Welcome to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. In this program, we want to encourage you in your Christian faith by showing how scientific evidence supports the Bible, particularly the Genesis account. The book of Genesis lays the foundation for all matters addressed in the rest of the Bible. The nature of God, His sovereignty in creation, man's purpose, sin, marriage, family, and why we need a Savior are all introduced and explained in Genesis. When we see that the first and most foundational book of the Bible can be trusted in all matters, including science, it builds confidence in the rest of the inspired word all the way to Revelation.
On today's show, we'll get some insights from Dr. Jason Lyle, astrophysicist and director of physical sciences with the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Lyle. There is a problem that critics say that the Bible has, and they call this the distant starlight problem.
And the problem is something like this. There are these galaxies that are billions of light years away. That itself is not a problem because a light year, despite the name, is actually a unit of distance, not time. One light year is about 6 trillion miles. And so when you have galaxies that are billions of light years away, what that means is the universe is really, really big.
Now, that's not a problem for an infinite God to create a universe that size. But normally, light takes one year to travel a distance of one light year. That's how it gets the name. That is, light will travel a distance of about 6 trillion miles in a year.
So you think about that, to travel a distance of billions of light years would take, you would think, billions of years for light to travel that distance. Yet we do see these galaxies. The light obviously has gone from there to here. And since that supposedly takes billions of years, doesn't that prove that the universe is at least billions of years old? And doesn't that disprove scripture?
Well, not really. In fact, there are several different ways to get light to travel enormous distances in a much shorter period of time. There have been several proposed solutions to this.
Some have suggested that maybe the speed of light was much faster in the past, and we're just assuming that it's always traveled at the same rate that it does today.
Now, I think that was a great idea to try, because sometimes secularists assume things are constant when they really aren't. Radioactive decay rates and things like that. But I think in this case, there are good reasons to believe that the speed of light has always been what it is today. The speed of light actually connects things like energy to mass. And it's hard to imagine that matter could even exist if the speed of light were very much different from what it is today.
So I don't think that's the best answer.
Some people have supposed that maybe God made the beams of light already connected from the stars to the earth, so that when he made the stars, he just goes ahead and makes the light beam as well. I like some aspects of that, but it has its problems because we see things happening in space. We see stars explode every now and then, called a supernova. There was one that we saw in 1987 where a star in one of the Magellanic clouds exploded. And, you know, it's over 150,000 light years away.
Now, if you say, well, no, God just made the beam of light already on its way, then what it means is that explosion never actually happened. It was just a picture that God put in a beam of light about 6,000 light years out that finally reached Earth in 1987. It would mean that the star that exploded never even existed, that the explosion never happened, and that we're just seeing fictional images that the Lord planted in beams of light.
Now, certainly it's within God's power to do that, but I don't think it's in God's nature to do that. God is not the author of confusion, but of peace and of a sound mind. And so I don't think he would do that.
Some people have proposed that time dilation might be the answer. And this is not a creation idea, basically, because in fact it was Einstein, who was not a biblical creationist, who nonetheless demonstrated that time can flow at different rates under different circumstances. This is all part of a branch of physics we call relativity. And it's something that's actually very provable. It's been tested, and lo and behold, clocks do tick at different rates depending on their circumstances.
The effect is tiny on Earth. We don't notice it in our everyday lives, but it has been measured with things like atomic clocks. And so these are all interesting things to try, but I think the answer has to do with what we would call the one-way speed of light. And so I'd like to spend some time talking about that now. And we need to understand something about speed.
Now, speed is the distance that something travels divided by the time that it takes to travel that distance. And so we talk about speed of 60 miles per hour. That means you could travel a distance of 60 miles in a time period of one hour. That's pretty easy.
Now, light travels much faster. It travels at 186,282 miles per second.
So in one second, light can travel 186,000 miles pretty fast. That's a round-trip measurement. What I mean by that is, let's suppose we wanted to measure the speed of light. We could do that by constructing a long hallway. Let's say It's 186,000 miles long, just to make the math easy.
And I'll stand at one end with my flashlight, and at the other end, I'll place a mirror. And so, what I'll do is when my clock strikes noon, I'll turn on my flashlight for just a split second, aiming it at that mirror.
Now, it's going to take time for the light to go down, hit the mirror, bounce back, and come back to my eyes. And so, I'll actually see the reflection. It'll actually take two seconds for me to see the reflection. Kind of amazing.
So, it takes light two seconds to go down. bounce off the mirror and come back. And even though that experiment hasn't been done in exactly that way, that type of experiment has been done on a smaller scale. And lo and behold, the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second.
Now most people assume that if the light takes two seconds to make that round trip, that the light probably took one second to go out and hit the mirror and one second to come back. And that seems very reasonable. But the fact is we don't really know that. And some people said, well, why would it be different?
Well, you know, why would the speed of light be different on an outgoing trip than an incoming trip? And I don't really know, but then again, I don't know why it would have to be the same either. Intuition is not what we base science on. We base science on facts and observations and experiments. And so we need to find out what is the one-way speed of light.
And this is very important because you see, the light from those distant galaxies only has to make a one-way trip. What if, hypothetically, the speed of light when it's moving toward an observer is much, much faster than when it's moving away? If that were the case, then light could arrive at Earth instantly, taking no time at all. We're going to take a short break. Stay with us.
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Yeah. Welcome back to Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. Here's Dr. Lyle. Well, we've been discussing the idea of distant starlight and how God may have got the light from those distant galaxies to Earth within the biblical time scale of thousands of years.
And I've suggested that the one-way speed of light might be different than the two-way speed of light. In other words, light when it's moving away from an observer could travel at a different speed than when it's moving toward an observer. And it turns out it's very difficult to test that hypothesis. You see, it's easy to measure the round-trip speed of light. You just shine your flashlight on a mirror, let it bounce off, come back, and you measure the time.
And in fact, you can do that with the moon. Astronauts who landed on the moon placed a small mirror there, and you can bounce a laser off the moon. It'll take about three seconds, because the moon is a bit farther away than 186,000 miles. But in any case, that can be done. That type of experiment's been done.
But to measure the one-way speed of light, Can't use a mirror anymore. We want to use a one-way trip. And to do that, you'd need to have a clock at this end, and you'd have to have another clock at the other end.
Now, I did something like this in my own office. I don't have the long hallway, but I do have the distance between my watch and the clock on my phone, and I can scale down the numbers. That's not a problem. And so, when my watch struck noon, I turned on a flashlight and let the light hit the phone, and then I just read the time on the phone as soon as the light hit it, and it read 12.05.
Now, would it be reasonable to assume that the light took five minutes to get from my watch to the phone?
Well, clearly not. Obviously, the clock on my phone is not synchronized with the clock on my watch. They're not reading the same time at the same time. And so, my point is, to measure the one-way speed of light, you have to have two clocks separated by a distance that are exactly synchronized. We know light's very fast, and so it won't do to have these clocks approximately synchronized.
We'll get the wrong answer. If the clock's slow, we'll think that light is one speed of light. The clock's fast, we'll think that light is another speed. But it turns out it's actually impossible to synchronize two clocks exactly when they're separated by a large distance. You see, normally what we do is we use radio pulses to synchronize two clocks.
But you see radio travels at the speed of light. We just assume that the one-way speed of light is the same as the two-way speed and we use that information to synchronize these clocks. But then if we then use those clocks to measure the one-way speed of light, we're begging the question. We're assuming the very thing we're trying to prove. Or maybe you could bring both clocks together and synchronize them so they're both in the same place and then move one of them or both of them.
But you see, according to Einstein, motion affects the passage of time, and so the very act of moving the clocks causes them to become desynchronized.
Now there is an equation that tells you how much they're desynchronized, but in that equation is the one-way speed of light. It seems that God has constructed the universe in such a marvelous way that the one-way speed of light cannot be measured because there's no way to fundamentally synchronize two clocks separated by a distance, and that's what you need to measure a one-way speed.
Now for things much slower than light, we can use light to synchronize approximately those two clocks. That's good enough for something that moves slowly. But for light, that's not good enough because light moves very fast and there's nothing faster that we could use to synchronize these two clocks exactly. And so it turns out the one-way speed of light is apparently conventional. And what that means is it's a matter of human stipulation.
We are allowed to choose what we want the one-way speed of light to be as long as the round-trip speed is 186,282 miles per second.
So I can actually choose the speed of light to be infinite when it's toward me, and then that tells me how to synchronize clocks. And so using this convention, which I call an anisotropic synchrony convention, anisotropic means different directions.
So ask ASC, the anisotropic synchrony convention. Using that convention, light takes no time at all to get from galaxies to Earth. Even today, Now I happen to think that this is the solution to distant starlight for a number of reasons. First of all, this anisotropic synchrony convention, where light travels infinitely fast when it's moving toward an observer, This was the convention that was used by all ancient cultures. Ancient cultures, when they recorded an event in the cosmos, they wrote down the time that they observed the event, as if it happened at the time they're seeing it.
And that's really what that convention is all about. We see the universe in real time. Second, it eliminates any perceived distant starlight problem if the Bible uses it. Indeed, if light travels infinitely fast when moving toward an observer, then it takes no time at all for light to get from those galaxies to Earth, even today. Third, there is evidence that the Bible does use this convention.
In Genesis 1, 14 through 15, we read that God made the lights in the firmament to give light on the earth. We find that these are the sun, the moon, the stars also. It says, and they're to give light on the earth, and it was so.
Well, what was so?
Well, God made these lights and they gave light on the earth. Apparently, stars immediately fulfilled their God-ordained purpose to give light on the earth. Thank you for joining us on Science, Scripture, and Salvation, a radio ministry of the Institute for Creation Research. That's all the time we have for our program today, but we would love to connect with you through our website at icr.org. For over 45 years, ICR has equipped believers with evidence of the Bible's accuracy and authority by showing how science supports the Genesis creation account.
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Thanks for listening and God bless.
