The Age of the Universe

I’ve been reading and watching a lot about the age of the universe, and the implications for young earth creationists (YECs).

Consider this: 

We have come up with pretty reliable ways of measuring the distance of astronomical objects.

Not only that, but we can analyze the signatures of the energy coming from distant stars, and make some conclusions about their elemental makeup, etc.

YECs claim the earth and stars are less than 10,000 years old.

Yet we’ve measured the distance to stars that are millions and even billions of light-years away.

This presents an obvious problem.  Observed reality doesn’t match up with scripture.

Bill Nye is in the news for this recent video slamming creationism.  In it, he says:

… Here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

The YEC websites that I’ve seen list a few possible “solutions” to this “problem”, which classically illustrate what Bill Nye was talking about.

Here are four:  

1)  We can’t accurately measure distances to astronomical objects.  

 “Greater distances are determined by the presumed sizes and intensity of stars, red shift, and many questionable factors which may have nothing whatever to do with distance.  In fact, some astronomers feel that it is possible that the entire universe could fit into an area within a 200 light-year radius from the earth! Therefore, there is no guarantee that the actual distances in space are as great as we have been told, and light from the farthest point in the universe could have reached us in only a few hundred years.”

No actual argument is given.  Just an assertion that astronomers don’t actually know what they’re doing.

2)  Light may take a “shortcut” through space.

Using a math formula, it’s demonstrated that the maximum amount of time for light to reach us is actually 15.71 years.

Googling around shows that only Creationist websites appear to talk about this notion, and one of them says “However, this idea never really caught on and appears to no longer have adherents.”

3)  The speed of light was different in the past.

There is no actual evidence to support this idea.  It’s just floated out there as a solution that fixes the problem.  There are a couple of cosmology theories that have been thought up specifically to solve the problem

4)  Light was created in transit

The implication that what we’re seeing what we look up in space is just a created image rather than reality has some pretty serious theological implications.  It’s analogous to God creating the illusion of an old earth by creating fossils in situ in the earth.  At its core, it’s deceitful, and God isn’t known for lying and deceiving.

The main problem here is that the star light age issue isn’t just a single question in a vacuum.  The age of the universe and the earth itself figures into so much of what we know.  Again, looking at Nye’s words, you have to come up with all sorts of solutions to support your world view when  your world view doesn’t actually match up with what we see around us.  We know species change over time.  We know that land masses float on the surface of the earth.  We know that stars are really far away.  We know that rocks and fossils take a long time to form.  Everything neatly dovetails together when we accept that the Earth is really old.

I suppose, to be fair, the YECs think the same thing.  They think all the evidence neatly fits together with the Biblical account.  The Grand Canyon was created by the great flood.  The old fossils of the simplest creatures were the once who died first in the flood.  The growth rate of humanity supports the claim that the earth is 6000 years old and started with a population of 8 people (post flood).

 

Reasons.org just gives up on the matter and comes closest to aligning with observed reality:

“The young-universe creationist is in an untenable spot. If the earth is six to ten thousand years old, then virtually nothing we see outside of our solar system is real. All observational astronomy of distant heavenly objects is a fiction….  On the other hand, if we see real stars when we look heavenward, and those stars are a billion light years away, then they must have existed a billion years ago.  If our eyes and our instruments can be trusted, then the universe is ancient.”