Question

A ray of light travels at 186,000 miles per second, and light from the edge of the milky way, would then take 100,000 years to reach here. If that is so, then our world would need be quite quite old, because we see those that are so far out there, and we couldn't see them unless those 100,000 years were fulfiled, in order to be in our sight. Don't get me wrong, I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and I am not at all a creation-evolutionist, but what I do hear, is that the earth is about 7-10 thousand years old. Please, if you can at all clear any of this up for me, I would much  appreciate it. Question: hence to all that above, the earth, the universe, would be much much older than only a handful of a thousand years--yes or no?

Answer

No, at best, it's just a few thousand years ago. Many a scientist comes along and says, "I've got a problem with with a young earth. What about the speed of light? God created a star out there and it's X number of light years away--it would take a million years for it to get here! The light can' t get here! The fact that we can see the light of the star way out there indicates that millions of years must have gone by."

Well, how about this for a wild solution. God not only created the star, He created the light in between there and here. Does that sound impossible? Well, if that's too simplistic, let me give you another solution. Hang on.

Research has been done on the speed of light. They've done it in kilometers. The speed of light is generally accepted as being 299,792.458 kilometers per second or, rounding it off, 300,000 kilometers a second. A light year is the distance light travels in a year. Thus, a star might come into being a million light years away from the earth but couldn't actually be observed until a million years later because it would take that long for the star light to reach the earth from outer space. If this is the case, then the solar system has to be immensely older than the few thousand years indicated by the Genesis chronologies. This fact would seem to remove the biblical chronology from serious consideration if we're going to have any honest assessment from science.

Well, let me tell you why that doesn't work. First--this comes from some interesting, fascinating research by an Australian scientist named Barry Setterfield--listen to this. "Arguments that the speed of light has been slowing down and thus traveled much more rapidly in the past would indicate a very young universe, in terms of thousands rather than billions of years." Barry Setterfield, an Australian scientist, proposed the decay in the speed of light in his writings called "The Velocity of Light in the Age of the Universe"--according to Setterfield, the first careful measurement of the speed of light was made by a Danish astronomer, Riemer, in 1675, and then by an English astronomer, Bradley, in 1728. It's been measured many times since then and is said to have reached an equilibrium at the number I gave you a moment ago. The data indicate that the speed of light in 1675 was about 2.6 faster than today and that it continued to decline until 1960 when atomic clocks began to be employed to measure it. Setterfield charted a rate of about 5.7 kilometers decrease in velocity per second between 1675 and 1728 and 2.5 kilometers per second decrease between 1880 and 1924 and he kept charting the decrease. He worked out a curve tracing the decay of the velocity of light.

He postulates that at the time of creation, the speed of light was 5 times 10 to the 11th power faster than now. So that light once traveled 7 million times faster than it does now. On this basis, Setterfield figures the earth was created about 4040 plus or minus a hundred years. At the time of creation, the speed of light was going so much faster than it does now. If the speed of light has indeed decayed, along with everything else, then the most basic empirical measurement of the age of the solar system would fit precisely into the genealogical chronologies of Genesis. Wow. You just take those same figures, put them on a curve, you have light being almost instantaneous 6000 years ago.

Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. Moreover, assuming that's correct, that would explain why the dates derived from various types of radioactive measurements on physical, geological elements, such as the half life of uranium 238, decaying into lead over millions of years, would all be skewed. The velocity of an electron in its orbit is proportional to the speed of light. Everything changes. What appears to be old isn't old at all if you understand this immense fact. Hence, radiometric ages in rocks, meteorites, and other astronomical objects in conventionally allocated years can all be predicted by the high initial value of C and accommodated within a 6000 year framework.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
Bible Bulletin Board
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Columbus, New Jersey, USA, 08022
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Email: tony@biblebb.com
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