Starlight and time "Scientists have discovered a galaxy 12 million light years away.

" How many times do you see statements like that appear on the news or science and astronomy magazines? According to the mathematicians, the universe is supposed to be in the region of 13-15 billion years old. Light from distant stars are supposed to have taken so many magnitudes of years to reach us that the whole universe must be so old, the scientists preach to us. Of course they have powerful telescopes and in-depth scientific know-how, so they must be telling us the truth, right? The truth? If one took the Hebrew scriptures as they are, and using the normal rates as we know them, add up the years from the beginning of creation until now, based on a seven day creation, man being made on the sixth day, and the genealogies that proceed from them, you would get an age of around 6000 years. If you were a little loose round the edges, maybe you'd come up with about 10,000 years. But according to the scientists of our day, the light from some distant stars must take millions of years to get here. They don't state it as possible, or in a tentative way. It is portrayed in the media as fact. Any doubt is confined to those elite group of scientists or the philosophers of science. So what is it then? Is the universe between 6,000-10,000 years old? Is that a preposterous, incredible, unbelievable idea just based on myths written by a prescientific people just imagining their origin in a primitive way? Is the universe really 13.7 billion years old, as the scientists tell us? The way it is measured Astronomers, the people that study stars and planets, use different ways to try to calculate the distance to the stars. For people like me, the question comes to one's mind: how can you measure the distance of something you cannot touch, something apparently so far away? Here are some key terms and their definitions for the purposes of the essay. I like to get definitions clear in my head before I start talking to anyone. You may have heard of the term, "light-year". It is the distance that light travels in one year at its current speed in a vacuum (not a vacuum cleaner!). That speed is about three hundred thousand kilometers in a second. Now that's fast. At that speed, a light year is 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers. Remember, it is a distance. It is like saying "so-many miles long", and as you hopefully will

see later, it doesn't logically follow that it means "it took so many years to get here". Now there are numerous methods used to calculate how far stars are. You can find out on the internet or in science books what these methods are. I will just mention them here. The most direct method is parallax, where you measure the position of a star, relative to stars "behind" it that act as a stationary background. You will find that some stars appear to slightly change position throughout the year in a back and forth motion. It is generally accepted that this is because the earth goes round the sun and our viewpoint of the star is supposed to change as our "planet" orbits the sun [4]. Based on the diameter of that orbit around the sun and some trigonometry, the approximate distance of the star can be calculated. It must be noted that the movement of such stars are very small, the numbers used to calculate those distances are very small too, so error can creep in. The distances measured by parallax are not in the order of millions of light years, but about 100 light years. This is way too small to make a good argument against a relatively young universe. Other methods are used, as can be seen in my reference number [1]. They include the amount of redshift in a star, where the energy of light from a star is reduced, and it is assumed that this is because of how it is speeding away from us, or its distance. Also, there are other methods involving the absolute luminosity/brightness of a star and comparing it with the brightness we see here, based on the assumption that we actually can find out the absolute luminosity without being anywhere close to the star. There are methods that involve the idea that we can get distance from changes in brightness of certain stars, or the surface temperature of certain stars. A lot of these are dealt with by other people a lot more qualified by me. For example, see page 7-15 to 7-19 of the book in my reference number [2]. But there is a more fundamental problem when talking about lightspeed and starlight and time. For all these methods, we may be dealing with symptoms rather than the actual root problem that makes all these attempts to measure the distance of stars and the size of the universe, based on light very questionable. Logical problems I believe there is a logical fallacy committed by those who interpret the notion that the stars are billions of light years away as meaning that the light took billions of years to get here. The fallacy is this: the way things work NOW in

the completed universe does NOT tell how things were created. Example: we can figure out all the properties of the materials that make up a computer, but that will not tell us how the computer is formed. We cannot use those same processes and properties in a formed computer to tell us that these processes have been going on for a long time. Another example of this is rock. You know that if we had no experience of rocks, and just found one, hard and inert on the ground, we wouldn't be able to say how it was created. We probably wouldn't have a clue that it may have started as some high temperature liquid that came from inside the earth, and whatever it was before then. The present properties of something does not necessarily or inevitably lead us to the story of its origin, and without experience, we could only give ideas about its age. We would be dwelling in the land of speculation. In the same way, just because we know the speed of light now, that does NOT tell us the speed of light during creation. We don't even know definitively how it was created, but unless one already believes in the eternity of natural laws (the laws that appear to govern the way nature works) as some scientists and nonscientists appear to believe, which is an untestable hypothesis, star light and (calculated) star distances cannot tell us how long the star has been up there. To put it another way, let me simplify it a little for you. The scientists can measure the speed of light now. They agree that it is a constant. Notice, it is that they agree, not that it actually is, since there is some evidence against that. Using that speed, they could probably tell us how far light can travel in a certain material, like air or a "vacuum", in about a year. Now, if, and that's a big IF, the stars are really the distance they say, then what you have are all the natural ingredients to make a conclusion. But there is an ingredient missing. There is a piece of knowledge that makes a huge difference in the interpretation you gain for that natural information. You don't know if those natural laws and agreed-upon constants has always been working in the same way always. You don't know if, during the creation of light, whether it was by a big undirected bang/expansion or Deity, it behaved the same way as it does now or once it was originally and fully produced. So some scientists make an untestable assumption: that Natural law has, for the past millions or billions of years, nay, even an eternity, has always held constant and thus we can get an approximate time that it took the light to get here, say millions or billions of years.

Thus after making this assumption which indirectly cuts out any possible supernatural activity, they determine that the time light took to get here was approximately so long. But they have no idea whether their assumption is true in reality. They can moan and complain that other agreed-upon constants of the universe, which they may also hold as having some eternal quality, would change and things couldn't happen or we couldn't tell heads nor tails of what is going on. But that is the problem with the eons of time in the past and megadistances, no matter how you try to measure it. It is out of reach of human experience, and it is cloaked in darkness. And all we have are theories about those distances and about that distant past that may seem consistent, theories that incorporate that assumption. But let's be honest. As long as we don't really know what really happened, can we or should we put such value on what, at best, is "educated" guesses, "educated" because what real education do we have about the past without any record to verify it? Why do believers in scripture, something that claims to be true and from somebody who was there throughout all time, compromise their scriptures over "educated" (more accurately, uneducated and speculative) guesses? So to put this all in simpler terms, there are two points that need to be understood with regards to light, its speed, and its use as a means of measuring mega-time. The processes and rates at work now do not necessarily tell us how things were created. The processes and rates at work now do not necessarily tell us the processes and rates at work at creation. Because of the above two facts, any huge length of time given by scientists can only be taken as speculation and not as factual. And note that this is not even taking into account the fact that throughout the history of the study of the speed of light, it has not been conclusively, experimentally shown that the speed of light has been constant during the history of our world. In fact there is even experimental evidence that the speed of light has decreased, meaning that it was faster in the past. This means that distance measurements using the speed of light may be unreliable. Conclusion In the end, due to dogmatic, all-encompassing naturalism (methodological or philosophy) [5], science has become a game of tricks with mathematics and

convoluted explanations and hypotheses based on one rule: "lets see how far natural forces alone can take us without invoking Deity". It is a game that is not based on reality, but on their presuppositions about science which they impose upon reality. The sort of naturalism amongst the majority of scientists today makes a limitation of science into a limitation of reality. If science is aimed at only natural causes, then reality must also depend on natural causes alone. But that is not a logical progression. A belief or philosophy is not reality. A method of viewing the universe is not reality. It is just a belief and a perception. When someone tries to tell you that a star is so far away in light years that may be true. No human knows for certain. But when they tell you that because of this the universe must be so many billions of years old, you can know that that is a belief based on some questionable assumptions, not fact. Scientists can play their games with their preconceived theories and assumptions and beliefs about the way they believe the universe works. But I just want you to know that you don't have to let their absolute statements cause your worldview to be shaken apart. They have not declared truth, since modern science cannot speak truth with regards to such huge times and distances which are outside our collective experiences. Starlight and lightyears are not the irrefutable evidence that we live in a multibillion year old universe for scientific and logical reasons. References 1. The ABC of Distances 2. Truth in the Balance - Chapter 7: How Did the Universe Get to Its Present Condition? 3. Parallax 4. Although heliocentrism is generally accepted and any thought against it seen to be a sign of stupidity, backwardness, and religious ignorance, and is harshly ridiculed, general acceptance of a notion does not mean "THE truth". It is a historical fact that heliocentrism did not win against geocentrism because of directly observed facts, but because of arguments and interpretations of certain data, and some faulty thinking. This was aided by the fall in respect for the church, and the growth of hatred for ideas linked with "religion", and myths about people such as Galileo (see Scientific reconsideration of geocentricity) and Copernicus. It did become popular and generally accepted, but it cannot be proven and geocentrism disproven. There are those who still give scientific and

logical evidence for geocentrism, although they are in the minority, and generally ridiculed. 5. Naturalism is the philosophy that nature is all there is. There is no supernatural. It becomes a method when you say that you are only allowed to use natural causes and effects to explain anything and everything. Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.