quote:
I was just outside with my telescope looking at the stars and a question popped up in my head.
- New earth creationists believe the earth, heavens and all life on earth were created between 5 700 and 10 000 years ago.
- Light travels at 299 792 458 meter/second or 186 282 mile/second
- So the distance of 1 lightyear is just under 10 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles.
If the earth and all the stars and galaxies were created 10 000 years ago, the max distance light could have traveled is 10 000 lightyears.
BTW, the term is "Young earth creationists" (YEC's) not "New earth creationists".
As Dr A has said, there are a number of standard answers.
1) the simplest answer: God created light in transit. But when one considers the vast amount of information which is contained in the light from a star, this makes God seem deceptive. (The spectrum tells us elemental composition, recessional velocity, rotational velocity, etc.) Thus some YECs have said this argument
should not be used.
2) another answer is that the speed of light was much faster in the past. But the main evidence for this is an imaginative analysis of historical data by Setterfield, which has been questioned even by other YECs. Again, some YECs have said that this argument
should not be used.
3) Jason Lisle has recently proposed
an imaginative theory, that the speed of light moves instantaneously
toward an observer, and at 1/2 c
away from an observer. He claims freedom to do this because he believes that we can only measure the
round trip speed of light, but not the
one-way speed of light. But in this he is wrong. We have good measurements of the one-way speed of light, and devices such as particle accelerators and free-electron lasers would not work if the one-way speed of light were not c.
I think the speed of light is a good issue to raise with YECs. I have a YEC friend who became an OEC ("old earth creationist") after thinking about the explosion of SN 1987A.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." — Albert Einstein
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. — Erwin Schroedinger
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