Why do creationists claim gravitational time dilation makes a young earth possible?

Gravitational time dilation, if it existed on such a large scale, should be easily observable. On the contrary, we observe (from the periods of Cepheid variable stars, from orbital rates of binary stars, from supernova extinction rates, from light frequencies, etc.) that such time dilation is minor. There is some time dilation corresponding with Hubble's law (i.e., further objects have greater red shifts), but this is due to the well-understood expansion of the universe, and it is not nearly extreme enough to fit more than ten billion years into less than 10,000.





Humphreys tried to use clocks in the earth's frame of reference. But the cosmos is much older than the earth. Judging from the heavy elements in the sun and the rest of the solar system, our sun is a second-generation star at least. Billions of years must have passed for the first stars to have formed, shone, and become novas, for the gasses from those novas to have gathered into new star systems, and for the earth to form and cool in one such system. The billions of years before the earth are not accounted for in Humphreys's model.





Humphreys's theory assumes that the earth is in a huge gravity well. The evidence contradicts this assumption. If the earth were in such a gravity well, light from distant galaxies should be blue-shifted. Instead, it is red-shifted.





See Conner and Page (1998) and Conner and Ross (1999) for several other technical objections.





There is a great deal of other independent evidence that the earth is very old.





If there were any substance to Humphreys's proposal, at least some competent cosmologists would build on it and share in the Nobel Prize. Instead, they dismiss it as worthless.|||The name sounds made up in order to impress other YECs that it is true.





Rev. Neil|||Don't paint with such a wide brush ~ not every creationist believes in a young earth. Disproving the young earth theory doesn't disprove the Creator.|||Please wake me up when its over......yawn!!!!|||Because they don't understand it to the point wherein they can actually do the math and figure just what exactly gravitational time dilation would require the universe to be like physically to cause the effects they describe in the first place.





They just jump on the qualitative meaning of words and refuse to entertain the idea that just because it says X it doesn't necessarily imply "significant X for your explanatory purposes".|||They don't really try to understand the argument: anything that superficially confirms their biases is repeated without further reflection.





Unfortunately, it doesn't do much good to refute a creationist's argument because he doesn't really understand his own argument in the first place. He'll just trot out another cut-and-pasted fallacy and say, "But what about that, huh? That sounds all science-y and says evolution is wrong. Checkmate."|||I haven't heard that as much as the universe expansion rate argument (see Einsten and Hubble).


All theories assume since we can't observe. There's also a great deal of "evidence" that the earth is rather young. It all depends on the assumptions.


If we assume that there is a God for instance (even though he can't be proven by observation), then we assume it's not possible to have happened by chance. On the flip side if we assume that there is no God (again, can't be proven against by observation) then we leave no room for having a purpose here. There's always going to be assumptions, we just need to clear out as many as possible by making observations and even then we still have to assume that which we cannot observe.|||I don't claim this at all.|||I haven't heard this one before.But who cares anyway? No one takes them seriously.