Constant—Or Constantly Changing?

on March 1, 2020

Recent measurements of Cepheid stars have yielded a new value for the Hubble constant using the Hubble Space Telescope. So why are evolutionists puzzled?

This news sheds light on the shaky foundations of evolutionary astronomy. The reason? Hubble’s constant is used to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. For people who accept the big bang, this value can supposedly determine the age of the universe. The new value shortens that age by a billion years.

But before you think, “Aha! Once again, good science shows that the universe is young, just like the Bible says,” you should know that the proposed new age is 12–13 billion years, still a far cry from 6,000.

What’s the big deal? Cosmologists can’t find anything wrong with previous calculations for the Hubble constant, which produced the accepted age of 13.8 billion years based on the study of red shifts of distant galaxies and the cosmic background radiation. Now they’re looking for a fudge factor.

“You need to add something into the universe that we don’t know about. That always makes you kind of uneasy,” said Dr. Chris Burns, an astrophysicist at Carnegie Institution for Science. And astronomer Dr. Lloyd Knox, who worked on the team that produced the earlier calculation, wonders, “Are we just going to always be introducing fudge factors?”

Creation astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner points out that the old measurement is highly dependent on the big bang model, while the new one is based on direct observation. So the new measurement is more likely to be correct. But measuring the current movement of stars doesn’t tell us when they started, and it certainly doesn’t require Christians to rethink basic physics or the Bible’s revealed truth that God created the stars in the universe 6,000 years ago.

When scientists build their ideas on assumptions that contradict God’s revelation, they will constantly need to invent new rescue devices to make the observations fit their faulty assumptions.

Article was taken from Answers magazine, September–October, 2019, 21.