The Big Bang is both beloved and despised among members of ID’s big tent. William Lane Craig, Guillermo Gonzalez, etc. favor the Big Bang. But the YECs in ID’s big tent despise the Big Bang because it disagrees with YEC. Thus the YECs have formed a rather strange alliance with certain ID-haters who despise the Big Bang because of the Big Bang’s quasi-theistic implications.
If the YECs succeed in solving the distant starlight problem and falsify the Big Bang’s chronology, then that will favor ID, but if the Big Bang is falsified in favor of an eternal universe, that will be unfavorable to ID since ID proponents might have to reject the Universal Probability Bound that is the core of many ID arguments. So Arp’s work against the Big Bang is a two-edged sword depending on how the Big Bang is potentially falsified. Nevertheless, some in ID’s big tent (the YECs) love Arp’s work.
Halton Christian “Chip” Arp (1927-2013) passed away December 28, 2013.
From Arp’s Website:
Short biography for Halton C. Arp
Halton C. Arp received his Bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1949 and his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1953, both cum laude. He is a professional astronomer who, earlier in his career, conducted Edwin Hubble’s nova search in M31. He has earned the Helen B.Warner prize, the Newcomb Cleveland award and the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award. For 28 years he was staff astronomer at the Mt. Palomar and Mt. Wilson observatories. While there, he produced his well known catalog of “Peculiar Galaxies” that are disturbed or irregular in appearance.
Arp discovered, from photographs and spectra with the big telescopes, that many pairs of quasars (“quasi-stellar objects”) which have extremely high redshift z values (and are therefore thought to be receding from us very rapidly – and thus must be located at a great distance from us) are physically connected to galaxies that have low redshift and are known to be relatively close by. Because of Arp’s observations, the assumption that high red shift objects have to be very far away – on which the “Big Bang” theory and all of “accepted cosmology” is based – has to be fundamentally reexamined.!
YEC physicist John Hartnett offers a favorable review of Arp’s work HERE.
HT: tjguy