Starlight and Time
Helping Christians Defend Their Faith
Many Christians, when asked about their faith, are stumped by the question "How did light from distant stars get all the way to earth in less than 6,000 years? Some stars are more than a billion light-years (light-years are the distance light travels in a year) away."
This has been explained in various ways. Some have said that God created the stars "mature", with a beam of light between the star and earth. This is satisfactory except for one thing. We see stars exploding that are more than 10,000 light-years away. Even if the explosion had happened at the beginning of creation, we would still not have seen the change from a pinpoint of light to a vast nebula.
An astrophysicist named Dr. Russell Humphreys recently formulated a theory to solve this apparent problem. To understand it, let's look at some not-so-basic astrophysics:
Scientists know from Einstein that gravity is just the affect of mass bending space. Where the mass is bigger, the gravitational field is stronger.
Another thing that Dr. Humphreys tells us is that time is not a constant. Clocks run faster at the tops of skyscrapers than they do at sea level. According to all the research that he has done, time and gravity are directly related. Not only this. Where gravity is stronger, time is slower.
Advocates of the Big Bang would have us believe that the universe has no center and no edge; it is a hyper-space-sphere-thingamagigg. This is just an assumption to validate the Big Bang; it has no scientific support.
In his book, Starlight and Time, Dr. Humphreys explains that if we assume the universe to be finite (having a center and an edge), there is an overall bend in the space-time "continuum" that Einstein speaks about. This bend results in a high gravitational field at the center of the universe. The overall gravity of the universe decreases as one moves away from the center.
If we also make the assumption that the earth is near the center of the universe, then the overall gravity around our solar system is very high.
The higher the gravitational field, the slower the passage of time. This means that there has been plenty of "time" for light to travel in the outskirts of the universe. Since time slows down as a beam of light gets closer to the center, most light hits earth at about the same time. The light that we see from stars billions of light-years away was really emitted from the star only a few days ago (our time).
The next time you look up at the stars, think about how awesome our God must be to design such an intricate plan, and thank Him for his great power and love. ><>
David S. MacMillan III
Not bad for 30 minute's work, eh? I thought that it was already written out, but unfortunately it wasn't in ready-to-be-published mode. So, I just sat down and typed it out non-stop. Whew! At least it didn't have any errors in it.
Well, that's all for now, folks.
In Him,
David
