Oh, my goodness Mellie, that link you gave me about creationist astronomy!!!! dizzy

The creationist physicist D. Russel Humphreys makes this argument:

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In contrast to the big bang story, the Scriptural record appears to imply that the universe is in fact, an island universe. Appendix B of Starlight and Time shows Biblical evidence that (a) the cosmos has a unique center and a boundary for its matter, beyond which there is at least some empty space; and (b) on a cosmic scale of distances, the earth is near the center.
The Earth is near the center of the universe! Right!

And there is more. Since the Earth, according to Humphreys, is near the center of the universe, we are also at the bottom of an enormous cosmic gravity well:

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But in a creationist cosmos having a center of gravity, if you were to travel outward from the center you would, on the average, go steadily "upward" in a gravitational sense. On a large scale, the heavens would be at a higher gravitational "altitude" than the earth. As Isaiah 55:9 says: "For as the heavens are higher than the earth . . ."
And where gravity is stronger, time passes more slowly. So, since the gravity would be enormous on the Earth, since we are at the center of the universe, time would pass incomparably more slowly here than in most of the universe:

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My theory proposes that the cosmos was at that critical size during the fourth day of Creation Week. While one ordinary day was elapsing on earth, billions of years worth of physical processes were taking place in distant parts of the universe. This allows starlight from even the most distant star to arrive during or soon after the fourth day, the same day God created all the stars. During that day, most of the expansion of the cosmos would have taken place.
So because of the humongous gravity here on the Earth, only a week went by on the Earth while billions of years passed out in the cosmos. So the light from the stars didn't get here until the fourth day, the same day that God created all the stars! Of course, the Bible tells us that God created not only all the other stars but also our own Sun on the fourth day, after the Earth was already a green and living planet full of herbs and fruit trees! But I guess that the gravity of the Earth was so overwhelming that the light from the Sun, eight light minutes from the Earth, took four days to reach us?

As for the statement that the Earth is very near the center of the universe so that gravity is much higher here than anywhere else in the cosmos, please take a look at this picture of a distant galaxy cluster:

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At the two o'clock position in this picture you can see an enormous elliptical galaxy, a so called class D galaxy. This monster galaxy is surrounded by a swarm of other, smaller galaxies, all of them yellowish in color. But you can also see a number of long thin drawn-out lines or arcs. The long arcs are galaxies far in the background of the cluster of yellow galaxies. (The background galaxies are mostly either blue, because they are full of extremely hot young stars, or red, because they are very distant and have had their light severely reddened by the stretching of the expanding universe.)

But why do the background galaxies have such weird, drawn-out shapes? The reason why they look like that is that the light they sent out has been distorted and "bent" by the enormously deep cosmic "gravity well" of the massive yellow galaxy cluster in front of them. Einstein predicted that background galaxies would have their visual appearance bent into long arcs by a massive foreground cluster, so the arcs you can see in this picture beautifully confirm Einstein's thory of relativity, and they also bear witness to the enormous mass and gravity of the foreground cluster.

Do you still think that the Earth is not only at the center of the universe, but that the cosmic gravity is higher near the Earth than anywhere else in the cosmos?

Ann