The starlight-travel-time problem has been a difficult issue for biblical creationists for a long time. Big Bang cosmologists also have their own starlight-travel-time problem but creationists have proposed various solutions to this problem in the past decade or more. Recently I proposed an expansion on a solution, first proposed by Jason Lisle, in an article entitled “A biblical creationist cosmogony.” It is somewhat technical so I thought I’d write a very short layman summary here.

Hubble Deep Field: Extremely distant galaxies on the edge of the visible universe. Credit: NASA/Hubble

When God said He created everything in order that He did according to the Genesis 1 account then all those events occurred as the Bible describes on those consecutive 24-hour days about 6000 years ago. Lisle proposal is that those events were timed when the light first arrived, or when a hypothetical Earth-bound observer might have first observed them happening. And the main issue is the creation of the stars and galaxies, some of which lay tens of billions of light-years distant. So if we only consider the language of appearance, the light from those galaxies, and all stars, first arrived sometime during Day 4 of Creation week. Therefore travelling at constant speed of light (c), which means light travels 1 light-year per year, then it would have taken billions of years to get to Earth. Therefore such a view of the universe requires that all galaxies were created at a time long before God created the Earth on Day 1 of creation week. But this is just language of appearance. A constant speed of light (c) assumes a certain convention of synchronizing clocks. We could equally have chosen another convention that simply times all events when they are observed. So when the light of the ‘newly’ created stars and galaxies arrives at the Earth on Day 4, it is truly the first light from the creation of those galaxies. In my view, the only question to answer with this model is: Is it compatible with Scripture? Continue reading →