you have with the man, Adam, is that the Bible supplies a particular explanation and a few additional words for the phenomenon.

Let's just "guess" that Adam had a full-grown appearance of a thirty-year old man. The human body is made up of millions of individual cells, most of which are part of an ongoing process of replacement as cells age and die. Not everything goes at once, or we'd always be facing organ or structural failure.

This means that the "thirty-year old" Adam, who's actually only a minute old, has cells that are "old" and starting the replacement process. Are we going to say, "that's what a dead cell would look like IF it had happened?" If you must...

All the cosmic-scale questions are doing is taking something big (instead of tiny) that more people can potentially "see" (most of us really just accepting what we are told in a magazine article, possibly with photographs) and suggesting that it should be too "weird" for us to accept a GIVEN universe: one with immense distances, but which distant light is created or stretched or by some other incalculable process made "near" us, which allows us to appreciate the stars and their designed function.

A supernova or two (or two hundred million) in various stages of fascinating display, are apparently "normal" to the type of universe God created. Whatever processes bring about the conditions that produce them are in-process for many more to come (until the "program" is shut down, and those potentialities never materialize in this universe). My explanation for the beginning is: when God kicked the "program" on at creation, he allowed there would be some "residual" display of what would be the case if the universe had been chugging along for eons. He chose not to start the system in alpha-mode, and bring all the sub-routines on one by one from a zero-state.

If Adam's body is conceived as a little universe within the cosmic universe, his cells were created in different states of "age." Then, his system of cell-replacement was brought on line instantly with everything else, and functioned as if it had been going on for thirty years.

It's simply a question of scale. If you can't have the appearance of a supernova, neither can you have a fully-developed human all at once.


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## chuckd (May 2, 2016)

Contra_Mundum said:


> It's simply a question of scale. If you can't have the appearance of a supernova, neither can you have a fully-developed human all at once.



Thanks, that makes sense.


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