How Old is the Universe?
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According to National Geographic – 13 Billion Years Old
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National Geographic, September 2001, p. 85 |
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• Those who believe in secular evolution generally believe that the universe is somewhere between 13 to 20 billion years old.
• The Bible teaches that the universe, like the earth is thousands of years old
If the Universe is only thousands of years old, how can we see stars that are billions of light years away?
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• One objection to a young universe that is raised by secular astronomers is the fact that based on current calculations, the time that it would take for light to reach the earth from certain stars is somewhere on the order of millions and in some cases, even billions of years.
• Since we can see the light from those stars, doesn’t this imply that those stars have been in existence for millions or billions of years?
• Before answering this question, we will first consider another more fundamental question:
– How do astronomers know that some stars are millions or billions of light years away?
– How do astronomers measure the distance to the stars?
How Do Astronomers Measure the Distance to the Stars? (Information in this section has been gleaned from Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the Bible Questions and Answers, p. 58-59)
• Astronomers measure the distance to stars in light years
– A light year is a measure of distance.
– Specifically, a light year is the distance that a beam of light travels in one year.
– The speed of light (sometimes represented by the symbol “c”) is generally accepted as being
• 299,792.458 kilometers per second
• which is about 186,282 miles per second
• which is about 670,615,000 mile per hour
– Therefore, a light year is about six trillion miles.
• Methods of Measuring Star Distance
– The Most Accurate Method: Triangulation -
– Methods Based On More Questionable Assumptions:
Measuring Star Distance Based on Triangulation
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• This method is good for up to a distance of about 300 (some would say only 100) light years.
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| Above slide from Kent Hovind - www.drdino.com |
• About 700 stars fall within this range, including:
– Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years)
– Sirius (8.6 light years)
– Arcturus (36 light years)
– Spica (220 light years)
Measuring Star Distance Using More Questionable Assumptions
• Brightness - Assumes that a star measured by this method has a known brightness. Therefore the dimmer the star, the farther away that star is thought to be. This method is thought to be useful out to millions of light years.
• Red Shift - Assumes that the "red shift" or loss of light energy in a star's light (as measured by a spectrometer) was caused by the distance that the star's light has traveled.
How is Red-Shift From Distant Stars Explained? (Information in this section has been gleaned from Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the Bible Questions and Answers, p. 58-59)
• Stellar Motion - If we assume that the stars are moving away from the earth (as a result, say, of a presumed "Big Bang" explosion), its light energy will be reduced and its wavelength stretched or red-shifted. But this is only one explanation of red-shifting.
• Gravitation - As light leaves a star, the stars gravity may slightly lengthen the wavelength of the light. A gravitational red-shift could also result from starlight passing near a massive object in space, such as a galaxy. As the light escapes from a strong gravity field, it loses energy, similar to what happens to a person struggling to the top of a mountain.
• Second-Order Doppler Effect - A light source moving at right angles (tangentially) to an observer will always be red-shifted. This can be observed in the laboratory by using a high-speed turntable. A detector is placed in the center and a gamma ray radiation source is placed on the outside edge. The gamma energy is seen to decrease, or red-shift as the turntable speed increases. This is an intriguing explanation for stellar red shift. When applied to the stars, it implies that the universe may be in circular motion instead of radial expansion.
• Photon Interaction – It is possible that light waves exchange energy during their movement across space and lose some energy in the process. A loss of energy is equivalent to a "reddening" of its light. A theoretical understanding of this proposed "tired light" process has not been developed.
• Any of these four explanations, alone or in combination, may be responsible for red-shift. We do not know enough about space to be certain of the source of stellar red shift.
If the Universe is Young, How Do We See Light from the Distant Stars?
• Regardless of how accurate current methods of measuring distance to the stars really are, the fact remains that the universe must be very large in order to accommodate the huge number stars that are visible to us today.
• It has been estimated that there are enough stars for every person on earth to own 2,000,000,000,000 (2 trillion) of them! (Astronomy and the Bible, Donald DeYoung p. 57)
• Even our own Milky Way galaxy is measured at around 100,000 light years in diameter (The Answers Book, by Ham, Snelling and Wieland, p. 186)
• Since a Biblical time frame only allows for about six thousand years, this seems to create a problem for those who accept the Bible’s teaching of a young universe.
• Scientists who believe in the biblical teaching of a young earth have proposed alternative models (based on empirical evidence) that would explain how we could see light from such distant stars in a young universe. We will briefly describe two of these models:
– Barry Setterfield's model which postulates a change in the speed of light.
– Dr. Russell Humphreys model which uses Einstein's Theory of Relativity to show how, at the time of creation, gravity could have distorted time in such a way that the distant stars aged billions of years while the earth aged only a few days.
Has the Speed of Light Changed? (Much of the information in this section was gleaned from Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change, 1997, pp.144-148)
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Barry Setterfield, an Australian scientist, in his book The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe (published by Creation Science Association (Inc.): Australia, 1983) notes the following:
• Roemer, a Danish astronomer, made the first careful measurement of the speed of light in 1675.
• Bradley, an English astronomer, measured the speed of light again in 1728.
• During the last 300 years, at least 164 separate measurements of the speed of light have been published. Sixteen different measurement techniques were used.
• Setterfield studied these measurements taken over the years and noticed that the speed of light was about 2.6% higher in 1675 than it is today and that it continued to decline logarithmically until 1960 when atomic clocks began to be used – at which point the speed of light appears to have remained constant.
• Based on these figures, he postulates that at the time of creation the speed of light was 5 x 1011 faster than it is today.
• On this basis, Setterfield figures that the earth was created 4040 BC, plus or minus one hundred years!
Speed of light has decayed. Creation Tech. Journal, June, 2000
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Has the Speed of Light Changed?
• For a number of years, the scientific community considered the speed of light to be an unchanging constant.
• When Setterfield and other creationists first presented the idea of the speed of light changing they were mocked by evolutionists for even suggesting the possibility (Creation ex nihilo, vol.22 no.1, December 1999 - February 2000, “’C’ the difference”, p.9)
• Today, some evolutionary scientists are beginning to change their tune concerning the supposed constancy of the speed of light!
• For example, in June 1995, Newsweek reported that a group of scientists were able to get light to travel (or least appear to travel) 70% faster than the traditionally accepted speed of light! The article also had this to say:
– “Until the 1990s most studies of quantum weirdness [such as displayed by light traveling faster than the traditional speed] were ‘thought experiments’ in which scientists used pure reason to deduce what would happen if they ran an experiment . . . But ingenious advances in light detectors and emitters . . . Are turning thought experiments into real ones” (“Faster Than What?” Newsweek, June 19,1995, pp.67-69)
• In February 1999, The New York Times reported that a team of physicists at Rowland Institute of Science and Harvard University were able to slow the speed of light to 38 miles per hour! (“Researchers Slow Speed of Light to the Pace of a Sunday Driver”, The New York Times, February 18, 1999)
• In July 1999, the secular journal New Scientist ran a front cover feature by an evolutionary cosmologist, proposing a faster initial speed of light in order to overcome problems in the big bang theory of cosmic evolution!
– “Call it heresy, but all the big cosmological problems will simply melt away, if you break one rule . . . The rule that says the speed of light never varies” (“Is nothing sacred?” New Science, July 24, 1999, p. 28)
– “The stimulus provided by . . . the theory that a change in the speed of light in the early Universe may have propelled it into the peculiar state . . . that we see today, should provoke us to take a wide-ranging look at the constancy of nature’s ‘constants’.” (Ibid. p.32)
• A number of recent news stories show that evolutionary scientists no longer consider the constancy of the speed of light to be “sacred”:
– “The speed of light is not what it used to be. Scientists have discovered that light may once have traveled many thousands of times faster than now, posing new questions about Einstein's theory of relativity, which forms the basis for much of our understanding of the universe. (Jonathan Leake,“High-speed Light Casts Doubt on Einstein’s Laws”, The Sunday Times - UK, December 24, 2000, www.Sunday-times.co.uk)
– Einstein built his theory around the idea that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant 670,615,000 mph (186,282 miles per second) and that nothing could go faster. New studies suggest, however, that this did not apply in the infancy of the universe, during and soon after the big bang, in which the universe exploded into existence 12 to 15 billion years ago” (Ibid.)
– “New observations from the world’s biggest telescope indicate that one of nature’s supposedly immutable constants [the speed of light] has changed over the 15 billion-year history of the universe” (The Associated Press, “Study: Light Speed May Have Changed”, The New York Times, August 15, 2001, www.nytimes.com)
Dr. Russell Humphreys Model
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According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity . . . Speed Affects Time
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According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity . . . Gravity Affects Time
For example, an atomic clock at the Royal observatory in Greenwich, England, ticks five microseconds per year slower than an identical clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado, both clocks being accurate to about one microsecond per year. The difference is exactly what general relativity predicts for the one-mile difference in altitude (Figure 1).
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Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe
• Dr. Russell Humphreys, a nuclear physicist who works at Sandia National Laboratories has proposed that:
– God initially created all the materials in the universe in a (relatively) small area (he proposes an area two light years in diameter).
– God then "stretched out the heavens", creating the galaxies and stars.
• Isaiah 42:5 - This is what God the LORD says-- he who created the heavens and stretched them out
• Isaiah 45:12 - It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.
• (Cf. Job 9:8, Psalm 104:2, Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 51:13, Jeremiah 10:12, 51:15, Zechariah 12:1)
• Using formulas based on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Humpheys shows that due to the tremendous gravitational force generated by having the mass of the universe initially concentrated in a relatively small area, the stars and galaxies could have (because of the effect of gravity on time) aged billions of years during the time that the earth aged 24 hours on the fourth day!
Epilogue on the Problem of Light From Distant Stars: Know the Scriptures and the Power of God
• The Old Testament teaches that there will be a resurrection of the dead and that God's people will go to be with Him.
– (e.g. Psalm 49:15, Psalm 73:24-26, Job 19:25-27)
• Yet in Jesus' day, the Sadducees did not believe in a resurrection. In order to trip up those who did believe in the resurrection, the Sadducees would bring up what they believed to be an inescapable logical consequence of believing in the resurrection in order to make those (like Jesus) who believed in it seem like fools – in much the same way that evolutionists today bring up seemingly unsolvable difficulties in an attempt to make those who believe in a young earth appear foolish.
Matthew 22:23-31 - That same day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. "Teacher," they said, "Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us. The first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother, right on down to the seventh Finally, the woman died. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?" Jesus replied, "You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead-- have you not read what God said to you, 'I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not the God of the dead but of the living." When the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching.
• Likewise people who try to trip us up when we hold to the clear teaching of Scripture today (such as a six thousand year old earth) are in error because they do not know the Scriptures or the power of God!
• To the extent that God allows us to resolve thorny issues in this life, that is a blessing that comes with God’s wisdom.
• But in the end, we must always trust that God can resolve those things for which we do not yet have answers.
• In the case of distant starlight, perhaps one of the models previously discussed will turn out to be right.
• If not, then perhaps God has a solution that we have not yet imagined (like Jesus when He addressed the issue of the resurrection with the Sadducees).
Did the Universe “Evolve”?
Scientific Problems With the “Big Bang”
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• While some believe that light from distant stars present a problem for young-earth creationists, evolutionists have their own problems explaining the universe!
• The biggest problem that evolutionists have is explaining where the material for the universe came from. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed (through natural means). Therefore there can be no natural explanation for the existence of the universe.
• Furthermore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the overall energy available for useful work (in a closed system such as the universe) always decreases over time. Therefore the universe cannot be infinitely old.
• Evolutionists also have their own problems with light from distant stars: faraway galaxies whose light has traveled great distances and therefore (supposedly) shows what those galaxies looked like millions of years ago look just as mature as nearby galaxies (Science News, March 7, 1981, “Most Distant Galaxies: Surprisingly Mature”, p.148).
• Recently, distant galaxies have been observed by the Hubble Space Telescope whose age, based on calculations which assume the big bang occurred, exceeds the age of the universe! (Nature, June 13, 1996, “An Old Galaxy in a Young Universe”, pp.555-556)
• Many calculations which are based on the assumption that the big bang occurred do not work out without having to make assumptions for which there is little or no evidence:
– Big bang cosmologists routinely assume that there is at least ten times as much matter in the universe as what we can see! (George Smoot and Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time, 1993, p.12)
– Some big bang cosmologists are now beginning to assume that the speed of light was many thousands of times faster when the big bang occurred than it is today. (Jonathan Leake,“High-speed Light Casts Doubt on Einstein’s Laws”, The Sunday Times - UK, December 24, 2000, www.Sunday-times.co.uk)
• “Observations only recently made possible by improvements in astronomical instrumentation have put theoretical models of the Universe [the big bang] under intense pressure. The standard ideas of the 1980s about the shape and history of the universe have now been abandoned - and cosmologists are now taking seriously the possibility that the Universe is pervaded by some sort of vacuum energy, whose origin is not at all understood” (Nature, June 25, 1998, “The End of the Old Model Universe”, p.741)
• “Astronomy, rather cosmology, is in trouble. It is, for the most part, beside itself. It has departed from the scientific method and its principles, and drifted into the bizarre; it has raised imaginative invention to an art form; and has shown a ready willingness to surrender or ignore fundamental laws, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the maximum speed of light, all for the apparent rationale of saving the status quo. Perhaps no ‘science’ is receiving more self-criticism, chest-beating, and self-doubt; none other seems so lost and misdirected; trapped in debilitating dogma.” (Roy C. Martin, Jr., Astronomy on Trial: A Devastating and Complete Repudiation of the Big Bang Fiasco, 1999, p. xv)
Scientific Problems With Evolutionary Theories on the Origin of Our Solar System
• Many undisputed observations contradict current theories on how the solar system evolved.
– One theory says planets formed when a star, passing near our Sun, tore matter from the sun.
– More popular theories hold that the solar system formed from a cloud of swirling gas, dust, or larger particles.
• If the planets and their 72 known moons evolved from the same material, they should have many similarities. After several decades of planetary exploration, this expectation is now recognized as false.
– “The solar system used to be a simple place . . . But 30 years of planetary exploration have replaced that simple picture with a far more complex image . . . One of the early hopes of planetary exploration was that learning why other planets differ from Earth would feed directly into our understanding of our home planet . . . I wish it were not so, but I’m somewhat skeptical we’re going to learn an awful lot about earth by looking at other planetary bodies. The more that we look at different planets, the more each one seems to be unique” (Science, September 2, 1994, “The Solar System’s New Diversity”, p.1360)
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| This is a composite photograph (not to scale) of all the planets in the solar system, except Pluto, From the top left are Mercury, Venus, Earth (with the Moon to the right), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. |
• According to evolutionary theories (Information for this section is documented by Walter Brown, In the Beginning - Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, Seventh Edition, 2001, p.21):
– Backward-Spinning Planets - All planets should spin in the same direction, but Venus, Uranus, and Pluto rotate backwards.
– Backward Orbits - All 72 moons in the solar system should orbit their planets in the same direction that the planets are rotating, but at least eight have backward orbits. Furthermore, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have moons orbiting in both directions.
– Tipped Orbits - The orbit of each of these 72 moons should lie in the equatorial plane of the planet it orbits, but many, including the Earth’s moon, are in highly inclined orbits.
– Wrong Chemistry - Because about 98% of the Sun is hydrogen or helium, Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury should have similar compositions. Instead much less than 1% of these planets is hydrogen or helium.
– Angular Momentum - The Sun should have 700 times more angular momentum than all the planets combined. Instead, the planets have 50 times more angular momentum than the Sun.
What Powers the Sun?
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(Information for this section comes from:
• Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the Bible, 1989, p.49-50
• Creation ex nihilo, December 1999-February 2000, “The Sun: our special star”. P.27-31)
• The dominant view of scientists is that nuclear fusion provides the sun’s energy - as hydrogen is converted to helium.
• Along with heat and light, the fusion process should also produce a multitude of subatomic particles called neutrinos. Theoretically, if nuclear fusion were the sole source of the sun’s energy, the earth’s surface should be hit by a trillion neutrinos per second.
• Instead we measure only one third this number of neutrinos striking the earth’s surface.
• The main scientific alternative for explaining the sun’s energy is called “gravitational collapse”. That is, if the sun is slowly contracting, great amounts of energy would be released (without generating neutrinos).
• This theory is generally rejected by evolutionists since it could only sustain the sun for millions rather than billions of years. Thus, the long-age framework of modern evolutionary thinking has strongly biased their view of solar energy.
• If gravity collapse turns out to be the correct theory, the sun and solar system must be much younger than previously thought.
• The solar astronomer John Eddy once commented:
• “I suspect the sun is 4.5 billion years old. However given some new and unexpected results to the contrary, and some time for frantic recalculations and theoretical readjustment, I suspect we could live with Bishop Ussher’s value for the age of the Earth and Sun [about 6,000 years]. I don’t think there is much in the way of observational evidence to conflict with that.” (J.A. Eddy quoted by R.G Kazmann, “It’s about time: 4.5 billion years”, Geotimes, September, 1978, p.18-20)
The Origin of the Moon?
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Information for this section was gleaned from:
• Donald B. DeYoung, Astronomy and the Bible, 1989, p.26-27
• In the Beginning - Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood, Seventh Edition, 2001, p.22
• Evolutionists have proposed four major theories as to how the Moon originated:
– The Fission Theory - states that the moon split off from the spinning earth, like mud flung from a bicycle wheel.
– The Capture Theory - states that the moon wandered too close to the earth at some time in the past and was “captured” in the earth’s orbit.
– The Accretion Theory - proposes the concurrent formation of both the earth and the moon from small chunks of material. As a result, the moon “just happens” to circle the earth.
– The Collision Theory - proposes that a large planetary object (about the size of Mars) hit the earth causing a large amount of debris to break off which then formed the moon.
• The evolutionary theories on the origin of the moon are highly speculative and completely inadequate. For example:
– The moon did not spin off Earth because it does not orbit directly above the equator as would be expected if the moon originated in this way. Instead the moon’s orbit is always tilted between 18 and 28 degrees to the earth’s equator (which is why it appears higher or lower in the sky during different seasons).
– The moon could not have originated from the earth because the relative abundances of its elements are too dissimilar from those of Earth.
– The moon’s nearly circular orbit is also strong evidence that the moon was never torn from, nor captured by the earth.
• The evolutionary models for the origin of the moon have numerous other problems - even by the evolutionists’ own admission.
• The problems that arise in trying to explain the origin of the moon from an evolutionary perspective, caused one expert to joke, “The best explanation [for the Moon] was observational error - the Moon does not exist.” (Nature, September 25, 1997, “It’s not easy to make the Moon”, p.327)
• But the moon does exist, and the best explanation for its existence is that God made it along with all the other heavenly bodies!
• Nehemiah 9:6 - You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.