Creation Science Talk: How Can We See Distant Starlight.

The biggest challenge from a creation science standpoint given the fact that the speed of light is finite is being able to see stars that are more than 6000 light years away. Several solutions to this problem have been proposed but unfortunately, some of them produce more problems than they solve.

The first solution proposed was that God created the light already in transit. There are two main problems with this idea. The first problem is the fact that there is nothing scientific about it, it is simply a patch to make the problem go away. The second problem is that the overwhelming majority of what we see in the sky never actually happened, basically making God an author of fiction. Finally, there is nothing to gain from this solution other than fixing a problem.

The second proposed solution Is it the speed of light has decayed since creation, making this decaying part of the fall. The first problem with this is that it did not really explain what it was originally intended to explain which was redshift. The second problem turned out to be the poor quality of some of the past data being used as evidence. Its biggest problem was the relationship between the speed of light, mass, and energy. The simple fact is that the decaying speed of light would cause way more problems than it fixes.

One little-known proposed solution was that the speed of light was slower within the sun's magnetosphere than in the space between the stars. This idea had the benefit of making testable predictions, those predictions were about what would happen when the Voyager spacecraft passed the sun's heliopause. However, this idea was entirely falsified by the fact that the two-way single delay continues to increase after BOTH Voyager spacecraft past the sun's heliopause.

One solution that remains quite popular, based on general relativity was formulated by Dr. Russell Humphreys, called the White Hole cosmology envisions the universe as bounded, that is the matter does not continue indefinitely but it actually has an edge to it, as opposed to The Big Bang cosmology where marriage just keeps going on and on forever. In this model, the water above the firmament described in Genesis 1:7 and Psalms 148:4 serves as the boundary layer along with the earth starting at the center. This is not geocentric in the classic sense in that the universe does not rotate around the Earth, we are merely physically located near the center. One of the consequences of this model would be a large amount of time dilation in the Earth's location, including the possibility of time actually being stopped on Earth while God was creating the distant stars. The result of this time dilation would be that in dissent locations of the universe there would be plenty of time for light to reach the earth while from our position it could still be about 6000 years old. One of the added consequences of this model is that it is capable of explaining the type 1A supernova measurements that have been interpreted as an accelerating expansion resulting in the idea of dark energy to save the Big Bang but doing so without the need for dark energy. This is because the residual time dilation would produce a slight blue shift relative to the redshift caused by the expansion of the universe.

The most recent solution called the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention was first proposed by Dr. Jason Lisle and is based on the fact that under Special and General Relativity there is no absolute now. That is that there is a wide range of how you can synchronize clocks in a relativistic universe the standard way of doing so which results in light from distant galaxies being millions and billions of years old is called the Isotropic Synchrony Convention. In this convention for synchronizing clocks, the one-way speed of light is the same in all directions and for all observers. Now according to the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, the speed of light is infinite when it is coming towards the observer at 1/2 the speed of light when going away from the observer. Under these circumstances, you would be observing everything in the universe as it happens, and there is no dissent Starlight problem. See the references for a full description of this concept.

Interestingly, after all these years we have not just one but two workable ways of solving the distance Starlight problem. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that they are not mutually exclusive. both of these solutions rely on well-established physics that has been around for over 100 years. Ultimately the problem only exists from the standpoint of the unbiblical Big Bang cosmology and insisting that there is only one approach to synchronizing clocks in a relativistic universe.

References: The Anisotropic Synchrony Convention