Gods and Suns

How creationism cheats the kids

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/05/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/gods_and_suns.htm

Why do I think creationism is something that only an abject moron would believe?

The answer lies in the stars.

According to the first version of creation in the Bible, God created the stars (the lights in the vault of heaven) on the fourth day, two days after he created earth.

And he supposedly created earth 6,000 years ago.

What we see is the light from the stars. Light travels in a vacuum at 186,000 miles per second, slightly slower through various types of matter.

A light year (for the benefit of any ignorant creationist reading this) is the distance light travels in a year. Call it 5,865,696.000,000 miles, or roughly the same as driving from Red Bluff to Bakersfield at 25 miles an hour.

The Old Testament, written at least 2,500 years ago, refers to the stars.

Which means that light from the stars was reaching earth 2,500 years ago, only 3,500 years after the creation of the earth.

Which means that no star in the universe can be more than 3,500 years old, because the light from a star more than 3,500 light years away wouldn’t have reached us yet when the old Testament was written. In fact, the stars had been around for some time at that point, since the bible makes it clear that they existed for the purpose of keeping track of holidays and seasons.

Now, we know that the earth is in a galaxy called the Milky Way, and that this galaxy contains at least 200 billion stars. It may contain as many as 400 billion. The number is big enough that they are still simply counting.

So even if we ignore the fact that we can plainly see other galaxies, which obviously lie outside of our own, it means that a creationist cosmology has anywhere from 3 to 6 stars jammed in each cubic light year of the universe.

Four hundred billion stars all within 3,500 light years would give us a night sky that is blinding pure white. And it would have meant no fourth day of creation, since the earth would have been fried to a crisp.

We can triangulate the distances of the nearer stars. We have a baseline of the earth’s position at opposite points of its orbit around the sun (and yes, creationists, we’ve proved that the earth goes around the sun) that represents the earth’s location on two dates six months apart. That baseline is about 18 light minutes long, which means a shift of several arc seconds in the position of nearby stars.

We know for a fact that the nearest stars are 4.3 light years away. We didn’t depend on indirect evidence that fundies mistrust, such as red-shift or determining the size and actual brightness of the star from its color and comparing it to its apparent brightness. We simply poke a stick in the ground pointing at Alpha Centauri on a January night, and then do the same thing the next June, and compare where the two sticks are pointing. It’s the same way Eratosthenes discovered that the earth was round, back around 345 BC. (Luckily for him, light from the stars was already reaching the earth by then).

There are all sorts of other things that upset the creationist cosmological model. For instance, there’s the matter of the Local Group. The Local Group is a collection of 35 or so galaxies that are "close" to the Milky Way. One of them, Andromeda, is bigger than the Milky Way, with about a half a trillion stars. Obviously, the fact that it’s a small smudge in the sky that looks like a kind of a blurry star to the naked eye will suggest this collection of half a trillion suns is some ways off, and in fact it’s about 2.9 million light years away. The nearest galaxy is Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, some 25,000 light years from us and 45,000 light years from the middle of the Milky Way, and believed to actually be in orbit on the edge of our galaxy. It’s a real weenie of a galaxy, having less than a million suns. You can probably buy it real cheap on E-Bay and use it as a conversation piece in your living room.

Then there’s the matter of supernovae. That’s when a star decides to blow up all at once. The last one in our galaxy was in 1604, and was on the far side of the galaxy. It sparked all sorts of end of the world rumors. We’ve seen supernovae since then in other galaxies, and one, in Andromeda, doubled the apparent brightness of the entire galaxy for a couple of days. In other words, one sun briefly flared as brightly as the other 499,999,999,999 or so, combined. You see why you don’t want to be near one.

You never want to hear that a supernova has occurred within 3,500 light years of earth, because that particular sort of news means that you are about to die a quick, but thoroughly unpleasant death. Not only are they bright, but they throw off a lot of radiation. We can’t even blame them on Putsch. Supernovae suck.

One of the more amusing relationships between Christians and supernovae occurred when the star that is now the Crab Nebula exploded. The church heralded the new bright star in the sky as a certain sign that Jesus was coming back, and when he didn't, they strived to expunge all mention of the star from the records.

Fortunately, it’s a big universe. Supernovae are common, but that’s only because there are billions of galaxies with trillions of stars.

The Constitution says that if you want to believe in a teeny, tiny little universe that’s only 3,500 light years across, you have every right in the world. The Constitution guarantees you can believe any kind of pure foolishness you want to believe.

But creationism is for idiots, a pathetic, blinkered, morally and intellectually bankrupt substitution for thought, one that presents a sad, limited view of the universe.

It seems to me that if you want to get kids to believe in greater powers, you should show them the universe as it is, a vast concourse of stars and worlds beyond imagining, an incredible panoply of galaxies and nebulae that span vast distances.

Certainly, any sane person would never point to the sky and tell their children, "Never mind what you see. The truth is only one millionth as glorious." – and then feed the children a pile of rubbish conjured up by ancient goat herders to try to explain the funny lights in the sky 2,500 years ago.