The last picture is a deep infrared shot in one of the darkest parts of space with the Hubble telescope. Some of these solar systems are said to be a BILLION LIGHTYEARS AWAY.


If something is one lightyear away, that means it takes light 1 year for it to reach its destination, Right?

So if these solar systems are 1 billion lightyears away, then it will take 1 billion years for us to see the light they project, Right?

Here is the question

If it takes a billion years for their light to reach us, if one of the solar systems emploded today would it take us a billion years to stop seeing the light that is projected from it? So infact these solar system could not have existed for the last 500 million years or longer?

Let me hear your scientific theory.

Or not it is just some really cool pictures.

I just think its funny that you put a picture of Uranus on the web site.

:P :P :P :P :P :P :P

Whoa. Deep for a Friday night!

I suggest the "Answers Book" by Ken Ham and some other PhD's.
It's part of the way I passed Geology at ASU while maintaining a Young Earth phillosophy on my papers.

So here is the answer to your question with a question:
When God created during that week, he created trees and stuff, yes?
Pick one of those trees out in your mind.
Now tell me, How old was that tree?
Did he make a seed, plant it, and wait for the tree to grow? Or did he make a living tree. Surely you couldn't say it had no age, that it was a new born- it was a full grown tree.
Same with Adam, he wasn't a baby, the man had a beard for Christ sake.
Same with rocks, did they grow, or did he create them as is, and if so, then how old was the rock?
Same with the heavens, with space, and with light.

Now this thought does fall into line with what we believe but would not stand a chance with the science community. For those answers, I advise Chapter 5: How Can We See Distant Stars in a Young Universe?

Ken Ham is a cool guy. I got to room with his son, Nathan, at BJU. Got to meet Ken a few times when he would come to the school.

Exerpt from Chapter 5:

Some stars are millions of light-years away. Since a light-year is the distance traveled by light in one year, does this mean that the universe is very old?

Despite all the biblical and scientific evidence for a young earth/universe, this has long been a problem. However, any scientific understanding of origins will always have opportunities for research—problems that need to be solved. We can never have complete knowledge and so there will always be things to learn.

Created light?
Perhaps the most commonly used explanation is that God created light ‘on its way,’ so that Adam could see the stars immediately without having to wait years for the light from even the closest ones to reach the earth. While we should not limit the power of God, this has some rather immense difficulties.

It would mean that whenever we look at the behavior of a very distant object, what we see happening never happened at all. For instance, say we see an object a million light-years away which appears to be rotating; that is, the light we receive in our telescopes carries this information ‘recording’ this behavior. However, according to this explanation, the light we are now receiving did not come from the star, but was created ‘en route,’ so to speak.

This would mean that for a 10,000-year-old universe, that anything we see happening beyond about 10,000 light-years away is actually part of a gigantic picture show of things that have not actually happened, showing us objects which may not even exist.

To explain this problem further, consider an exploding star (supernova) at, say, an accurately measured 100,000 light-years away. Remember we are using this explanation in a 10,000-year-old universe. As the astronomer on earth watches this exploding star, he is not just receiving a beam of light. If that were all, then it would be no problem at all to say that God could have created a whole chain of photons (light particles/waves) already on their way.

However, what the astronomer receives is also a particular, very specific pattern of variation within the light, showing him/her the changes that one would expect to accompany such an explosion—a predictable sequence of events involving neutrinos, visible light, X-rays and gamma-rays. The light carries information recording an apparently real event. The astronomer is perfectly justified in interpreting this ‘message’ as representing an actual reality—that there really was such an object, which exploded according to the laws of physics, brightened, emitted X-rays, dimmed, and so on, all in accord with those same physical laws.

Everything he sees is consistent with this, including the spectral patterns in the light from the star giving us a ‘chemical signature’ of the elements contained in it. Yet the ‘light created en route’ explanation means that this recorded message of events, transmitted through space, had to be contained within the light beam from the moment of its creation, or planted into the light beam at a later date, without ever having originated from that distant point. (If it had started from the star—assuming that there really was such a star—it would still be 90,000 light years away from earth.)

To create such a detailed series of signals in light beams reaching earth, signals which seem to have come from a series of real events but in fact did not, has no conceivable purpose. Worse, it is like saying that God created fossils in rocks to fool us, or even test our faith, and that they don’t represent anything real (a real animal or plant that lived and died in the past). This would be a strange deception.

Did light always travel at the same speed?
An obvious solution would be a higher speed of light in the past, allowing the light to cover the same distance more quickly. This seemed at first glance a too-convenient ad hoc explanation. Then some years ago, Australian Barry Setterfield raised the possibility to a high profile by showing that there seemed to be a decreasing trend in the historical observations of the speed of light (c) over the past 300 years or so. Setterfield (and his later co-author Trevor Norman) produced much evidence in favor of this theory.1 They believed that it would have affected radiometric dating results, and even have caused the red-shifting of light from distant galaxies, although this idea was later overturned, and other modifications were also made.

Much debate has raged to and fro among equally capable people within creationist circles about whether the statistical evidence really supports c decay (‘cdk’) or not.

The biggest difficulty, however, is with certain physical consequences of the theory. If c has declined the way Setterfield proposed, these consequences should still be discernible in the light from distant galaxies but they are apparently not. In short, none of the theory’s defenders have been able to answer all the questions raised.

A new creationist cosmology
Nevertheless, the c-decay theory stimulated much thinking about the issues. Creationist physicist Dr Russell Humphreys says that he spent a year on and off trying to get the declining c theory to work, but without success. However, in the process, he was inspired to develop a new creationist cosmology which appears to solve the problem of the apparent conflict with the Bible’s clear, authoritative teaching of a recent creation.

This new cosmology is proposed as a creationist alternative to the big bang theory. It passed peer review, by qualifying reviewers, for the 1994 Pittsburgh International Conference on Creationism.2 Young-earth creationists have been cautious about the model,3 which is not surprising with such an apparently radical departure from orthodoxy, but Humphreys has addressed the problems raised.4 Believers in an old universe and the big bang have vigorously opposed the new cosmology and claim to have found flaws in it.5 However, Humphreys has been able to defend his model, as well as develop it further.6 The debate will no doubt continue.

This sort of development, in which one creationist theory, c-decay, is overtaken by another, is a healthy aspect of science. The basic biblical framework is non-negotiable, as opposed to the changing views and models of fallible people seeking to understand the data within that framework (evolutionists also often change their ideas on exactly how things have made themselves, but never whether they did).

A clue
Let us briefly give a hint as to how the new cosmology seems to solve the starlight problem before explaining some preliminary items in a little more detail. Consider that the time taken for something to travel a given distance is the distance divided by the speed it is traveling. That is:

Time = Distance / Speed
When this is applied to light from distant stars, the time calculates out to be millions of years. Some have sought to challenge the distances, but this is a very unlikely answer.7

Astronomers use many different methods to measure the distances, and no informed creationist astronomer would claim that any errors would be so vast that billions of light-years could be reduced to thousands, for example. There is good evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across!

If the speed of light (c) has not changed, the only thing left untouched in the equation is time itself. In fact, Einstein’s relativity theories have been telling the world for decades that time is not a constant.

Two things are believed (with experimental support) to distort time in relativity theory—one is speed and the other is gravity. Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the best theory of gravity we have at present, indicates that gravity distorts time.

This effect has been measured experimentally, many times. Clocks at the top of tall buildings, where gravity is slightly less, run faster than those at the bottom, just as predicted by the equations of general relativity (GR).8

When the concentration of matter is very large or dense enough, the gravitational distortion can be so immense that even light cannot escape.9 The equations of GR show that at the invisible boundary surrounding such a concentration of matter (called the event horizon, the point at which light rays trying to escape the enormous pull of gravity bend back on themselves), time literally stands still.

Using different assumptions …
Dr Humphreys’ new creationist cosmology literally ‘falls out’ of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edge—that if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center, as it appears to be as we look out into space.

This might sound like common sense, as indeed it is, but all modern secular (big bang) cosmologies deny this. That is, they make arbitrary assumption (without any scientific necessity) that the universe has no boundaries—no edge and no center. In this assumed universe, every galaxy would be surrounded by galaxies spread evenly in all directions (on a large enough scale), and so, therefore, all the net gravitational forces cancel out.

However, if the universe has boundaries, then there is a net gravitational effect toward the center. Clocks at the edge would be running at different rates to clocks on the earth. In other words, it is no longer enough to say God made the universe in six days. He certainly did, but six days by which clock? (If we say ‘God’s time’ we miss the point that He is outside of time, seeing the end from the beginning.)10

There appears to be observational evidence that the universe has expanded in the past, supported by the many phrases God uses in the Bible to tell us that at creation he ‘stretched out’11 (other verses say ‘spread out’) the heavens.

If the universe is not much bigger than we can observe, and if it was only 50 times smaller in the past than it is now, then scientific deduction based on GR means it has to have expanded out of a previous state in which it was surrounded by an event horizon (a condition known technically as a ‘white hole’—a black hole running in reverse, something permitted by the equations of GR).

As matter passed out of this event horizon, the horizon itself had to shrink—eventually to nothing. Therefore, at one point this earth (relative to a point far away from it) would have been virtually frozen. An observer on earth would not in any way ‘feel different.’ ‘Billions of years’ would be available (in the frame of reference within which it is traveling in deep space) for light to reach the earth, for stars to age, etc.—while less than one ordinary day is passing on earth. This massive gravitational time dilation would seem to be a scientific inevitability if a bounded universe expanded significantly.

In one sense, if observers on earth at that particular time could have looked out and ‘seen’ the speed with which light was moving toward them out in space, it would have appeared as if it were traveling many times faster than c. (Galaxies would also appear to be rotating faster.) However, if an observer in deep space was out there measuring the speed of light, to him it would still only be traveling at c.

There is more detail of this new cosmology, at layman’s level, in the book by Dr Humphreys, Starlight and Time, which also includes reprints of his technical papers showing the equations.12

It is fortunate that creationists did not invent such concepts such as gravitational time dilation, black and white holes, event horizons and so on, or we would likely be accused of manipulating the data to solve the problem. The interesting thing about this cosmology is that it is based upon mathematics and physics totally accepted by all cosmologists (general relativity), and it accepts (along with virtually all physicists) that there has been expansion in the past (though not from some imaginary tiny point). It requires no ‘massaging’—the results ‘fall out’ so long as one abandons the arbitrary starting point which the big bangers use (the unbounded cosmos idea, which could be called ‘what the experts don’t tell you about the “big bang”’).

Caution
While this is exciting news, all theories of fallible men, no matter how well they seem to fit the data, are subject to revision or abandonment in the light of future discoveries. What we can say is that at this point a plausible mechanism has been demonstrated, with considerable observational and theoretical support.

What if no one had ever thought of the possibility of gravitational time dilation? Many might have felt forced to agree with those scientists (including some Christians) that there was no possible solution —the vast ages are fact, and the Bible must be ‘reinterpreted’ (massaged) or increasingly rejected. Many have in fact been urging Christians to abandon the Bible’s clear teaching of a recent creation because of these ‘undeniable facts.’ This reinterpretation also means having to accept that there were billions of years of death, disease, and bloodshed before Adam, thus eroding the creation/Fall/restoration framework within which the gospel is presented in the Bible.

However, even without this new idea, such an approach would still have been wrong-headed. The authority of the Bible should never be compromised as mankind’s ‘scientific’ proposals. One little previously unknown fact, or one change in a starting assumption, can drastically alter the whole picture so that what was ‘fact’ is no longer so.

This is worth remembering when dealing with those other areas of difficulty which, despite the substantial evidence for Genesis creation, still remain. Only God possesses infinite knowledge. By basing our scientific research on the assumption that His Word is true (instead of the assumption that it is wrong or irrelevant) our scientific theories are much more likely, in the long run, to come to accurately represent reality.

References and notes
T.G. Norman and B. Setterfield, The Atomic Constants, Light and Time (privately published, 1990). Return to text.
D. Russell Humphreys, Progress Toward a Young-earth Relativistic Cosmology, Proceedings 3rd ICC, Pittsburgh, pp. 267–286, 1994. Return to text.
J. Byl, On Time Dilation in Cosmology, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 34(1):26–32, 1997. Return to text.
D.R. Humphreys, It’s Just a Matter of Time, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 34(1):32–34, 1997. Return to text.
S.R. Conner and D.N. Page, Starlight and Time is the Big Bang, CEN Technical Journal, 12(2):174–194, 1998. Return to text.
D.R. Humphreys, New Vistas of Space-time Rebut the Critics, CEN Technical Journal, 12(2):195–212, 1998. [Ed. note: Refs 5 and 6, as well as other criticisms of Dr Humphreys’ model, with his responses, were published in the CEN Technical Journal, and are available here. Return to text.
Many billions of stars exist, many just like our own sun, according to the analysis of the light coming from them. Such numbers of stars have to be distributed through a huge volume of space, otherwise we would all be fried. Return to text.
The demonstrable usefulness of GR in physics can be separated from certain ‘philosophical baggage’ that some have illegitimately attached to it, and to which some Christians have objected. Return to text.
Such an object is called a ‘black hole.’ Return to text.
Genesis 1:1; Ecclesiastes 3:11; Isaiah 26:4; Romans 1:20; 1 Timothy 1:17; and Hebrews 11:3. Interestingly, according to GR, time does not exist without matter. Return to text.
For example, Isaiah 42:5; Jeremiah 10:12; Zechariah 12:1. Return to text.
D. Russell Humphreys, Starlight and Time, Master Books, Green Forest, AR, 1994. Return to text.
This chapter from the book The Revised and Expanded Answers Book, published and graciously provided at no charge to Answers in Genesis by Master Books, a division of New Leaf Press (Green Forest, Arkansas).

By the way, this is the chapter I always skip over when reading this book. Math- yuck

Mike, thanks for the usefull information, there is some good stuff there.

Lets keep it going, this is the thread where you ask the question that has always had you looking for other theorys or oppinions on something.