The Problems With Distant Starlight

This is Chapter 15 from "Jesus" Is Not the Answer to Every Sunday School Question, Book 1: Foundations.

At the 2010 annual Worldview Apologetics Conference, sponsored by Antioch Bible Church of Redmond, Washington, I had the chance to ask the late Norman Geisler a question during the open Q&A session. I had read somewhere that he believes in an old earth and I was curious why. So with several hundred conference attendees looking on, I took the microphone and nervously asked this giant of Christian thinking, “Would it be fair to say that you are an old-earth creationist?”

“I think the speed of light is the crucial thing. If you could prove that the speed of light changes, you’d probably convert me to a young-earth creationist.”
— Dr. Norman Geisler
Multimedia Presentation by Dan Kreft at the Apologetics Symposium, Cedar Park Church, Bothell WA. January 8th, 2019 Many Christian laymen and apologists alike stumble over the what has been dubbed "the distant starlight problem," citing it as a key obstacle to their acceptance of a young (i.e. ~6,000 year) creation.

Dr. Geisler responded, “On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’m a young-earth creationist. On the other four days, I’m an old-earth creationist. But I’m cheering for, and I’m praying for, and I’m hoping for the young-earthers to be right—but I’m not betting on ‘em.” 1 When I asked how he reconciled his position with the findings of scientists and apologists who disagree with him, he went on to say, “I think the speed of light is the crucial thing. If you could prove that the speed of light changes, you’d probably convert me to a young-earth creationist.” 2

Seven years later, William Lane Craig, another giant in the field of Christian apologetics, was a featured speaker at the same conference. When asked by someone braver than I why he believed in an old earth, Dr. Craig responded:

“The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the idea that the earth is very ancient, and there’s nothing in the Bible that requires you to believe otherwise. I think that when you read the Genesis narrative, from the standpoint of an ancient Hebrew author, there are actually indications in the text itself that it doesn’t think that this is a literal week of consecutive 24-hour days. And so I think the Bible gives you the freedom to follow the scientific evidence where it leads, which is that the world is indeed very ancient. When you think that we can see the stars—that very simple fact—that you can see these stars billions of light years away shows how ancient the universe is. The person who thinks the world was created a few thousand years ago would have to say that God not only created the stars and the earth, but he created the starlight—the star beam—in between the star and the earth so that it would hit our retinas and we would have the illusion of seeing these distant objects, and that is so ad hoc and artificial, it strikes me as far more plausible to think that these distant objects have emitted this light, it’s come to us and now we see them and that therefore the universe is very ancient.” [Emphasis his] 3

So what is the distant starlight problem, and why do so many cite it as reason to reject a plain and straightforward reading of Genesis 1:1–2:4?

The Distant Starlight Problem

“…if the universe were only 6,500 years old, how could we see the light from anything more distant than the Crab Nebula?”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Simply put, if the cosmos were only 6,000 years old, then we would not be able to see anything in the nighttime sky that is farther than 6,000 light years away.4 But since we can see objects and galaxies that are billions of light years away,5 those who affirm a young earth are clearly in error. Seems like a fairly open-and-shut case, doesn’t it?

The problem of light travel time is an interesting dilemma, for sure, but it’s actually a self-refuting argument because the big bang cosmological model also has a distant starlight problem known as “the horizon problem.” Did you know that?

Problems on the Horizon

Nine years of WMAP measurements. The difference between the hottest and coldest parts of the universe is a scant 200 µK.

Nine years of WMAP measurements. The difference between the hottest and coldest parts of the universe is a scant 200 µK.

According to the predictions of the standard Big Bang model, when we measure the temperature of outer space, we should see some areas that are much hotter than others. But what we actually see is a remarkable uniformity and consistency of temperature across the heavens.

“Uh, Mr. Kreft, I don’t get it. How is that a ‘distant starlight problem’?”

Great question. But before I answer it, a brief primer on the second law of thermodynamics is in order.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy), states that the total entropy in a closed system can only increase over time. In other words, as time marches on, things become more and more disordered: wood rots, concrete crumbles, our lawns get weedy, our cars break down, and fires burn out— unless we put energy back into them to preserve or sustain them.

When this law is applied to thermal energy, it means that heat always moves from something hot to something cold, never the other way around. This happens until equilibrium is reached (i.e., the hot object is the same temperature as everything around it). This transfer happens by

  1. Conduction, or direct contact. Don’t touch a hot stove or you’ll experience conduction firsthand.
  2. Convection. Heat rises, and when it does it starts currents in its surroundings, thus circulating thermal energy. This is how the small elements in your water heater can heat up the entire tank and how a radiator on one wall can heat an entire room.
  3. Radiation. We love radiation in the wintertime—it’s what warms us when we’re near the fireplace.

In outer space there is no conduction due to the great distances between objects, and convection can’t occur because there is no medium (such as air or water) to circulate; this leaves radiation. So if we want to get thermal energy from a “hot spot” in the universe to a colder spot, it must radiate across the vacuum of space.

Now radiated heat is nothing more than invisible (infrared) light. We know experimentally that the two-way speed of light is 3x108m/s or 186,000 miles per second,6 so thermal energy can be transferred between two objects no faster than that, since light cannot travel faster than itself. Are you still with me?

The big bang distant starlight problem: not enough time to get heat from one side of the visible universe to the other.

The big bang distant starlight problem: not enough time to get heat from one side of the visible universe to the other.

While no one can say for certain how big the universe is, current estimates hover in the realm of about 92 billion light years across.7 But alas, the big bang is alleged to have happened only 13.8 billion years ago, which poses an interesting conundrum for those who believe in an ancient universe: the hot spots on one side of the universe would not have had sufficient time to impart their energy to cooler spots on the other side of the universe and reach the near equilibrium we see today. This is the distant starlight problem that many old-earth creationists either don’t know about or are willfully ignoring.

“Mr. Kreft, you’re not telling the whole story. This problem was solved by ‘inflation.’”

Okay, let’s talk about inflation.

Inflation’s Inflated Importance

Image courtesy of Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

Image courtesy of Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The theory of cosmic inflation seeks to solve several well-documented problems with the big bang 8 by proposing that space expanded at many times the speed of light starting around 10 −36 (that’s 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000) seconds after the big bang and lasting until 10 −33 to 10 −32 seconds. 9 This is said to solve the horizon problem by providing time for the still-closely-packed matter in the burgeoning universe to reach a uniform temperature before jetting off across the fabric of spacetime.

This theory enjoyed great popularity for a time but has in recent years has come under intense scrutiny; even one of the men who worked early on to refine the theory now expresses serious doubts about it, 10 and he is not alone. 11, 12 So it’s far from “settled science.”

So, What Young-Earth Cosmology Solves This Problem?

As of this writing there doesn’t seem to be a consensus young-earth solution to the distant starlight problem; but it’s not as if young-earth cosmologists are curled up in the fetal position under their desks, sucking their respective thumbs trying to console themselves because their position has no hope.

Australian physicist and cosmologist John Gideon Hartnett summarizes five categories of distant-starlight solutions that he prefers in order from least to most favored:

  1. C-Decay (the speed of light was faster in the distant past).
  2. Light was created “on its way.”
  3. Clocks run faster “out there” than they do here on earth.
  4. Clocks run slower here than “out there.”
  5. Using alternate timing conventions. 13

An in-depth discussion of each of these is light years beyond the scope of this book, but I’ll try to briefly summarize each:

C-Decay: The C-decay idea suggests that light is slowing down over time and used to be orders of magnitude faster 6,000 years ago than it is today. This generated a lot of interest back in the late 1970s and 1980s but was ultimately rejected due to a lack of experimental support—the actual observed speed changes just didn’t pan out. 14 Put another way, there is no solid evidence that the speed of light has changed in any meaningful way over time.

Light created “on its way”: Also known as “the appearance of age,” this seems to be where most young-earth proponents I talk to tend to hang their hats. The idea is that God created the light beams when He created the stars and thus did not allow light to propagate as it normally does. While it is certainly within the purview of a sovereign, omnipotent God’s power to do such a thing, Russell Humphreys points out five problems with this theory:

  1. It lacks clear biblical support or reason for God to set up such an illusion. For example, Adam and Eve were given the appearance of age because God desired to create mature humans, and the trees in the garden had the appearance of age so that they could provide food to Adam and Eve. But proponents of this theory offer no reason that God should allow us to see only that which was within the travel time of light, or in other words, to progressively reveal more and more of the universe as time goes on. In short, it’s unnecessary—the same way that it’s unnecessary to say that God just magically removed the waters of the flood after a year of sitting on the surface of the earth (see chapter 1 of Book 3: Practical Apologetics).;
  2. Most events that astronomers observe today would never actually have happened. If we see a star that is 160,000 light years away explode as we did back in 1987, then at best the spectacle would be a grand illusion—a lie, if you will.
  3. It has little to no explanatory power: it cannot account for galactic redshifts, or the cosmic microwave background radiation.
  4. It’s untestable because it makes no scientific predictions.
  5. It discourages deeper investigation as it invokes the “God of the gaps.” It’s a “just-so” story that says, “That’s just the way God did it—deal with it.” 15

Clocks run faster “out there” than they do here: This involves clocks in the cosmos running much faster during Day Four of creation than they do today. Some models that take this approach predict that we should see blue-shifted light in the cosmos, but we don’t—we see only red-shifted light. Dr. Hartnett’s second cosmology detailed in his 2007 book, Starlight, Time, and the New Physics, gets around the blue-shift problem by invoking a fifth dimension, but Hartnett himself concedes that this extra dimension has proven elusive, so he continues his search.16

 

Clocks run slower here than “out there”: According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, gravity affects time—something we observe today with atomic clocks that operate at different altitudes. For example, the atomic clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England ticks five microseconds per year more slowly than an identical clock stationed at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado—a difference that exactly equals what general relativity predicts for a one-mile difference in altitude.17

Applying this principle to a much larger scale in his 1994 book, Starlight and Time, Russell Humphreys postulated a fixed and expanding universe with the earth at or near the center of a gravitational well. His cosmology proposes that time on earth actually stopped during the early days of creation while the universe was still quite small whereas time on the edges of the expanding universe ran at a “normal” rate. This slowing of “earth” clocks would make it possible for millions or billions of years (cosmic time) to elapse in the far reaches of the cosmos while only a few days had elapsed on and near Earth.

It’s a fascinating theory that sounds promising and seems to fit beautifully with the creation account in Genesis 1, but in 2003 Dr. Hartnett discovered a fatal flaw that made it unworkable in light of our observations of the near cosmos. So, Dr. Humphreys is working on modifications to his theory to address its shortcomings. I’m rather partial to Dr. Humphreys’ cosmologies—not because I understand all the math (I don’t) but because of how closely they cohere with the Bible—so I am quite eager to see if they stand up to the rigorous analysis of his peers.

 

Timing conventions: Did you know that we don’t know what the one-way speed of light is? Because the speed of light is the “speed limit of the universe,” it’s not possible (as far as we know today) to measure its speed in one direction—all experiments that have been conducted to measure the speed of light involve measuring the time it takes for light to travel away from an observer, bounce off a reflector, and arrive back at the observer. When Albert Einstein was working on his theory of special relativity, he adopted a timing convention that assumes that the speed of light is the same in both directions. This “Einstein synchrony convention” is used in nearly all relativity theory work today. But get this—it’s just a convention—it’s not a law.

In 2001 astrophysicist Jason Lisle examined what would happen if we adopted a different convention. His “anisotropic synchrony convention” proposes that light traveling toward an observer has no travel time at all. Under the traditional ESC, light from the stars trillions of miles away would not be able to get to earth on Day Four of creation—a distant starlight problem; but under Lisle’s ASC there is no problem at all since an observer on Earth would see the light the instant it was emitted by those flaming balls of gas in the nighttime sky. Is Lisle’s ASC the answer? Time will tell. It’s still a work in progress, but it certainly seems promising.

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”
— Albert Einstein

My Analysis of the Situation

When we boil this down, here’s what I see:

  1. The young earth position has a light-travel-time problem. This problem is addressed in several different ways, with each proposed solution having its own set of strengths and weaknesses. Not all young-earth cosmologists agree on how to solve this problem.
  2. However, the old earth position also has a light-travel-time problem. This problem is addressed most commonly by cosmological inflation. But inflation has problems, and not all old-earth cosmologists agree that it is the best solution to the problem, either.

With this in mind, it seems irrational to reject either the young-earth or old-earth position based upon light-travel-time problems alone. Furthermore, it seems to me that an egregious injustice is committed against the biblical record when we discard a plain-and-straightforward reading of Genesis 1:1-2:4 just because there are some things in the physical universe we cannot yet explain.

Whenever I hear the “distant starlight problem” driven, as it were, as a nail into the young-earth coffin, I cannot help but wonder if the one raising the objection is perhaps not aware of the arguments against the standard (popular) cosmologies, even from those in the old-earth/old-creation camp. It seems to me that perhaps brilliant men like Drs. Geisler and Craig once considered carefully the scientific evidence available in the past, made the decision that the evidence was substantial for an old earth, and then stopped asking questions, taking for granted that it’s “settled science.” It’s not—there is still much we do not know and much more we need discover, but this is certainly no reason to jettison a plain-and-straightforward reading of the account of creation in an attempt to accommodate the scientific consensus du jour.

In Colossians 2:8 the Holy Spirit warns us to “see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ.” In other words, don’t throw the Bible under the bus just because it seems that nearly all scientists agree that the Bible is either irrelevant to the discussion or that it is not true. Even with all their great learning and impressive-sounding degrees, God is still smarter than them all, and His Word is infallible.

Footnotes

  1. Norman Geisler, Worldview Apologetics Conference, April 17, 18, 2010, Audio CD. Karl Payne, 2010.
  2. Ibid.
  3. William Lane Craig, Worldview Apologetics Conference, April 21–22, 2017, MP3 Audio CD. Karl Payne, 2017.
  4. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, i.e., 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles).
  5. Calla Cofield, “Farthest Galaxy Yet Smashes Cosmic Distance Record,” space.com, accessed May 17, 2017, http://www.space.com/32150-farthest-galaxy-smashes-cosmic-distance-record.html. But, see also John Gideon Hartnett, “A Long Time Ago, in A Galaxy Far, Far Away...So The Story Goes,” accessed May 17, 2017, https://biblescienceforum.com/2016/04/18/a-long-time-ago-in-a-galaxy-far-far-away-so-the-story-goes/.
  6. Roger Rassool, “Why Can’t Anything Travel Faster than Light?” Cosmos Magazine, accessed May 22, 2017, https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/why-can-t-anything-travel-faster-light.
  7. Luke Davies, “How Big Is the Universe?” accessed May 22, 2017, https://phys.org/news/2015-10-big-universe.html.
  8. “What Is the Inflation Theory?” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, accessed June 1, 2017, https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_cosmo_infl.html.
  9. Wikipedia, s.v. “Inflation (cosmology),” accessed May 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology).
  10. Paul J. Steinhardt, “The Inflation Debate: Is the theory at the heart of the modern cosmology deeply flawed?” accessed May 22, 2017, http://physics.princeton.edu/~steinh/0411036.pdf.
  11. John Horgan, “Is a Popular Theory of Cosmic Creation Pseudosci- ence?” Scientific American, accessed May 22, 2017, [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-a-popular-theory-of-cosmic-creation-pseudoscience/.
  12. Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt, Abraham Loeb, “Cosmic Inflation Theory Faces Challenges,” Scientific American, accessed May 22, 2017, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmic-inflation-theory-faces-challenges/.
  13. John Gideon Hartnett, “Starlight and Time: Is It a Brick Wall for Biblical Creation?” Bible Science Forum, accessed May 22, 2017, https://biblescienceforum.com/2015/07/31/starlight-and-time-is-it-a-brick-wall-for-biblical-creation/.
  14. D. Russell Humphreys, Ph. D., Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2002), 46–49.
  15. Ibid., 43–46.
  16. John Gideon Hartnett, “Starlight and Time: Is It a Brick Wall for Biblical Creation?” Bible Science Forum, accessed May 22, 2017, https://biblescienceforum.com/2015/07/31/starlight-and-time-is-it-a-brick-wall-for-biblical-creation/.
  17. D. Russell Humphreys, Ph. D., Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2002), 11, 12.
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