The Myth of Millions of Years

Creationist cosmology is full of wormholes

Ronald Bailey | July 20, 2005

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So what are possible creationist solutions to the distant starlight problem? First, Lisle suggests that perhaps the speed of light was not constant over time and that when God created the universe it was so much faster that it could travel across nearly 14 billion light years to arrive at the earth by Day 4 of Creation. He does acknowledge that if the speed of light had been significantly greater in the past, there would have been dramatic changes in the energy and mass of everything in the universe. Remember Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 (Energy = mass multiplied by speed of light squared).

Lisle also offers "gravitational time dilation" as a possible solution to the distant starlight problem. He claims that the Milky Way might really be the center of the universe and thus at the bottom of a deep universal gravity well. In which case time would pass much more slowly in our galaxy—perhaps only thousands of years elapsed on earth while billions of years of physical processes occur in the universe. Something like the above scenarios must have happened because according to Lisle, "We know from the Bible that the light got here in thousands of years."

Considering the earnest arguments of creationists presented above, ask yourself which sounds more mythical—that the universe really is billions of years old or that it is 6,000 years old but was created to look just like it is billions of years old?

Tomorrow's topics include the burning question "The Intelligent Design Movement: How Intelligent Is It?" along with "The Human Origins Controversy."