Starlight and Time Problem

This May, 2010, a science club composed of a large number of home school groups in Tucson invited speakers from the Arizona Origin Science Association (AzOSA.org) to present lectures on Creation Science. On the last day, the teachers and students requested I add a presentation on starlight and time and answer the question: “If we can see galaxies that are billions of light years away, how can the universe be less than 10,000 years old?

First, let me give you a little background into the controversy that is raging in our classrooms on the subject of creation or intelligent design being taught alongside naturalistic evolution in our schools and colleges. The general argument against teaching creation or intelligent design in our schools is that these subjects are religious, whereas evolution is scientific. I want to show briefly here that both creation and evolution are based on faith. . I will expound on this in detail in a separate blog, but for now let’s examine the evolutionary and creation views regarding the origin of the universe.

The Evolutionary Model is based on Faith

About 16 billion years ago the universe came into being out of a big bang. Then, about 4.billion years ago the earth evolved. About 3.5 billion years ago life evolved on earth. Finally, humans evolved from ape-like creatures 1-2 billion years ago. Note here that one must take a huge leap of faith to accept that the origin of everything came from nothing, a violation of the laws of physics and causality as we know them. We also must accept by faith that life arose from non-life. We will talk about this later, so you will want to keep reading my blogs.

The Creation Model is based on Faith

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He created the stars and galaxies and all life. Note here it one must take a leap of faith and believe in a Creator God. So you really have a choice to make; put your faith in blind chance, or in God.

The Creation Model Can Explain the Starlight and Time Problem

Several creation models have addressed the starlight and time problem, and we will briefly discuss three. I will keep you updated on a new theory as more research is reported. The first and oldest theory states that light was created in transit. The problem with this theory is the light would be carrying images of events that never happened. For example, consider Supernova 1987a, visible in one of the Magellanic clouds. This theory would say the star never exploded at all. Instead God created an already-exploded dead star, and He created the image of an explosion along the path from that star to us, 6000 light-years away from us. Most astronomical data would be fiction. How then, could the "heavens declare the glory of God"?

The second theory is that the speed of light was once millions of times faster than it is today. I have worked a little with the author of this theory, Barry Setterfield and although his theory has caused controversy concerning the statistical analysis of the data, I believe his theory could ultimately provide answers to a lot of questions about red shifts, cosmic background radiation, and other problems in astronomy and geology.

The third theory was proposed by creation physicist Russell Humphries, author of the book Starlight and Time. This is the theory that uses Einstein’s theory of relativity. After all, it was God who invented relativity! Einstein merely discovered it. A certain effect of relativity allows light to travel across the universe during a single ordinary day in the earth's past, the 4th day of creation. This effect allows distant galaxies to age billions of years during the 4th day — yet if you had been on earth that day, it would have seemed to be no longer than a day is today.

This would mean that clocks — and all physical processes —ticked at very different rates in different parts of the early universe. Dr. Humphries idea is a logical consequence of putting what the Bible says about the cosmos into Einstein's theory of relativity.

Dr. Humphries takes the Bible at face value. Then he follows up the scientific consequences according to Einstein's (general) theory of relativity. The result is a theory which has a young earth rather than one billions of years old.

Perhaps our current “scientific” interpretation of what we observe is not correct and science really supports exactly what the Bible teaches – a young universe!