Distant Starlight and a Young Earth

Job 38:1-5

As Christians, we take God’s Word about His Creation. He is, after all, the only eyewitness. The Bible answers the questions of who, what, where, and even when. When science claims otherwise, we believe God by faith. We weren’t there, and neither were they.

Job 38:1-5

¹ Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, ² Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? ³ Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. ⁴ Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. ⁵ Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?.

It takes a lot of nerve to think you have it all figured out. This passage reveals that we can’t figure out the measures of how God stretched out the heavens.

Science answers to God, and not the other way around. But you don’t have to ignore science and set your brain on the shelf to believe the truth about Creation. What Christians have believed by faith for millennia without proof we can now believe by faith plus scientific evidence. That evidence is not required by me in order to continue to believe. But it gives me answers to offer to those who try to use science to disprove the truth.

Opponents of our young Earth, which we know to be about 6,000 years old, use several arguments to postulate that the universe is actually billions of years old. But most of those arguments are today easily debunked using known science. [Still, most people today believe everything is eons old because the theory of evolution is taught as fact at almost all levels.] Much of the evidence for a young creation lies in the rocks around us, but other evidence isn’t on this planet, but in space. And since evolutionist’s earth evidence doesn’t pan out as they had hoped, they want to talk about the stars. They believe it to be their strongest argument and one which cannot be refuted: that for us to see stars that are millions or billions of light years away, our now seeing them conclusively proves that they are millions or billions of years old. Keep in mind that most of God’s creation isn’t on the Earth, though we are the focus of His plan. So let’s talk about those stars and the light they produce.

Let’s start with the star we orbit. Any time you glance at the sun you are not looking at where it is, exactly, but where it was about 8 minutes ago. Why is that? Because even at light speed, its rays take that long to travel the 93 million mile distance to our eyes. That sounds far, but it’s really close compared to all other stars which are light years away, rather than just light minutes away. The next closest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4 light years away. So as we look at that star, we are seeing what it looked like 4 years ago. You could surmise that if it exploded today, going supernova, we wouldn’t know about it for 4 years. So if our sun was to suddenly go out, we wouldn’t know about it for 8 minutes.

About 40 years ago a star known as SN 1987A exploded. Located about 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, it was the first naked-eye visible supernova in four centuries, and so it was the first that could be studied using modern tech. But when did it actually explode? Was it just 40 years ago, or 168k years ago, or some other time? Keep in mind that the light-year is a unit of distance, not time. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, about six trillion miles. Right away, the distance of the stars obviously raises a perceived problem for a recent creation. If the world is only six thousand years old, how could we have seen SN 1987A? For that matter, what about all those other galaxies that are much farther away? How can we see anything in the universe that is more than 6,000 light-years away? Creationists get this question so often that we have a name for it: the light travel time problem. Over the years, creationists have offered several answers to this problem.

Mature Creation

A popular solution to the light travel time problem is the concept of a mature creation. God did not create man and woman as babies or as embryos. Rather, the Genesis Creation account indicates that God made Adam and Eve as mature adults. Suppose one could go back in a time machine to shortly after the Creation Week, say on Day Eight. Examination of the first couple would have indicated that they were adults, perhaps in their twenties, even though Adam and Eve were only a couple days old. That is, Adam and Eve were created mature, without the normal birth and growth process that humans go through to reach maturity.

Likewise, the plants in the Garden of Eden (and elsewhere on Earth) would have looked mature too, even though they didn’t exist more than three days before the creation of Adam and Eve. The Day Three account says that God caused the plants to grow out of the ground (Genesis 1:11–12). This happened in less than one day, because God made the dry land appear one day before he made the plants appear. Why was it important that the plants rapidly reach maturity so quickly? According to Genesis 1:29–30, originally man and animals were vegetarian. The plants could not fulfill this purpose if they were not mature. This pattern of maturity would seem to apply to all the creation week.

This concept of maturity, or the appearance of age, also played out in some of the miracles that Jesus performed. Jesus’ first public miracle was the changing of water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana (John 2:1–11). When the wine ran out, a very embarrassing thing for the bridegroom, Jesus changed water in six large stone vessels into wine to supply the need. The servants who witnessed the miracle took the wine to the master of the feast, who did not witness the miracle. The master of the feast was impressed with the quality of the wine and commended the bridegroom for not serving the best wine first, which was the common practice, but rather held back the best wine for later in the feast. A marriage feast could go on for days, so the master of the feast apparently thought that the wine was at least a few days old. However, anyone who did not witness the miracle would have thought the wine was even older than that. After grapes are grown, harvested, and crushed, the fermentation and aging process of wine takes some months. Any reasonable person would have concluded that the wine was the result of this process and hence was mature. When confronted with the fact the wine did not exist until a few minutes before, one would be left with the conclusion that the wine had the appearance of age. Similarly, one may argue that feeding of the 5,000 (Matthew 14:15–21) required the appearance of age. Jesus multiplied the five loaves and two fish to feed the multitude. Anyone who did not witness the miracle but examined the fish created by the miracle would have reasonably concluded that the fish were hatched and grown in the Sea of Galilee before being caught, processed (cooked?), and transported to the location to be eaten. Likewise, one would reasonably conclude that the bread was the result of grain that was sown, grown, harvested, milled, and then baked. All these processes normally take considerable time, but none of these processes happened. Again, this miracle required the appearance of age.

Creationists who appeal to mature creation to solve the light travel time problem reason that if most astronomical bodies were not visible at least by the end of the Creation Week, then the astronomical bodies could not fulfill their functions given in the Day Four account (Genesis 1:14–19). Therefore, God must have created the universe mature, with light created in transit between them and the earth. But such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God. The light we receive from distant astronomical bodies is not just illumination. Details of the light often bear evidence of other events. Like the supernova we saw 40 years ago. Are we saying that God created the appearance of a supernova already in transit, just 6,000 light years away from the Earth?

Another question: Our bodies have subtle evidence of things that occurred during our growth and maturing processes. The most obvious of these are small scars of minor injuries sustained while growing up, but there are other evidences, such as the sealing off of the ends of our leg bones upon completion of the growth process. Did Adam and Eve bear in their bodies any evidence of a childhood they never experienced? Most supporters of mature creation would answer that Adam and Eve did notm any more than they had belly buttons. This amounts to an affirmation that while Adam and Eve were created mature, they did not bear any detailed evidence of processes that never happened. Such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God. And how about the trees God created. If you cut one down would it have had growth rings? I would think not.

So how can we see the light from distant stars if God didn’t create mature beams already here?

Decreasing Speed of Light

Some have suggested that the speed of light has changed over time. If the speed of light were infinite or near infinite when God made the stars, then their light could have reached the earth in a very short length of time. Supposedly, the speed of light has decreased since the creation week to the relatively modest 186,282 miles per second today. In the late 1980s, attention was drawn to the fact that the earliest measurements of the speed of light a few centuries ago were higher than the currently accepted value. Intervening measurement of the speed of light appeared as if they were gradually decreasing toward the modern value. If taken at face value, this would indicate the speed of light has decreased in modern times, though it raises the question of why this trend has recently ceased. Has it reached a terminal velocity?

General Relativity Solutions

The passage of time is not at the same rate to all observers. Depending upon location, time can pass more slowly in some reference frames than in others. It’s called Time Dilation. We now know that in the universe there are massive gravitational forces so strong that they can bend light, space, and time. Black holes are so strong that light can’t even escape them. And as you approach the ‘event horizon’ time slows down. Leading creationists today believe God may have created the Earth inside what they call a white hole. [Russ Humphreys’ white hole cosmology, published in 1994.] It would have evaporated on day four as God stretched out the heavens into place. With the earth at the center of the white hole, it would be the last thing to emerge from the white hole as the white hole vanished. Time on earth would pass at a normal rate to us, but very slowly compared to locations outside the event horizon, the outer boundary of the white hole. This would allow for billions of years to pass in much of the universe while only a few days might have elapsed on the earth. This would have provided ample time for light to reach the earth from the most distant parts of the universe.

Another version of this theory postulates a “timeless zone,” in God’s creation which again allowed much time to elapse in part of the universe but not everywhere.

Is There a Better Solution?

How much science [as we now know it] should we allow during the Creation Week? By its very nature, wasn’t the Creation Week miraculous? The creation of plants on Day Three hardly followed science as we know it. General relativity is one of the best scientific theories we have. This is why solutions to the light travel time problem based upon general relativity are so attractive. But how much science as we now know it should we allow during the Creation Week? Ditto for the creation of swimming and flying things on Day Five and the creation of land animals and man on Day Six. The creation of light on day one seems to have not followed the pattern of how light is understood to work today. The creation of astronomical bodies on Day Four likely wasn’t accomplished by physical processes currently in operation.

In short, all the processes during the Creation Week did not conform to how the world now operates, the description of which we call science. So, isn’t it inconsistent to expect the light travel time problem to have a naturalistic (scientific) explanation?

Just as God rapidly brought forth the plants on Day Three to meet their purposes, could God similarly have rapidly brought forth the light of the stars on Day Four so that they could fulfill their purposes? I am not suggesting this was done through the physics of general relativity or by altering physics so that the speed of light changed. Rather, I’m suggesting that God miraculously brought the light to earth from the farthest reaches of the universe right after he filled the universe with astronomical bodies. He Who makes the laws can break the laws anytime He wants.

This is called the dasha solution to the light time problem, from the Hebrew verb used in Genesis 1:11, where God said let the earth ‘bring forth’ grass. It literally means to shoot forth, like you would see in a time lapse video. Maybe God rapidly matured things upon creating them.

We recognize the role of the miraculous in so much of the rest of the creation week, so why must we restrict ourselves to a natural, physical mechanism to solve the light travel time problem? The dasha solution is the only answer for the light travel time problem that is consistent with the miracle of creation and the character of God.

These are the current leading theories about the light travel time problem. It’s mind blowing. But let’s close by looking at it all from a different angle: How much nerve does it take for man to think that he can figure out God and His massive universe? We are talking about light traveling great distances and yet the furthest man has traveled from Earth is 1.5 light seconds, the distance to the moon. Even Voyager II has only traveled about one light day away from the Earth in 50 years.

Interestinly, the Big Bang Model has its own light travel problems that they admit they cannot explain. But they have faith that there must be an explanation!

We believe God at His Word, and just as man doesn’t have enough information to prove how light travels, nor does man have enough information to use light as a disproof of what God, the only eyewitness, has told us.

[based largely on helps from Dr. Danny Faulkner]