Yes a challenge. Well, this is a side argument that you are picking up. Not my main argument saying that you need to prove that the universe has no beginning to show atheist has merits.
In this side argument, what have you modeled? My first guess to modeling the sun’s rays in its complexity would be like . Here we model the millions of neutrons derived from and destroyed in nuclear reactions. So sun rays can be the same thing. Except it’s a little more complicated. Photons have group velocities (in 4 D space), wave velocities (in 4 D space), frequencies, orientation, effective mass, momentum (in 4 D space). So you would have to model each of that, and that’s only from my limited knowledge. That’s 15 dimensions. Now to get the number of photons accurately, you will need a model of the 10 million reactions or so every second in the sun. You can fudge it a bit since we are only talking about the light rays, by using monty carlo methods to estimate the appearance of each photon on the sun. Since the sun is, what, 100 earth diameters, that’s quite a large volume to approximate. That alone even in 1 D, I do not know of any supercomputer that can handle that. Now add 15 variables to it to describe the individual photons. Now with 10 million reactions, in 16 variables, it will take some large number of supercomputers. Now that is just the initial conditions.
In space there are many minute particles, but they will not have much of an effect on the photons. What is crazy are the magnetic fields. Since the sun’s magnetic field along encompasses the earth, we have to use relativistic equations to get accurate photon trajectories and attenuation. Quantum computers may be able to do that, but any real modeling will be only be zero,1 or 2 order approximations or some approximation. There will definitely be a sizable error margin. Modeling radioactive leakage over 10,000 years alone has error bars several times the size of the data. These error bars would be tremendously greater if we had to approximate and we will. Cause there are too many variables.
Now comes the easier to understand but thought to compute part. The multitude (I have no idea how many just that it is a lot) of absorption and remittance of these photons across the sky. I’m not talking about simple water vapor, but I’m talking about electron to electron interaction here.
Hehe, then there is the way less tedious calculation of rays hitting and interacting with your eyes. Whew, just typing this makes me hungry.
So how would you do this? Or anyone?
Whenever we say something that CD doesn’t agree with, he simply says “you say that because you’re ignorant.”