Every source the main article rests on, grouped by the job it does rather than by author. Everything below was downloaded and read as bytes except where marked not obtained; those are collected honestly rather than buried, because an argument resting on a paper nobody on this side has read should be flagged.
No quotation in the article was established through a page-summarising tool. The two-column Answers Research Journal and CEN Technical Journal PDFs were extracted with the columns cropped separately, because a naive extraction of a two-column page interleaves the columns and makes a real sentence look absent — that failure produced garbage on the first pass through Lisle 2010 and is why every page number below was read off a running head rather than inferred. Everything is catalogued in sources/index.tsv under the topic key young-universe-cosmologies.
Every quotation was re-checked against the stored bytes after the article was drafted. The script is research/verify-quotes.py, and it can be re-run. It finds 171 quotations of eight words or more: 146 match a stored source outright, 12 come from works listed below as not obtained or are article titles that happen to sit in quotation marks, and each of the remaining 13 was traced by hand to a specific extraction artefact — a running head printed inside a sentence, a footnote block set between two clauses, a superscript reference marker, justified text that drops inter-word spaces, a Greek letter, or an inline image — and then confirmed fragment by fragment against the source. The check found one real defect, in the Conner and Page abstract, where the printed text reads "the age of the Universe and the Earth time required for light to travel" and the draft had smoothed it to "the age of the Universe and the time required." It is now quoted as printed.
How to read an entry
Each entry gives the citation, then what the source actually contains, then which way it cuts: supports a young-universe answer, undercuts one, background, or complicates.
The problem, stated by young-earth astronomers
Faulkner, Danny R. 2013
"A Proposal for a New Solution to the Light Travel Time Problem." Answers Research Journal 6:279–284. https://assets.answersresearchjournal.org/doc/v6/light-travel-time-problem.pdf Held in the library.
The single most useful paper in this literature, for three reasons. It calls the problem "one of the greatest challenges that recent creationists face today." It reformulates the problem correctly: the stars were made on Day Four and Adam on Day Six, so any solution must explain how Adam saw a star 4.3 light years away two days later, not merely how we see quasars. And it catalogues seven prior families of solution in chronological order, which is the spine of the article. It then proposes an eighth — the dāšā' or "matured creation" solution — and concedes that "since my modest proposal appeals to a miracle, there may be no physical predictions and hence nothing that we can test." Background, and undercuts every solution that only works at cosmological distance.
Faulkner, Danny R. 2021
"Solving the Light Travel Time Problem." Answers in Depth, Answers in Genesis, 23 February 2021. https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/solving-light-travel-time-problem/ Held in the library.
The popular version of the same survey, written on the thirty-fourth anniversary of SN 1987A, and the source of four load-bearing statements. It gives the clearest young-earth statement of why created-light-in-transit fails, drawn from Faulkner's own forty years of eclipsing-binary photometry: we would "see evidence of events (eclipses, for example) that would have never happened. This is deceptive." It reports that Humphreys has abandoned the white hole cosmology. It notes that "while the white hole cosmology was young earth, it was an old universe theory," which most of its supporters never noticed. And it makes the strongest theological case for a miraculous answer: "isn't it inconsistent to expect the light travel time problem to have a naturalistic (scientific) explanation?" Undercuts four of the eight answers; supports the eighth.
Repp, Andrew 2022
"Fifty-Seven Years of Creation Astronomy, Part II." Creation Research Society Quarterly 59:81–91. Held in the library.
A survey of the field written from inside it, and unusually candid. Light-travel time is listed as the first of three unresolved areas. It records that "a general consensus has emerged … that the purported evidence for [c] decay is artifactual in nature," that there is "no generally accepted explanation for the CMB in a creationary framework," and that after Planck "there has been little if any attempt to explain [the anisotropies] within a creation framework." Its footnote 9 is the sharpest available statement of why only the coordinate reading of ASC is defensible: "a physically infinite c in one direction would require a zero ε₀μ₀ in that direction, making either Coulomb's Law or Ampere's Law wildly anisotropic as well." Also records that creation science "in one case effectively [made] a prediction subsequently falsified by observations" — the non-detection of CMB anisotropy. Undercuts broadly, from inside.
Faulkner, Danny R. 2020
"How Big Is the Universe?" Chapter 18 of The New Answers Book 4; republished 25 January 2020. https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/how-big-is-the-universe/ Held in the library.
The most direct young-earth refusal to shrink the universe: "those errors would not reduce the distances down to just thousands of light-years," and "Many recent creationists worry about the light travel time problem and entertain possibilities of the universe being far smaller than generally thought as a way out of this dilemma. But thinking this stumbles over something that ought to be obvious." Undercuts the "question the distances" answer.
Faulkner, Danny R. 2017
"Are Old Supernova Remnants Really Missing? Re-Evaluating a Well-Known Young-Universe Argument." Answers Research Journal 10:245–258. https://assets.answersresearchjournal.org/doc/v10/supernova_remants_missing.pdf Held in the library. (The published filename misspells "remnants"; the URL is as issued.)
Withdraws a standard young-earth argument, and in doing so supplies the article's sharpest point about what a synchrony convention cannot fix. Faulkner tabulates seventeen Galactic supernova remnants with age estimates above Davies's 7,000-year criterion — 20,000 years for SNR G034.6-00.5 with two independent methods agreeing exactly, up to 4.5 million years for GSH 90-28-17 — and concludes: "It would be difficult to reduce any of these age estimates so that they to be compatible with Davies' criterion of 7000 years. … I discourage recent creationists from using it." These objects are a few thousand light years away, so no synchrony convention or cosmological metric touches their ages. Undercuts, and it is an internal source.
Answer 4: the speed of light decayed
Aardsma, Gerald A. 1988
"Has the Speed of Light Decayed?" Impact No. 179, Institute for Creation Research, 1 May 1988. https://www.icr.org/article/has-speed-light-decayed/ Held in the library.
The refutation, from the head of ICR's Astro/Geophysics Department, using Setterfield's own data. Norman and Setterfield fitted 163 historical measurements of c with every point weighted equally, though "the reported error bars range from ± 20,000 km/s to ± 0.0003 km/s," and got 38 km/s per year. Aardsma's weighted least-squares refit gives 0.0000140 ± 0.0000596 km/s/year — zero. He also shows the apparent trend rests on one point: Norman and Setterfield used a corrected Rømer value and an uncorrected Cassini value, and "this single, anomalous point is responsible for most of the apparent 38 km/s/year decay." Undercuts, decisively, from inside.
Norman, Trevor, and Setterfield, Barry 1987
The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time. Flinders University of South Australia, School of Mathematical Sciences technical report, August 1987. Not obtained. Cited in the article only as Aardsma reports and quotes it; Aardsma worked from the report directly and reproduces its numbers and its own words about the Cassini and Rømer determinations. A copy would be worth having, but nothing in the article depends on wording that Aardsma does not supply.
Duff, Michael J. 2002
"Comment on time-variation of fundamental constants." arXiv:hep-th/0208093. Held in the library.
The reason "the speed of light changed" is not a well-posed claim. Only dimensionless constants can vary in a way with "operational meaning"; c, ℏ, G, e and k "are merely human constructs whose number and values differ from one choice of units to the next." Appendix D reproduces a Dirac lecture saying the same thing. Undercuts.
Murphy, Michael T., et al. 2022
"Fundamental physics with ESPRESSO: Precise limit on variations in the fine-structure constant towards the bright quasar HE 0515−4414." Astronomy & Astrophysics; arXiv:2112.05819. Held in the library.
The dimensionless quantity a varying c would have to move, measured across cosmic distance with a laser-frequency-comb-calibrated spectrograph. Single absorber: Δα/α = 1.3 ± 1.3(stat) ± 0.4(sys) ppm. Twenty-nine measurements combined: −0.5 ± 0.5 ± 0.4 ppm over z = 0.6–2.4. Parts per million. Undercuts.
Creation Ministries International 2006
"Arguments we think creationists should NOT use." Published 7 February 2006, updated since. https://creation.com/arguments-we-think-creationists-should-not-use Held in the library.
Lists c decay under "What arguments are doubtful, hence inadvisable to use?" Also, in the same paragraph and still live at retrieval, states that "CMI currently believes that both Dr Russell Humphreys' and Dr John Hartnett's cosmologies … provide viable solutions for the distant starlight problem" — one of which its own author has since retracted in writing. Undercuts c decay; background on how slowly retractions propagate.
Answer 5: Humphreys' gravitational time dilation
Humphreys, D. Russell 1994
Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe. Green Forest, Arkansas: Master Books.
Read, but not held. The only Internet Archive copy, starlighttimesol0000hump, is in the printdisabled collection: it cannot be borrowed, and every OCR derivative returns 401. It is still readable in whole paragraphs through the search-inside endpoint, which is how the article's quotations were obtained. Leaf indices were converted to printed pages using the public BookReader page map, which gives a constant offset of two across the whole volume; that was anchored twice, far apart (leaf 13 = p. 11 and leaf 85 = p. 83). Nothing from this route is stored in the source library, per this project's standing rule.
Four passages matter. The model statement (p. 21): "I call it a 'White Hole' cosmology … and it just happens to solve the problem of the starlight travel-time rather neatly." The admission that a merely bounded universe is not enough (p. 21): "our clocks are ticking only a few percent slower than clocks near the edge. This is not enough to solve the problem." The mechanism (p. 37): "The shrinking event horizon reaches earth early on the morning of the fourth day. During this ordinary day as measured on earth, billions of years worth of physical processes take place in the distant cosmos." And the summary (p. 83).
This pass also resolved three quotations that an earlier project dossier could verify only at second hand — the pp. 17, 88 and 97 passages that Humphreys reproduces in his 1998 reply. All three are confirmed at those pages. Note that the bracketed glosses in the 1998 reproduction ("[that is, within the three dimensions we can perceive]" at p. 88, "[what we perceive as]" at p. 97) are Humphreys' later additions and are not in the 1994 text.
Conner, Samuel R., and Page, Don N. 1998
"Starlight and Time is the Big Bang." CEN Technical Journal 12(2):174–194. Held in the library.
The main critique, and the co-author is a general relativist who worked alongside Hawking in Cambridge and co-authored ApJ 206:1 (1976) with him. Two claims do the work. The verdict: "An accurate treatment of the physics indicates that this model is actually a trivial variant of the standard Big Bang model." And the technical core, which can be checked independently of the rest of the dispute: "physical clocks located on Earth and on distant galaxies behave identically in bounded and unbounded Universes which have identical interior matter distributions." Undercuts.
Citation trap. Humphreys' 1998 reply reproduces the first sentence as "a trivial variant of the standard Big Bang model" while citing the introduction, where the word "standard" does not appear; it comes from the abstract, a different sentence. Quote Conner and Page from Conner and Page.
Humphreys, D. Russell 1998
"New Vistas of Space-Time Rebut the Critics." CEN Technical Journal 12(2):195–212. Held in the library.
The reply. States the model's requirement plainly — "In the cosmos I have proposed, matter is bounded … It does not matter to my theory whether that space is ultimately bounded or not" (p. 203), and "A centre of mass is essential to my theory" (p. 196). Argues that Conner and Page analyse his cosmos with a metric blind to the Klein-metric "Euclidean zone." Contains one correct counter-punch that the article records: Conner and Page derive a field in an unbounded Newtonian cosmos using the shell theorem, which presupposes a centre, and "an unbounded cosmos can have no centre" (p. 205). Complicates.
Humphreys, D. Russell 2007
"Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer spacecraft." Journal of Creation 21(2):61–70. Held in the library.
The paper that derives the metric behind the 2008 model, and offers the Pioneer anomaly as evidence for creationist cosmology generally: "Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies: a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation." Supports, at the time of writing. Superseded by the next entry.
Turyshev, Slava G., et al. 2012
"Support for the Thermal Origin of the Pioneer Anomaly." Physical Review Letters 108:241101; arXiv:1204.2507. Held in the library.
A finite-element thermal model of both spacecraft, built from the design documents and driven by the actual flight telemetry: "once the thermal recoil force is properly accounted for, no anomalous acceleration remains." This does not refute Humphreys' metric. It removes the one observation he offered in its support. Undercuts.
Humphreys, D. Russell 2008
"New time dilation helps creation cosmology." Journal of Creation 22(3):84–92. Held in the library.
The replacement model, built on the 2007 metric: the interior of an expanding shell of water identified with Psalm 148:4, and a new form of time dilation Humphreys calls achronicity, in which time stops throughout the volume inside a horizon rather than only at it. The Day Four scenario requires God to tune three factors so that the boundary of the timeless zone expands at exactly +c and then contracts at exactly −c. Humphreys labels it "a speculative light transit-time scenario" and says "other scenarios are possible." A second, smaller dilation episode during the Flood year would have made the galaxies "suddenly look roughly 500 Ma older" to an observer on Earth. Complicates.
Byl, John 1997
"On time dilation in cosmology." Creation Research Society Quarterly 34:26–32. Not obtained. Cited in the article on the authority of Repp 2022, p. 85, which reports that Byl "argues against it on mathematical grounds (see response in Humphreys, 1997)." Byl is also thanked in the acknowledgements of Dennis 2024a. A copy would strengthen the section; nothing in the article turns on wording nobody has read.
Answer 6: Hartnett's Carmelian cosmology
Hartnett, John G. 2005
"A creationist cosmology in a galactocentric universe." TJ [Journal of Creation] 19(1):73–81. Held in the library.
The clearest statement of what the model required: "A creationist cosmology requires a finite universe that is most likely spherically symmetric about our galaxy." Its theological argument — a finite number of stars implies a finite universe — is independent of Carmeli and was never retracted. Supports, as originally published.
Hartnett, John G. 2013
"The Universe: Finite or Infinite, Bounded or Unbounded." Bible Science Forum, 21 December 2013. Held in the library.
Hartnett's own description of his peer-reviewed IJTP 52:4360–4366 paper, containing the concession that matters: "The new solution though is identical with the unbounded solution." The IJTP paper itself is not obtained — the DOI resolves and the article is paywalled at SpringerLink. Undercuts the claim that boundedness does observational work.
Hartnett, John G. 2019
"My Current Thinking on Distant Starlight." Bible Science Forum, 19 April 2019. Held in the library.
The first retraction: "In the years leading up to 2015 I had discovered several serious inconsistencies with Carmeli's cosmology," and "I now believe that Lisle's ASC model is the best solution by a long shot." Also carries the unanswered mechanical objection to Humphreys: white-hole time-dilation cosmologies "cannot provide sufficient time-dilation" for light travel time within the Milky Way. Undercuts two models at once.
Hartnett, John G. 2016, updated 2021
"Does My Use of Carmeli's Cosmology Provide a Valid Solution to the Starlight-Travel-Time Problem?" Bible Science Forum, 19 November 2016, with a note appended 23 June 2021. Held in the library.
The second retraction, appended to his own defence of the model: "I have now abandoned this model. There are too many inconsistencies and besides we never found a full 5D (space, time and velocity) solution for the whole universe. I have moved on, so should you." Undercuts.
Hartnett, John G. 2021
"Where I Now Stand." Bible Science Forum, 11 March 2021. https://biblescienceforum.com/2021/03/11/where-i-now-stand/ Held in the library.
Written to explain why he stopped writing for Creation Ministries International. Repeats the retraction and adds the complaint that his abandoned model "is still promoted as a viable model, even in their premier publication, see chapter 5 of the Creation Answers Book. But Jason Lisle's model is not mentioned at all." A useful and unflattering datum about how young-earth cosmology is presented to the public. Background.
Answer 7: the anisotropic synchrony convention
Newton, Robert [pseudonym of Jason Lisle] 2001
"Distant starlight and Genesis: conventions of time measurement." TJ [Journal of Creation] 15(1):80–85. Not obtained. Cited only for date and priority. Dennis 2024a, p. 427, identifies the pseudonym: "In 2001 Jason Lisle published under the pseudonym R. Newton, a proposed solution to the LTTP." Hartnett gives the same account and adds that Lisle "originated the answer … when he was still a graduate student."
Lisle, Jason P. 2010
"Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem." Answers Research Journal 3:191–207. https://assets.answersresearchjournal.org/doc/v3/anisotropic-synchrony-convention.pdf Held in the library.
The central paper. Six passages carry the article's argument.
- The convention has no observational content (p. 204): "It is not a scientific model; it does not make testable predictions. It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified."
- But the model built on it does (p. 204): "the ASC model goes beyond the mere convention and does make testable claims and is therefore falsifiable."
- Why ASC is the natural pre-modern convention (p. 202): "only ASC does not require knowledge of the distance to the source to record the time of any event. Since the surface of simultaneity is essentially identical with the past light cone, events happen as they are seen."
- The thesis (p. 202): "The starlight problem was not so much a physics problem, but an error of exegesis. It is the semantic anachronism fallacy."
- The distance scale is not touched (p. 204): "I will further stipulate that the consensus understanding of galactic distances, redshifts, and universal expansion is basically correct." This is the sentence most often lost in popular retellings.
- The predictions (pp. 205–206): blue stars, spiral structure, and youth indicators in distant planetary systems, all following from the 6,000-year stipulation rather than from ASC. Footnote 9 adds that at extreme redshift the universe "will appear slightly less than 6,000 years old … caused by the expansion of the universe."
Also carries the horizon-problem parallel (p. 191) and, in footnote 1, the same Adam-and-Alpha-Centauri reformulation Faulkner would publish in 2013. Supports, and simultaneously undercuts any claim that ASC makes the universe small or the distances short.
Lisle, Jason 2020
"Refuting the Critics: Distant Starlight and ASC." Biblical Science Institute, 8 May 2020. https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/refuting-the-critics/refuting-the-critics-distant-starlight-and-asc/ Held in the library.
A thirteen-point reply to an internet critique, and the most useful single page for seeing how ASC handles specific observations. Three things are worth having. Lisle works the SN 1987A ring echo through under ASC and gets the observed delay, because light travelling from the star to the ring is aimed away from the observer and is therefore slow. He points out that the round-trip isotropy of light "is a prediction of both ASC and ESC," which retires the commonest bad objection. And he concedes what an observed trend with distance would mean: "Perhaps God created galaxies with systematic differences depending on their distance from our local group. Not every sequence is a time-sequence." Supports on the observational objections; undercuts the claim that the ASC model is predictive about galaxy evolution.
Lisle, Jason 2025
"Sizes of Galaxies in JWST Data and Cosmology — Reply to Barnes." Answers Research Journal 18:441–447. Held in the library.
Cited for one sentence, and it is the most important concession in the literature: "the difference between ESC and ASC is one of coordinates, leaving the underlying geometry and measurable observations unaffected" (p. 446). Quote it with its context — Lisle makes the concession while arguing that his separate Doppler model is not merely a coordinate change, which makes it stronger evidence, not weaker. He also separates the two proposals: "since the ASC model doesn't assume any particular metric, it is compatible with either the FLRW metric or the Doppler model" (p. 447). The Doppler model is examined separately in The Doppler Model of Galaxy Redshifts. Undercuts any evidential use of ASC.
Dennis, Phillip W. 2024a
"An Internal Contradiction of Lisle's Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) Model." Answers Research Journal 17:427–433. Held in the library.
The main internal critique, by a young-earth creationist. The argument: ASC assumes Minkowski spacetime, Minkowski spacetime presupposes an isotropic physical light speed, so "the assumption of Minkowski space, as correctly embraced by Lisle, is incompatible with the conclusions of ASC." Also charges that ASC transforms the time coordinate and then keeps the ESC radial distance: "One cannot use both the ESC distance and the ASC distances and times within a derivation and expect a valid calculation" (p. 430).
The most useful and least-used result is Appendix B, eq. (10), p. 432: the induced geometry of the ASC simultaneity surface is ds² = 4ε(1 − ε)(dr² + r²dΩ²), a conical non-Euclidean geometry; at Lisle's limiting case ε = 1 the proper radial extent is zero. That is the rigorous reason ASC cannot support any claim about the present size or state of the universe in either direction. Acknowledges John Byl and Danny Faulkner among reviewers. Complicates.
Dennis, Phillip W. 2024b
"A Refutation of Lisle's 'Refutation' of Dennis (2024)." Answers Research Journal 17:709–738. Held in the library.
Thirty pages, four lines of argument: a one-way speed extracted from femtosecond photography of a light pulse in water; a slow-clock-transport argument from the New Horizons spacecraft; the coordinate-abuse charge again; and a theological argument that ASC requires eternalism. Quoted in the article only for Dennis's statement of his own position: "I am a young earth creationist who is thoroughly committed to a literal seven days of an actual Creation Week." Complicates.
Citation trap. Dennis's charge that eternalism is heretical carries a qualifier that must travel with it: "if knowingly held, is a serious heresy." Dropping the clause turns a general claim into an accusation against Lisle personally.
Tenev, Tichomir G.; Baumgardner, John; and Horstemeyer, Mark F. 2018
"A Solution for the Distant Starlight Problem Using Creation Time Coordinates." Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 82–94. doi:10.15385/jpicc.2018.8.1.11
Obtained in full 2026-08-29, after an earlier pass had it as abstract-only. Held in the library with a column-cropped extraction beside it.
The proposal replaces ASC with a "Creation Time Coordinate" — elapsed time since a star's creation plus three days — described as "a divinely-prescribed objective definition of simultaneity" rather than an "observer-specific subjective" one, and spells out initial conditions that place every stellar creation event just outside the past light cone of Earth's Day Four.
The supernova-remnant section (p. 86) is better work than the abstract suggests, and reading the full paper changed this article's treatment of it. They audit Ken Davies' 1994 argument and find an error in his favour: once the detectability factor is applied to the young case too, a 7,000-year Galaxy predicts "only 126 expected SNRs instead of 268" against about 200 observed, which they concede "would suggest that either the galaxy is somewhat older than 7,000 years or else the estimated average time between SN explosions is too large." What they keep is the 200-against-2,256 Sedov comparison and the claim that "there are no observed third (snowplow) phase SNRs." That second claim is what Faulkner 2017 contradicts — "stage three supernova remnants have been identified" — and Tenev and colleagues do not cite him. Supports the ASC family; undercut on its own evidence by a paper published a year earlier in the same community.
Dennis, Phillip W. 2018
"Consistent Young Earth Relativistic Cosmology." Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 14–35. doi:10.15385/jpicc.2018.8.1.6
Obtained in full 2026-08-29, same route as Tenev. The model excises a past region from a closed FLRW spacetime and chooses a hyperboloidal surface as the first day of creation. Its abstract contains the most candid statement in this literature of what all of these models have in common: "The resulting space-time is a subset of the usual FLRW space-time and thus preserves the FLRW causal structure and the observational predictions such as the Hubble law. … All properties of light arriving from distant galaxies retain the same features as those of the FLRW space-time." The conclusion (p. 28) is blunter still: "There can be no unprejudiced objection to this solution." Complicates — it is a young-earth cosmology whose author states that it predicts exactly what standard cosmology predicts, and treats that as a strength.
Einstein, Albert 1920
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson. Project Gutenberg ebook 5001. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5001/5001-h/5001-h.htm Held in the library.
Chapter VIII carries the passage every ASC defender cites: equal light travel times on the two legs of a round trip are "in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity." Read the chapter, not the sentence. It is a Socratic dialogue: Einstein raises the circularity objection in his own voice, the interlocutor gives this reply, and Einstein then adopts it ("It is clear that this definition can be used to give an exact meaning…"). Lisle cites it from the 1961 Crown edition, p. 23. Supports the legitimacy of the convention.
Janis, Allen 2018
"Conventionality of Simultaneity." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, first published 1998, substantive revision 21 July 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-convensimul/ Held in the library.
The state of the philosophical debate, and the reason neither side of the ASC argument can claim it is settled. Malament's 1977 theorem is the strongest argument against conventionality — standard synchrony is the only non-trivial simultaneity relation definable from causal connectibility alone — and Torretti and Norton read it as decisive. Grünbaum's 2010 critique, and arguments by Janis, Redhead, and Debs and Redhead, hold that it is not: "Malament's remarkable proof has not undermined my thesis that, in the STR, relative simultaneity is conventional." Complicates, in both directions.
Malament, David 1977
"Causal Theories of Time and the Conventionality of Simultaneity." Noûs 11(3):293–300. Not obtained. Cited only as the Stanford Encyclopedia characterises it, which is enough for the use the article makes of it. Worth obtaining if this section is ever expanded.
The James Webb prediction
Lisle, Jason 2022
"The James Webb Space Telescope." Biblical Science Institute, 21 January 2022. https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/astronomy/the-james-webb-space-telescope/ Held in the library, with his 9 September 2022 follow-up "Creation Cosmology Confirmed."
The strongest single item on the young-earth side of this article. Published before the telescope reached its operating orbit and six months before the first science image, with a section headed "Predictions." Two matter. The one that came true: "Rather than galaxies just starting to form, I expect to see fully-formed (fully-designed) galaxies at unprecedented distances. This will force secular astronomers to adjust their estimates of when the earliest galaxies formed … We might see headlines like 'Webb discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.'" The one that has not: "I don't expect to see evidence of genuine Population III stars … I predict it won't be zero as required by the big bang model." Supports.
Witze, Alexandra 2022
"Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies." Nature news, 27 July 2022. Held in the library as the Internet Archive capture of 4 August 2022.
The independent record of what happened sixteen days after the first deep field, and the reason Lisle's prediction has to be scored as a hit rather than waved away. "Webb's distant galaxies are also turning out to have more structure than astronomers had expected"; "up to ten times as many distant disk-shaped galaxies as previously thought"; Labbé's team "reports finding seven massive galaxies in the CEERS field, with redshifts between 7 and 10." And the line everyone quoted: "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning … wondering if everything I've ever done is wrong." Supports.
Barnes, Luke A. 2024
"Size of Galaxies in JWST Data and Cosmology — Reply to Lisle." Answers Research Journal 17:785–789. Held in the library.
The check on how the "secular astronomers expect X" half of these predictions gets constructed, published in a young-earth journal by a working cosmologist. Its target is Lisle's 2024 quantitative argument from galaxy sizes, not the 2022 prediction, and the distinction matters: "Once the straw man is replaced by a more realistic set of assumptions, there is no inconsistency," and "the 'standard model' prediction of Lisle (2024) is both inadequate and inexcusable. It is a straw man." Barnes also finds the Doppler model "physically indistinguishable from an expanding space model. It is a mere redescription." Complicates.
Maiolino, Roberto, et al. 2026
"The search for Population III: Confirmation of a HeII emitter with no metal lines at z=10.6." arXiv:2603.20362v4. Preprint, no journal reference at retrieval. Held in the library.
Bears on Lisle's second 2022 prediction. A fifty-two-author team reports a helium-1640 emitter three kiloparsecs from GN-z11, spectrally resolved into two components, with an equivalent width above 20 Å and "no metal lines detected," concluding that "Population III stars are the most plausible explanation … with no satisfactory alternative from other classes of sources or mechanisms." A non-detection of metals is an upper limit, not a measurement of zero, so this does not settle the prediction. Complicates.
Venditti, Alessandra, et al. 2026
"How can we finally see the first light? Status and perspective in the search for Population III stars." arXiv:2607.00167v2, doi:10.33232/001c.167811. Held in the library.
The field's own summary three months later, and more cautious than the GN-z11 headline: the methods now in play are "yielding a growing number of observational candidates and narrowing the allowed parameter space for the first stars, setting the stage for a 'golden era' of Pop III searches." Candidates, not a detection. Background.
The observations any answer has to reproduce
Pietrzyński, G., et al. 2019
"A distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud that is precise to one per cent." Nature 567:200; arXiv:1903.08096. Held in the library.
Twenty eclipsing binary systems, a surface-brightness–colour relation calibrated to 0.8 per cent, and a geometric distance of 49.59 ± 0.09 (stat) ± 0.54 (syst) kpc — about 161,700 light years. ("distane" in the abstract is as printed.) No Cepheids, no rungs. Undercuts the "question the distances" answer.
Panagia, N., et al. 1991
"Properties of the SN 1987A Circumstellar Ring and the Distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud." Astrophysical Journal 380:L23–L26. Held in the library.
The classic geometric distance to the same galaxy, by a completely different route: the ring's angular diameter from Hubble against its absolute diameter from the light-travel delay in the ultraviolet emission lines. d(1987A) = 51.2 ± 3.1 kpc, about 167,000 light years, agreeing with the eclipsing binaries. Undercuts the same answer, independently.
Grebenev, S. A., et al. 2012
"Hard X-ray emission lines from the decay of ⁴⁴Ti in the remnant of supernova 1987A." Nature 490:373–375; arXiv:1211.2656. Held in the library.
Two direct-escape lines of titanium-44 at 67.9 and 78.4 keV, detected by INTEGRAL, with an inferred initial mass of (3.1 ± 0.8) × 10⁻⁴ M☉. Nuclear physics running at its laboratory rate 162,000 light years away. Undercuts any model that needs the constants to have been different where that light came from.
Blondin, S., et al. 2008
"Time Dilation in Type Ia Supernova Spectra at High Redshift." Astrophysical Journal 682:724–736; arXiv:0804.3595. Held in the library.
Thirteen high-redshift supernovae, spectrally aged; the observed aging rate is "consistent with the 1/(1 + z) factor," which "unambiguously" excludes no-time-dilation models. Cited here as one of the observations a young-universe cosmology must reproduce. All of the surviving models do reproduce it, because they reproduce standard cosmology. Background.
BICEP/Keck Collaboration 2021
"Improved Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves using Planck, WMAP, and BICEP/Keck Observations through the 2018 Observing Season." Physical Review Letters 127:151301; arXiv:2110.00483. Held in the library.
r₀.₀₅ < 0.036 at 95% confidence, σ(r) = 0.009, "the strongest constraints to date on primordial gravitational waves." Cited for the honest concession that inflation — the standard answer to the big bang's own light-travel-time problem — has not been confirmed by its distinctive signature. Supports the young-earth side's parity argument, within limits.
Cited but not central
Faulkner, Danny R. 2016
"Thoughts on the rāqîa' and a Possible Explanation for the Cosmic Microwave Background." Answers Research Journal 9:57–65. Held in the library.
Faulkner's proposal that the microwave background is redshifted thermal radiation from the "waters above." Cited for its author's own disclaimer: his worked example gives 30 K against an observed 2.7255 K, and "it is easy to pick pairs of their values that would result in a match with the CMB." A proposal that can be tuned to any temperature predicts none. Undercuts.
Moon, Parry, and Spencer, Domina Eberle 1953
"Binary Stars and the Velocity of Light." Journal of the Optical Society of America 43(8):635. doi:10.1364/josa.43.000635 Not obtained. Citation verified through Crossref. Nothing is claimed about it beyond what Faulkner and Akridge report: it proposes Riemannian light paths with a maximum length of about 15.71 light years.
Akridge, G. Russell 1984
"The universe is bigger than 15.71 light years." Creation Research Society Quarterly 21(1):18–22. Not obtained. Cited from Faulkner 2013's reference list as the critical discussion that retired the non-Euclidean proposal inside the creationist literature.
Harris, D. M. 1978; Gray, G. 2005; Chaffin, E. 1992; DeYoung, D. 2010, 2011; Taylor, J. 2005, 2006
All not obtained, and all cited in the article only as Repp 2022 reports them: Harris for the infinite-c-with-a-slowing-front proposal, Gray for the biosphere or "soft gap" model, Chaffin as the reference behind the creationist consensus against c decay, DeYoung for the strongest recent defence of created light in transit, and Taylor for the observation that in-transit creation would have to cover matter as well as light. Repp quotes DeYoung directly, which is the only place the article quotes any of them.
Citation traps in this literature
Anyone re-using this material should know where the mines are. Four of these produced real errors during drafting.
- Two-column ARJ, CEN and CRSQ PDFs interleave under naive
pdftotext. A plain extraction of Lisle 2010 welds the two columns together and makes real sentences look like nonsense — "will need that—a convention. It is not a scientific model; it to be modified." Crop the columns (pdftotext -x 0 -W 306and-x 306 -W 306on a letter-size page) and read the printed page off the running head of the same page. - Lisle says two different things about predictions on the same page, and both are quotable. The convention "does not make testable predictions"; the model "does make testable claims and is therefore falsifiable." Quoting either without the other misrepresents him. Both are on p. 204.
- Humphreys' 1998 reproductions of his own 1994 book carry bracketed glosses that are not in the book, and his reproduction of Conner and Page splices a word from their abstract into a sentence from their introduction. Go to the originals.
- "Humphreys abandoned the white hole" rests on Faulkner's report, not on a Humphreys retraction. Humphreys' own 2008 paper says only that "the cosmology this paper outlines is a new one that does not stem from the Klein metric." Say who reports the abandonment.
- Hartnett has three separate retraction statements with three separate dates (19 April 2019, 11 March 2021, 23 June 2021). Citing the 2007 book without them is out of date.
- The ICC proceedings moved to a repository that refuses browsers and accepts plain HTTP clients. Cedarville migrated
digitalcommons.cedarville.eduto TIND;cgi/viewcontent.cginow returns a "content has moved" page, the Wayback Machine has snapshots of some article IDs but not others, and a real Chrome session oncedarville.tind.iogets a bare403 Forbiddenfrom the site's AWS web application firewall.curlgets HTTP 200 from the same URL. The working route is: resolve the paper's DOI (https://doi.org/10.15385/jpicc.2018.8.1.11) to a record number, fetchhttps://cedarville.tind.io/record/<n>with curl, and take the/record/<n>/files/<name>.pdflink out of the HTML. Dennis 2018 is record 21134, Tenev et al. 2018 is record 21151. Also note that on the archived volume index the PDF link for an item appears before its title in the DOM, so a naive title-then-link pairing is off by one — that cost three wasted fetches before the DOI route was found. - Faulkner's 2017 supernova-remnant PDF is at a URL that misspells "remnants" (
supernova_remants_missing.pdf). The correctly spelled URL 404s. Both spellings appear in the Wayback index; only the misspelled one resolves.
What could not be obtained
Listed with the route someone else could take.
- Newton [Lisle] 2001, TJ 15(1):80–85. The original ASC paper. Route: the Journal of Creation back-issue archive at creation.com, or a library copy.
- Norman and Setterfield 1987, The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time. Route: setterfield.org, or Flinders University's technical report series.
- Byl 1997, CRSQ 34:26–32, and Byl 1998, CRSQ (volume number garbled in Repp's reference list). Route: the CRSQ index, or Byl's own site.
- Hartnett 2013, IJTP 52:4360–4366. DOI 10.1007/s10773-013-1752-7 resolves and paywalls. Route: a preprint link on Hartnett's blog, or institutional SpringerLink access.
- Malament 1977, Noûs 11:293–300. Route: JSTOR.
- Moon and Spencer 1953 and Akridge 1984. Route: Optica's archive for the first; the CRSQ index for the second.
- Faulkner, "Comments on the Cosmic Microwave Background," ARJ 7 (2014): 83–90. The PDF is in the library but its embedded font encoding is broken and extraction produces mojibake. Route: OCR, or the HTML article body.