Starlight, Time, & the New Physics

The problem: Many stars are millions, even billions of light-years away (a light-year is the distance light travels in one year). So it would seem obvious that it takes light millions of years to reach us from those stars. But how can this be in a universe that, the Bible makes plain, is only thousands of years old? For many, this is a huge stumbling block to accepting the straightforward creation history in the Bible. But Genesis history is crucial to the logic of the gospel (a good world, ruined by sin, to be restored in the future), so this is a major issue. A common response from believers is to say that God could have created the light ‘on its way’. But light from distant stars also carries information—galaxies rotating, stars exploding. So if that information never left the star, but was created ‘en route’, this means that in a 6,000-year-old universe, anything we see beyond 6,000 light-years away would be a phony light show. This is because the information in the light beams recording those events would have necessarily been created ‘en route’, thus the events would never have taken place in the actual stars themselves. In other words, it would involve a God of truth creating a completely unnecessary false history. It’s really not far removed from the embarrassing suggestion around Darwin’s time that God created the fossils in the rock. Finish reading this review here: http://christianreader.typepad.com/christian_reader/2009/06/starlight-and-time.html