An hypothesis of distant starlight reaching the earth during the fourth day of creation using the laws of physics God created

Faith & Science Conversation
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I realize that most of you navigate in the old earth paradigm. But maybe you can give some thoughtful feedback on my hypothesis.

This comes out of my deep and profound ignorance of physics and astrophysics, so I won’t be easily offended by your responses. If you could give me brief thoughts on why you think it is nonsense or interesting, I would appreciate that. Here it is:

An hypothesis of distant starlight reaching the earth during the fourth day of creation using the laws of physics God created

There are an estimated minimum of 1 septillion stars in the universe (1 followed by 24 zeros.) It could be many magnitudes greater.

It is not even clear what the value of a chronon, the hypothesized smallest unit of time, might be. One candidate for it is Planck time (an infinitesimal 5.39 x 10-44 seconds). In 24 hours there are 86,400 seconds in a day, so multiply the two for the number of chronons in one day. (Is that 4.66x1049 chronons in a day?)

There are many orders of magnitude more chronons in one 24 hour day, even if the number of stars is greater by 10,000 times than the above estimate (1 followed by 29 zeros.)

If on the fourth day of creation, God created stars individually at a rate of one per chronon, all the stars could have been created in much less than 24 hours, perhaps in 1-20 of a day—a small fraction of a second.

Time runs slower in stronger gravitational fields, and faster in weaker gravitational fields. This phenomenon is known as gravitational time dilation.

So here’s a thought experiment: Assuming the rate of the creation of stars at one per chronon, starting with the most distant star, still applying the current measured speed of light, how much time would it take for the light of the first star to reach the earth?

Then assuming that God in his infinite wisdom created each star to minimize the strength of the gravitational field between the earth and that star, could all the light from all the stars have reached the earth by the end of the fourth day of creation, so that when Adam first observed the sky, he would have seen all the stars visible to us today with our naked eye? Or if Adam had access to the Webb space telescope, would he have been able to see light from all the stars and galaxies that astronomers can see today?

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To have distant starlight to quickly reach Earth, you need a way to speed it up. Neither gravity nor the absence of gravity will do that, and indeed there is no known physics that will.

The more fundamental reason such a hypothesis fails is in common with all such efforts - there is no solution to a problem which does not exist. Distant starlight takes billions of years to reach Earth - that is perfectly in line with long understood physics, routine engineering, and does not present any problem whatsoever.

A milestone is approaching; a man made object, voyager 1, will in November of 2026 journey passed one light day distance from Earth. And yet the probe would require tens of thousands of years to reach the closest star at 4 light years distance. The universe is vast and ancient.

It is not just light that marks time. We also receive cosmic rays and neutrinos which transited over deep time. Cosmic jets are observed from galactic centers that extend hundreds of thousands of light years, interacting with the intergalactic medium. There are streams of stars resulted from galaxies having traveled through each other over millions of years. Thousands of galaxies have interacted. All these observations are consistent with an old universe.

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There are gravitational fields between each mass in space and every other mass, which of course in interstellar space are already infinitesimal.

How would Adam have known how long the time took to reach his eye? Why would it matter? What matters is what we see today and what we see is evidence of deep time.

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It doesn’t involve what Adam knows or doesn’t know. He is just the hypothetical observer just as he is the hypothetical user of the Webb space telescope. The question is when did the light reach from the most distant stars to the earth.

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This is not about the speed of light. It is about time running faster. But of course, if there is infinitesimal gravity in most of space, that would be a valid objection. The rate at which time runs would not change that much. But if indeed light could go farther, not faster–because time runs faster–again not light going faster–then it would not take as much time for light to traverse a light year’s distance. How much less time would it take if there was closer to zero gravity in space?

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That is not the most important question, which is why does the light that does reach the earth show events that couldn’t take place in 10,000 years? Why would God create a false history just to support a young earth?

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Given that the speed of light and intervals of time are linked by relativity, the same result applies. There are lots of problems with idea of the creation of the universe somehow outpacing the presence of gravity anyways. Without gravity, you do not have stars, and without stars, you do not have light to reach earth to begin with.

The light we see from distant space is not some static celestial dome, it displays ongoing dynamic events such as pulsing signals and various categories of supernova which must happen some time after creation. Gravitational waves which also travel at the speed of light tell of massive mergers. Zero gravity with gravitational waves would be hard to surpass as a self contradiction. So I’m afraid the idea addresses a problem which does not exist, is wrong, and would not help anyways.

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The basic problem in the hypothesis is related to the worldview.
Your hypothesis takes as the starting point and ultimate measure of truth what is the current (modern) understanding of the material universe. From this starting point, you try to force the Genesis text to the given modern mold - to be true, the Genesis text needs to fit to the current understanding about the universe.

That approach is problematic because forcing the Genesis text into the mold of the current (modern) worldview demands twisting the words and concepts of the Genesis text to something totally different than what the original text was telling. Even the concept of time needs to be twisted if we try to force everything in the story into seven 24h days and the huge distances in the universe.

A more credible approach is to take the text as the original listeners understood it. The text was not told to teach about the material science of the universe, it was told to reveal spiritual truths about the relationship between the Creator and the creation, including humans. The ancient worldview of the listeners was just the stage where the story was told, to help the listeners to get the core message.

In the worldview of the original listeners, the stars were not very far away. They were lights shining on the firmament, the solid ‘raqia’ that stretched from the ends of the flat world to the opposite ends.
The creation story in Genesis 1 uses this worldview as a background stage but turns the polytheistic beliefs into something totally different. The visible manifestations of the important gods on the firmament (sun, moon and stars) are described just as lights created by the true God.

You are free to try to force the world of Genesis 1 into the mold of the modern worldview but if you try to do that, you can expect painful difficulties and contradictions.

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Billions of years.

No.

You calculated the number of planck times per day. Why didn’t you also calculate the time for light to travel from distant stars? That’s no harder.

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Last Tuesdayism fits the data better.

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Last Tuesdayism fits the data perfectly. :wink:

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With the major data releases from the Gaia probe measurements, we now have a much better measure of the distances to stars within our galaxy and even other nearby galaxies. Geometry indicates that many of the stars that we see are too far for the light to reach us within a young-earth time frame, much less the distant galaxies.

Given that we can’t see any indication of an edge to the universe, the light from the most distant stars is almost certainly too far to ever reach us. The light from the most distant stars that we can detect evidence of (too far to detect individual stars with present technology) has taken around 13 billion years to arrive.

This does not require a prior assumption of an ancient universe, but merely the assumption that God’s physical laws do not change arbitrarily and abruptly without leaving evidence. In addition to the measurements of distance, the most distant objects look as expected for them to be much younger than the nearby stars and galaxies that we see today.

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Why isn’t this enough?

Why must there be some torturing of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology and the human psyche in order to justify scientifically something that the Bible treats as a divine speech act in order to be “biblical?”

What drives this bizarre urge? And to the degree that it does?

Is the next project to unarvel the processes of resurrection? Immaculate conception? The indwelling of the Spirit? The mechanics of justification by faith?

“I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.”

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My objection is that the entire proposal rests on forcing the text to conform to a worldview that is alien to it. Genesis 1 is not trying to talk about physics, which makes all the questions of the final paragraph silly.

Don’t try to make the text answer questions the writer had no interest in; instead ask what its questions were and what the answers have to teach us.

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That’s not even a question: the stars are in the category of “lights” in the narrative, which means they were visible right then.

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Greetings cewoldt,

I know that D. Russell Humphreys created a model that assumed that time went faster at the edge of the universe than at its center due to gravity, by analogy with a blackhole where time slows down as you approach the blackhole. I am speaking as a non-expert in this case, but one obvious problem with these scenarios that I have never seen addressed is that, last time I checked, Earth is not a supermassive blackhole and the nearest one to Earth is 30,000 light years away, meaning it would have a negligible effect on the flow of time in Earth’s vicinity. Also, as far as I know, the blackhole at the center of our galaxy is not massive enough to impact the flow of time 13 billion lightyears from Earth let alone Earth itself. Where is the gravity coming from that is slowing down time so much at only 6 days pass on Earth while billions of years pass for the most distant galaxies? If you just say it was a miracle then it is not a scientific hypothesis.

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You don’t need to be an expert to see this. It’s undergraduate-level physics. Just google “gravitational time dilation” and plug in the figures. You would need to be within a few metres of the event horizon of a supermassive black hole to get from six days to billions of years.

This is the difference between science and pseudoscience. Science looks at weird phenomena such as gravitational time dilation and does the maths to figure out what it can and can’t account for. Pseudoscience looks at weird phenomena such as gravitational time dilation and treats it as a free pass to make things up.

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Question: Are there stars so distant that no light from them has yet to reach earth?

There may well be young stars that are so far away that we haven’t seen any light from them yet. I suspect some of the newly formed stars we’ve detected have been more than 6000 light years away.

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The Earth would need to be really close to a black hole in order for the math to work out for YEC timelines. This would pose a whole lot of other problems, such as the massive amounts of radiation that close to a black hole.

As the Earth is now, the first starlight to reach the Earth would have been from the Alpha Centauri system which is 4-5 light years away, and as the distance implies it would take 4-5 years for that light to reach the Earth. However, we can see stars in our own galaxy that are more than 10,000 light years away, and we can also see other galaxies billions of light years away.

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LOL
He wasn’t educated enough to know that there is no edge?