"Distant starlight disproves a young universe" (Claim #E423)
Response
If we try to prove how old the universe is using distant starlight, we have to guess about some things that we don’t know for sure: 1
- “Time is rigid.” Einstein realized that motion and gravity affect time.
- “The speed of light is constant (the same in the past).” This is probably true, but we don’t know that for sure.
- “The one-way speed of light is known.” Actually, Einstein realized that we can’t measure this for sure. We can measure only the round-trip speed of light.
Creationists models have been proposed:
Distant starlight is actually a problem for evolutionists, too (the horizon problem).
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Sources
Williams, A., & Hartnett, J. W. (2005). Dismantling the Big Bang: God's Universe Rediscovered. Green Forest, AR: Master Books.
Notes
- http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-starlight-prove ↩
- http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v6/n1/distant-starlight ↩
- Williams and Harnett, 2005, p. 176: “The relevance to the biblical starlight problem is that variable time allows the possibility that time on earth could have run at a slower rate than time in the outer galaxies. Thus, ‘billions of years’ could have passed in the outer galaxies while only days passed on earth. While other models have tried to achieve this same result by changing the speed of light — and the outcomes have violated other aspects of observed physical reality — the curious thing about variable time is that you wouldn’t know it was happening to you.” ↩