Can anyone?
"This discussion is not really about God at all, but about the truth claims of methodological naturalism in dealing with the unobservable past. Even if one finds the right settings of the knobs that produce a resemblance to these bodies, how would one know the model is true? By tweaking parameters in a model, which is not reality but a simplification of it, the modeler has only applied his or her intelligent design to achieve a correspondence between an imaginary prehistory and the actual history of the world. Is the correspondence real or contrived? If it feels satisfying to discover a correspondence, how is this feeling validated? When a whole class of causes (specifically, intelligent causes) has been ruled out from the get-go, then what remains must be forced to fit even when it does not fit very well."
I am sure that scientists will try. And very likely someone will come up with an explanation—a model—that accounts for the observations.
If and when that happens, will that be the "Truth"? No. It will simply be a model that has not yet been discarded. The model may be nothing like what really happened; but so long as it explains the facts and allows us to make predictions, it will be useful. That is about all we can expect from a scientific model.
Look, I believe that God created everything in the heavens and the earth. But God's methods of creation—including his timetable—he has chosen not to share with us. (Personally, I think that God almost always operates according to what we might call natural law.)
It could be that God created everything out of nothing in a mere six 24-hour days, as some interpreters of the Bible maintain. But where does that leave us? To my knowledge, no one has built a useful scientific model on the foundation of creation ex nihilo.
And that was precisely the point of my question: Can the critics actually offer an alternative model based on a creationist point of view that (1) adequately explains the observed facts about nature and (2) allows us to make predictions?