Would that be an African Thursday or a European Thursday?
Let’s say the light we’re seeing shows two galaxies colliding. If that light was created already in transit and the universe was created as mature, then since they are billions of light years away but the universe is only thousands of years old then those galaxies never collided at all – and the light we’re seeing is a lie because it would be showing things that never actually occurred.
And if we’re supposed to believe that God created light in transit that didn’t actually come from stars it’s deceptive anyway – so why should we believe that those stars even exist?
Fake starlight is a conjecture that leads to not being able to trust God at all. Any YECist who is presenting that position is thus a false teacher because they are implicitly denying the trustworthiness of God – and we’re back to that pesky instruction God gave to Moses that we’ve repeatedly seen YECists ignoring, something about false witness.
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Light appearing before the sun was created in six-24-hr-day YECism was a factor when I was a YEC in my youth. The explanations for it always seemed contrived and with no biblical support – they were just made-up, fabricated.
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Hugh, try looking? You can find pictures on the internet if you don’t believe me.
Pictures are worth 1,000 words.
The question was if it is deceptive for God to create events that didn’t happen. The answer is yes.
Totally not related to the question asked.
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You are traveling down the highway when you encounter flaming debris scattered on the road, wheels, engine parts, and metal strewn about. People are standing around talking about an accident, but you say “in my theology this is the way it was made, and everything was exactly placed”.
The is Arp 148, one of the hundreds of imaged merging or interacting galaxies. At 450 million light years distant, It is seen here as it was before mammals or dinosaurs appeared on Earth. Just by being that far out there, we know the travel time for the light to reach us falsifies YEC. But what is shown is far from static. Images of galactic collision depict processes developed over millions of years across thousands of light years - gas drawn out into the void, shock waves, tidal disruptions, and cascades of star birth. YEC allows no time for the material movement over the distances involved. Then on top of that, YEC provides no time for the recessional red shift of Arp 148 due to the expansion of the universe.
If you do not believe your own eyes, that cannot be helped. But for my part it is delusional to think that the light travel, the cosmic event, and the red shift, can be fit into YEC timelines. That would be a universe sized deception.
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For the umpteenth time:
Truth comes from the reality of the data in God’s creation and from the reality of the data in the Bible, and if they appear to conflict, the interpretation of one or the other or both is in error.
At least YECs get to futilely exercise their imaginations. To what end? Whatever, it certainly does not honor God or truth.
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As an atheist, it is the dogmatism of religion that I least admire. I trust people a lot more when they demonstrate the ability to change their minds. Admitting you are wrong is WAY better than refusing to abandon wrong conclusions.
Biblical interpretations are the product of fallible humans. Even worse, you have settled on a fallible human interpretation of the Bible that proves it wrong. If the Bible is infallible then it wouldn’t be contradicted by observable facts, so why do you insist on an interpretation that is contradicted by mountains of observable facts? If anyone is proving the Bible to be false it is YEC’s.
Even worse, you are now giving us reasons to not trust God. Supernova 1987a is a perfect example. As the name implies, this is a supernova that was observed in 1987. We also have pictures of the star before it exploded. That star is 168,000 light years away. According to your logic, that star never existed. God just made it up. We can’t even trust our eyes when looking out into the Universe. Why, then, should we trust the Bible? Why can’t it be just as made up as the stars we see out in the Universe? If we can’t trust the creation, then why trust the Bible?
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(Hey, T – Welcome back! It’s been a while. ; - )
Remember that we are essentially inside the Big Bang. If we look at the ground underneath us, we see the Earth as it appears right now. If we look at the sun (with appropriate protection), we see it as it was about 8 minutes ago, because the light took that long to get here. Looking all the way out to 13.7 billion light years, we see things that far away as they appeared that long ago. [Because of the expansion of the universe in the meantime, those objects are now much farther from us; 13.7 billion light years is how far it is from us to where they were when the light left them.] The earth being about 4.56 billion years old means that the earth was formed at the time shown by light from things 4.56 billion light years away. If we were 4.56 billion light years away, and had a super huge telescope, then we could watch the Earth being created right now.
The reason that the microwave background looks largely the same in all directions is that we are seeing a bit of the universe as it was when the microwave background formed if we look far enough in any direction. That takes looking an equal distance in any direction.
Note that all this is rejecting two popular and untenable young-earth claims. Humphrey’s geocentric universe model implies that we should only see things within 6000 light years of Earth and things within 6000 light years of the Big Bang, but the reality is that we see things in between as well. Lisle’s anisotropy of light speed model says that we should see things at all distances as they are now, not what they were like in the past. (If that were true, GPS wouldn’t work.)
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Space has been expanding while that light traveled, though, so if they were 13.7 billion light years from us when that light left them it ended up traveling farther than 13.7 billion years. So if the light has traveled for 13.7 billion years, they would have been somewhat closer when that light started its journey.
It seems to me that saying they were 13.7 billion light years away when the light left them is a shorthand since it actually assumes a static universe at least while that light was traveling.
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The universe was only 100 million light years across and 300,000-400,000 years old when the CMB formed. Due to inflation, the CMB radiation we are seeing now is coming from a distance of 46 billion light years. The math seems a bit wonky, but I was able to make some sense of it here:
If I understand it correctly, our observable universe is only a section of the full universe. An observer in a distant galaxy would see parts of the universe that we can’t see, and vice versa.
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That is correct; my description was inaccurate because I did not include the effect of the universe’s expansion on our distance.
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Perhaps an analogy might be useful. Suppose there are two advanced civilizations, each 100 light-years away from us, that decide to send a message to Earth at the same time. You will get both messages in 100 years. It doesn’t matter how old you are; the messages will arrive at the same time.
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Yes, since space expanding doesn’t pull galaxies apart.
Makes me think of a sci-fi series where the expansion of space pulls apart a community of galaxies, making a cluster of five and a cluster of seven out of the initial group of twelve. The story happens when the cluster of a dozen is just reaching the point at which their means of travel between galaxies is becoming insufficient to bridge the gap.
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