For this article I will be discussing a theory regarding the speed of light by astrophysicist Jason Lisle. I believe that this is quite useful information because there are many teenagers and young adults who although they have a christian background leave the faith after hearing about things such as distant starlight in collage.
Before we begin to discuss this further I'd just light to say that regardless on whether or not your an old-earth creationist, evolutionist, or a young earth creationist all these positions have issues with distant starlight. For those who hold the position that the universe is billions of years old you have the Horizon problem which is discussed in one of the articles below. I, personally, however hold to the young earth modal as I believe it's what the bible teaches. The young earth/universe does have problems regarding distant starlight as well however.
There have been multiple theories proposed to answer how we can see distant starlight in a young universe but each of these following theories isn't' without their share of issues. Let's go over some. In one theory they say how do we know the speed of light hasn't changed over time, maybe light traveled much faster in the past; this is an assumption however and cannot be confirmed by science.
A common theory among young earth creationist such as myself teaches that just as God made Adam and Eve and The animals fully mature in the beginning he also made the universe and the stars/starlight fully mature as well. The problem with this theory is that even if a star exploded during creation week we still wouldn't supposedly have seen it by now because it would take many thousands, if not perhaps millions of years for that light to reach us, but we do see stars exploding.
A theory that I would like to talk about today however is called the Anisotropic Synchrony convention (ASC). It proposes that light doesn't travel at the same speed in different directions. How do we measure the speed of light? We bounce it off a mirror and get an average speed for the round trip. But this doesn't give us the light's speed going in one direction. So, what if the light starts out going really fast but takes a long time to get back to us or as I think might be the case is it takes the whole 186,282 m/s to travel away from the earth but gets back to us instantaneously. After all, there are substances in which the speed of light is very different in different directions. This would have us seeing starlight from exploding starts as the event was occurring and would solve that problem.
So how would we measure the one way speed of light? You would need two clocks, not a mirror. You would place the clocks at two different locations and let's say when we start the one clock says it's noon then we send out the light, and when it hits the other clock we read the time. However it would only work if the clocks were synchronized. However you cannot synchronize exactly two clocks that are separated by a distance. This is because even using a radio transmitter to synchronize them it still will be off a fraction of a second as it does take a little time for the radio pulse to get there. Now we could compensate for that if we knew how fast the radio pulse travels. But guess what, it travels at the speed of light. Even if you put the radio transmitter in the middle between the two clocks we still don't know if the radio pulse traveled to the one at the same speed as to the other.
You could synchronize them at the same place but when you go to move the one clock it will throw off the time because according to Einstein, motion affects the passage of time. Now there is an equation that can tell you how much the clock is de-synchronized so you can compensate for it, but in that equation is the speed of light. The one thing we don't know. It is apparently impossible to synchronize clocks without knowing the one way speed of light but it's also impossible to measure the one way speed of light without synchronized clocks. So the best we can do is pick what we want it to be. The one way speed of light is a convention not a property of nature. so we pick the one way speed of light and that's how we synchronize clocks.
"That light requires the same time to traverse the path A-M as for the path B-M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light but a stipulation which i can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity". -Albert Einstein (Relativity pp.22-23).
So under the ASC convention, light will take no time at all to get from distant galaxies to the earth, therefore the distant starlight problem is solved if the bible uses ASC. Lisle proposes that the bible uses this convention because that was the ancient way of doing it and he thinks the bible implies it as well in Gen 1:14-15.
In conclusion since the one way speed of light is an unknowable thing it would be foolish to hang all your hopes on an old universe based solely or mostly on this evidence. The thing about scienctific views is that they are constantly changing with time so it's best to put your faith in God's word instead because it never changes.
References and Related Articles: The Speed Of Light-Jason Lisle
https://forjesustheamen.blogspot.com/2019/10/what-is-gravitational-time-dilation.html#more
https://forjesustheamen.blogspot.com/2018/11/what-about-issue-with-distant-starlight.html
https://forjesustheamen.blogspot.com/2019/07/flaws-in-big-bang-model.html
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