The Distant Starlight Problem: What Are the Possible Answers?

The universe is enormous. For instance, the Andromeda Galaxy is two million light-years away, but it is the closest galaxy of any size. The James Webb Space Telescope has photographed galaxies that probably are more than 12 billion light-years away. Yet the six-day creation account of Genesis 1 and the genealogies found elsewhere in the Bible indicate that the world is only thousands of years old. If light only travels so fast, how can we see galaxies that are millions and even billions of light-years away?

First, keep in mind that the light-year is not a unit of time but rather a unit of distance. A light-year is the distance light would travel in one year assuming a constant speed of about 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/s), which is about six trillion miles (10 trillion km). So distances expressed in light-years are not necessarily reflective of elapsed time.

Still, the distant starlight problem needs to be acknowledged and addressed by recent creationists. And recent creationists have responded with various resolutions of the distant starlight problem.

Mature Creation

One proposal is known as mature creation. God did not create man and woman as embryos or babies that had to slowly develop and mature. Rather, God created the first humans as mature adults. If we could go back in time to the garden of Eden a few days past the creation, we might conclude that Adam and Eve had been around for more than 20 years, but we would be wrong. Similarly, God may have created the world mature so that Adam and Eve could see distant stars, even though all the stars are light-years, not light-days, away.

This view has been popular among recent creationists, but it has its problems. The light of distant stars and galaxies contain many details of events that seem to be real. For instance, for more than 45 years, I have studied eclipsing binary stars, systems of two stars orbiting one another so closely that we don’t see the individual stars. However, we see what appears to be a single star periodically dim as the two stars eclipse one another as they orbit. By observing and analyzing these eclipses, we can determine many properties of the stars involved, such as mass, shape, and even hot and cool spots on the stars. The Andromeda Galaxy has several eclipsing binary stars that astronomers have studied. If God merely made the light in transit with detailed light curves showing these eclipses, then we are seeing evidence of processes that never happened. That seems deceptive and not in line in what we know about God.

C-Decay

To overcome this objection to mature creation, recent creationists have proposed other solutions to the light-travel time problem. In 1981, Barry Setterfield attracted much attention when he pointed out that historic measurements of the speed of light show a decreasing trend. Setterfield argued that the best fit to the data was exponential decay, with the speed of light being nearly infinite during the creation week. That way, light from the most distant parts of the universe could have reached the earth within the creation week, allowing for the light from the entire universe to be visible today.

However, scrutiny from other creation scientists soon pointed out difficulties with c-decay, which is what this idea about the changing speed of light came to be called (in physics, c is the symbol used for the speed of light). One difficulty was that the historical data do not necessarily support the conclusion that the speed of light has decreased. The earliest measurements were subject to the greatest error. Once one understands the likely errors of the earliest measurements, the earliest measurements are consistent with the speed of light as measured today. As for the decreasing trend in the measurements, the earliest measurements probably were just too high. Later experimenters did not work in a vacuum—they were aware of the earlier measurements and hence unintentionally biased their conclusions in favor of higher values for the speed of light. Another difficulty is that the speed of light is not an arbitrary constant, but rather, it depends upon two fundamental constants, the permittivity and permeability of free space. These constants govern the structure of matter at the atomic level, so changes in the speed of light would require dramatic changes in the structure of matter. There is no evidence that this has ever taken place.

General Relativity Solutions

Some creation scientists have proposed solutions to the light-travel time problem that involve general relativity, our best understanding of how gravity works. Most famous of these is Russ Humphreys’ white hole cosmology published more than 30 years ago. Many recent creationists like the white hole cosmology, not realizing that Humphreys abandoned that model years ago in favor of second and now a third relativistic model to solve the light-travel time problem. Similarly, John Hartnett offered a solution that was a variation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, though Hartnett has since abandoned that model.

ASC

Hartnett eventually came to embrace the anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC) proposed by Jason Lisle. What is ASC? Lisle noted that within special relativity, one must adopt a convention about the speed of light. Direct measurements of the speed of light require measuring the time it takes light to travel from a light source to a mirror and the time it takes the light reflected by the mirror to return to the light source. Twice the distance between the light source and mirror divided by the elapsed time gives the average speed of light during the experiment. Most people assume, as did Einstein, that the speed of light is the same either direction, so the average speed of light measured this way is the constant speed of light. But is the speed of light truly constant, having the same value either way? As counterintuitive as it may seem, there is no reason why the speed of light must be the same in all directions—we must assume some convention. What if the outgoing speed of light were one-half the claimed speed of light but that the incoming speed of light is infinite (the assumption of ASC)? The results of the time measurement experiments would be the same.

There are some less direct, one-way measurements of the speed of light that at first glance seem to support the Einsteinian convention. One of these is timing the mutual eclipses of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. We can calculate when the eclipses ought to occur and then measure when the eclipses are observed to happen. When we do so, we find that the observed eclipses vary from the predicted eclipse times by up to eight minutes either way, depending upon the changing distance between Jupiter and earth as either orbit the sun. I always encounter a similar thing when measuring the time of eclipses in eclipsing binary stars. As the earth orbits the sun each year, the distance between earth and the eclipsing binary stars change periodically. Don’t these measurements prove that the speed of light always is the same regardless of the direction that light travels? Surprisingly, they do not. In such measurements, one must consider synchronizing clocks between the two locations. The synchronization process between the two locations is complicated and subtle, but the results are the same whether one assumes the Einsteinian convention or ASC.

It’s not that Lisle is claiming that the speed of light truly is infinite when traveling toward the earth and one-half the assumed constant speed of light going the other direction. A decade before publishing his ASC model, Lisle, using the pseudonym Robert Newton, published what appeared to be a very different paper about two different time conventions that we use in astronomy. One time convention is when we observe something to happen here on earth, and the other time convention is when the event happened in the faraway place where it happened. A good example is the supernova SN 1987A. On earth, SN 1987A appeared in late February 1987, and astronomers have studied its aftermath ever since. So we can say that SN 1987A happened in 1987 (hence the name). However, SN 1987A was in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is evidence that the LMC is about 170,000 light-years away. Therefore, assuming the Einsteinian convention, SN 1987A happened 170,000 years ago. Astronomers generally consider both answers to be correct. On the other hand, strictly assuming ASC, one would conclude that the light of SN 1987A reached earth as soon as it was emitted, so there is only one answer to the question of when SN 1987A happened.

Again, Lisle is not necessarily saying that the light of SN 1987A reached earth instantly, especially if one considers his two relevant papers together. In his earlier paper, Lisle pointed out that the perspective of the creation account is from the earth, or more specifically, from the earth’s surface. Lisle’s second paper provided a more rigorous justification for this perspective. From the earth’s surface, the stars were created on day four of the creation week when the light of stars appeared on the earth’s surface. However, it may be that from the perspective of where the stars are that God may have created them prior to when the light reached earth. Using the two conventions that astronomers use, either one is acceptable. In his second, more technical paper, Lisle argued that from the perspective of special relativity and the necessary assumption that one must make about the speed of light, the time convention that one adopts is physically equivalent to the other, and hence, it doesn’t matter which one we choose.

The Dasha Solution

During the creation week, there often was some process involved.

Finally, more than a decade ago, I proposed my dasha solution to the light-travel time problem. During the creation week, God did not simply make everything instantly mature. Instead, during the creation week, there often was some process involved. For instance, Genesis 1:11–12 make it clear that God caused the plants rapidly to grow up out of the ground and brought them to maturity. God formed man from the dust of the ground and then made him alive (Genesis 2:7), and God made woman from man’s side (Genesis 2:21–22). Furthermore, God made the land animals and flying animals from the ground, perhaps in a method somewhat similar to how God created man (Genesis 2:19). None of these processes were instantaneous, but instead, they involved rapid change or maturation. In similar manner, could God have created the stars on day four and then miraculously brought the light to earth the same day so that the stars were visible from earth? I chose the word dasha for this solution to the light-travel time problem because that is one of the two Hebrew verbs used to describe how God miraculously grew and matured the plants on day three.

The Big Bang Has a Light-Travel Time Problem Too

Is there evidence for any of these solutions to the distant starlight problem for recent creation? Probably not. However, we must recognize that the big bang model, the current reigning secular origin theory for the universe, suffers from a light-travel time problem as well. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the best evidence for the big bang model. It is the supposed remnant of the hypothetical hot, dense plasma of the universe only 380,000 years after the big bang redshifted to a very cool 2.73 K temperature. The CMB has a very uniform temperature—slight variations in temperature across the sky are about one part in 100,000. That requires that the early universe had a uniform temperature to at least one part in 100,000. Things generally don’t have the same temperature. To have the same temperature, objects usually must come into thermal contact so that they can exchange heat until they reach the same temperature (physicists call this thermal equilibrium). The most efficient way to do this is via radiation, that is, with exchange of photons of light. But this would have required that all parts of the early universe were able to exchange heat by this process. This could not have happened because in the big bang model, the early universe was too large for this to have taken place. For instance, photons from the CMB coming from one direction and just now reaching the earth are the same temperature as photons coming from the CMB in the opposite direction. It took light from either direction 13.8 billion years to reach the earth halfway between the two different directions, so the points in those opposite directions have never been in thermal contact with one another. So why are they the same temperature? This is called the horizon problem.

The horizon problem was recognized by the early 1970s. In the early 1980s, Alan Guth proposed cosmic inflation to solve the horizon problem. Guth proposed that within a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang (something like 10^-34 seconds), the universe briefly expanded far faster than the speed of light. This would have allowed the universe at the very beginning to have been small enough to come into thermal equilibrium at all points and reach the same temperature. But cosmic inflation rapidly expanded the universe, so the universe was pulled out of thermal contact with itself. Over the ensuing billions of years since cosmic inflation ended, the universe has gradually been returning to thermal contact. What is the evidence that cosmic inflation happened in the early universe? There is none. What mechanism caused cosmic inflation and then stopped cosmic inflation? No one knows. Yet nearly all astronomers and cosmologists have no doubt that cosmic inflation happened. Why? Because without cosmic inflation, one must abandon the big bang model. Hence the big bang model relies upon faith (not science) that cosmic inflation occurred.

Conclusion

For a God big enough to create the universe, getting the light to earth by day four of creation week is small potatoes.

The distant starlight problem is something that recent creationists must acknowledge. We also have a choice of solutions to this problem (for a more detailed discussion of the various solutions, please see this article). Which solution, if any, is correct? We don’t know. But keep in mind that the dominant secular theory of the origin of the universe also has a light-travel time problem too.

I spent decades fretting over the distant starlight problem until I settled upon the dasha solution. Along the way, I came to realize that the distant starlight problem is of no large consequence. Compared to the creation of this incredibly large universe that God created, the distant starlight problem is rather trivial. For a God big enough to create the universe, getting the light to earth by day four of creation week is small potatoes.