How do most Christian deal with objects millions or billions of light years away from Earth?

[Mark Quayle]

We write our sci-fi and consider the possibilities of such things as time-travel, and congratulate ourselves on our ingenuity, where both young and old events occur simultaneously, but if God, the very inventor of time, makes the earth both young and old, we call it a lie???

 

[Tolworth John]

Now one could say that God has the ability to create light on its way to Earth and it is possible. Its unlikely but it is possible and would account for a young Earth. But we all know God is rather straight forward and doesn't trick us by bending the rules of physics and nature to do something He could have designed from the start. So that is unlikely.

Another option is the Earth is young but the universe is old.

Another option is Genesis describes not Creation from the start of the universe, rather rejuvenation of this world. But when you read Genesis 2 it sure doesn't sound like that:

4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth,and there was not a man to till the ground.

That sounds like a brand new Earth. But I'm not reading it in the original language of course.

So what do you think? Are we really looking at the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years ago? And that's the closest galaxy. And I'm pretty sure there is no debate on the accuracy of these distances since they can be checked and checked by the finest mathematics minds in the world.

one has a choice about which authority to believe.
The bible with its six day creation and miracles etc
or
Atheistic evolution with its rejection of God and the idea that the super natural exists.


Of course there are those who will pick and chose from the what ever bits of the bible can be explained by atheistic science.

Distant starlight is a big problem for creationists and also for evolutionists.

The Big Bang would have caused great temperatures atdifferent levels right across the universe.

But

That is not what science finds, the universe has a constant even temperature with only a few degrees of variation.

The problem is that there has not been enough time for heat to have radiated across the univers and to have evened out!
Light-travel time: a problem for the big bang - creation.com read about it for yourself.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

one has a choice about which authority to believe.
The bible with its six day creation and miracles etc
or
Atheistic evolution with its rejection of God and the idea that the super natural exists.


Of course there are those who will pick and chose from the what ever bits of the bible can be explained by atheistic science.

Or even better, we can view the Bible as a source of theological truth and reflection while turning to science for practical theories that help us function in this material world.

 

[Sophrosyne]

We write our sci-fi and consider the possibilities of such things as time-travel, and congratulate ourselves on our ingenuity, where both young and old events occur simultaneously, but if God, the very inventor of time, makes the earth both young and old, we call it a lie???

With alternate dimensions one could possibly be seen as time traveling in our dimension as you translate yourself into them and the laws differ such that maybe there is no light nor speed of light or the laws of gravity are the opposite or something. Imagine translating into from the first 4 dimension (L,W,H,T) to dimensions 5-8 where you don't exist as matter as defined here but energy and can travel faster than the speed of light as there is energy forms that can do that you could move and translate back and be seen at instantly teleporting from one place to another. If there are 16 dimensions and in one set you only exist in spirit perhaps time travel in spirit could occur and translating back time would be the exact same. To be honest I don't see God as needing to travel backwards in time as it exists here to fix a boo-boo and doesn't really need to but see what happens in the future likely he may be so smart as to not even need to time travel he can just imagine in his mind what will happen down an infinite path of chances of everyone and everything around and adjust things just enough to keep the world from destruction or an asteroid from wiping everything out.

 

[timothyu]

The bible with its six day creation and miracles etc
or
Atheistic evolution with its rejection of God and the idea that the super natural exists.

Or that we have no real understanding of time.

 

[Rachel20]

The sun and moon on the 4th day. The light on the first day was a different light as in later spoken of as the light of the world, I am the light, etc.

Light has many forms, and the light on the first day could align with that of the first thing that existed with the Big Bang as well - radiation

 

[Sophrosyne]

As the speed of light changes due to gravity and that people traveling at the speed of light will experience time differently imagine the big bang where a super dense singularity that has more gravity than all the black holes that are in our universe now. No light will escape till the gravity diminishes after the "bang" and it may be possible that gravity is so dense that it forms waves that persist even after things become more uncompressed. If gravity affects time then time will not be static during the big bang and not be static after it for a time this could cause light that is affected by gravity and time later to not be measurable accurately. This could explain why people can calculate times it takes for light to reach us from stars to be huge numbers because they don't take into account the gravity affect on light and time. Gravity could literally slow light down from stars giving a compressed build up of light from a star that unravels over time.

This probably all sounds ridiculous.

 

[Mark Quayle]

As the speed of light changes due to gravity and that people traveling at the speed of light will experience time differently imagine the big bang where a super dense singularity that has more gravity than all the black holes that are in our universe now. No light will escape till the gravity diminishes after the "bang" and it may be possible that gravity is so dense that it forms waves that persist even after things become more uncompressed. If gravity affects time then time will not be static during the big bang and not be static after it for a time this could cause light that is affected by gravity and time later to not be measurable accurately. This could explain why people can calculate times it takes for light to reach us from stars to be huge numbers because they don't take into account the gravity affect on light and time. Gravity could literally slow light down from stars giving a compressed build up of light from a star that unravels over time.

This probably all sounds ridiculous.

Your speculations are certainly no worse than mine, lol! My thinking, is that if what truth there is, behind your speculations, are considered even with complete understanding, there may well be a physical way for a thing to be both young and old, seen from different viewpoints in space.

 

[Mark Quayle]

To be honest I don't see God as needing to travel backwards in time as it exists here to fix a boo-boo and doesn't really need to but see what happens in the future likely he may be so smart as to not even need to time travel he can just imagine in his mind what will happen down an infinite path of chances of everyone and everything around and adjust things just enough to keep the world from destruction or an asteroid from wiping everything out.

My notion that a thing can truly be both young and old was not that God should ever need to repair a booboo —far from it! (Though it is curious to consider, that if God was to back up and redo, we would never know it.) My thinking had more to do with the logically necessary fact that God's economy has no necessary relationship to time, yet even WE, in our current scientific beliefs, admit that time is relative —very much so— so that a thing from one 'point' or rate in space appears to have taken less time than it will appear from another 'point' or rate in space.

 

[Mark Quayle]

With alternate dimensions one could possibly be seen as time traveling in our dimension as you translate yourself into them and the laws differ such that maybe there is no light nor speed of light or the laws of gravity are the opposite or something. Imagine translating into from the first 4 dimension (L,W,H,T) to dimensions 5-8 where you don't exist as matter as defined here but energy and can travel faster than the speed of light as there is energy forms that can do that you could move and translate back and be seen at instantly teleporting from one place to another. If there are 16 dimensions and in one set you only exist in spirit perhaps time travel in spirit could occur and translating back time would be the exact same. To be honest I don't see God as needing to travel backwards in time as it exists here to fix a boo-boo and doesn't really need to but see what happens in the future likely he may be so smart as to not even need to time travel he can just imagine in his mind what will happen down an infinite path of chances of everyone and everything around and adjust things just enough to keep the world from destruction or an asteroid from wiping everything out.

This reminds me of what my dad once said: "How fast is the speed of thought?" Though he did not go any further than that to get me thinking down any rabbit-hole, I began to understand, that God's point of view is the only real one. When I consider the speculation that we are in fact no more real than mere imaginations in God's minds (which I don't believe, quite, but that there is something to it) there seem to me perhaps MANY ways for God to skin this cat.

 

[Tolworth John]

Or even better, we can view the Bible as a source of theological truth and reflection while turning to science for practical theories that help us function in this material world.

Yes if those scientific theories agree with scripture.

 

[Tolworth John]

Or that we have no real understanding of time.

Which would then mean a six literal day creation was perfectly reasonable.

 

[Sophrosyne]

My notion that a thing can truly be both young and old was not that God should ever need to repair a booboo —far from it! (Though it is curious to consider, that if God was to back up and redo, we would never know it.) My thinking had more to do with the logically necessary fact that God's economy has no necessary relationship to time, yet even WE, in our current scientific beliefs, admit that time is relative —very much so— so that a thing from one 'point' or rate in space appears to have taken less time than it will appear from another 'point' or rate in space.

My thinking is that God doesn't make mistakes he sometimes however will change the way he does something because of someone else's actions that to us seems like a mistake or change of mind. God's economy is both in time and outside of time as he exists in both realms. He exists in our time because he cares to interact with us either very subtly and unknown to us or very personal and obviously powerful. I believe the "one day is LIKE a thousand years" to God doesn't necessarily mean that in his realm it is exactly that but rather that from our perspective if one considers the longest (by Biblical standards) living man at less than 1000 years to God that day isn't even over yet. It may be when God desires it time can move 1 million years to what we consider a day here.
I often wonder if the length of a day has changed over the eons and the length of a year also. If a year was not 365.25 days or close to it but 1244 days back before Adam and Eve was ejected from the Garden of Eden then who knows how long that they lived there.

 

[Sophrosyne]

This reminds me of what my dad once said: "How fast is the speed of thought?" Though he did not go any further than that to get me thinking down any rabbit-hole, I began to understand, that God's point of view is the only real one. When I consider the speculation that we are in fact no more real than mere imaginations in God's minds (which I don't believe, quite, but that there is something to it) there seem to me perhaps MANY ways for God to skin this cat.

The speed of thought varies by the thinking.... to God it may be infinitely little or so close to nothing that it is relatively instantaneous.

 

[Richard.20.12]

Wonder how many light years before Jesus' birth the Christmas Star flared? Well synchronised.

Hey, that's a really good point! Yeah, I think that is highly unlikely things aren't happening as they appear.

 

[Richard.20.12]

Actually the closest galaxy is the Andromeda at 2.5 million light years. There are the Magellan Clouds (irregular dwarf galaxies) but they are still 163,000 and 260,000 light years away. And they're only visible in the southern hemisphere so they don't really count.....just kidding.

 

[Richard.20.12]

> Have you considered the fact that God created light on the first day and stars on the fourth day? It doesn't seem unlikely to me that God created the light on its way to Earth.

Yes, there is that. Its does seem pretty straightforward in Genesis.

> This is also supported by the fact that God explicitely created the stars for calculating the time (Genesis 1:14). If the light even of the closer stars took years and decades to reach the Earth and the sky was completely black until then that makes little sense to me.

Good point.
Yet we have this problem because we're pretty sure the light from many celestial objects we can plainly see even with the naked eye take many years to get here. We can see the Andromeda Galaxy as a faint blur and that's 2.5 million light years away. Small telescopes many people own easily show light from many objects billions of light years away.

One thing to consider is God was around billions of years ago. He's always been around. When we think of our world's creation we can naturally assume God came about at the same time but He has always been here. Our little minds can't fathom such a thing of course but we have to keep this in mind.

 

[Richard.20.12]

The sun and moon on the 4th day. The light on the first day was a different light as in later spoken of as the light of the world, I am the light, etc.

True. Plus the light spoken of here is the creation of the sun and the moon as the lesser light. But we all wonder why was the sun not created first. Without the sun there is no heat. I mean, if we were creating everything I think we'd make sure the sun was in place before anything else. Thankfully we didn't do all this otherwise it would probably be a mess!

 

[Richard.20.12]

Sorry, I fail to see how that would make any sense. It says that God separated the light from the dark and called the light "day" and the dark "night". That sounds like literal light to me.

That does seem logical as the vast majority of the Bible is spoken very plainly and clearly. It just doesn't serve any purpose for God to speak in riddles that most of us wouldn't understand. It would defeat the whole point of the Bible to lead and guide us.
There are other aspects of the Creation story that also point to literal and practical events occurring that are referred to repeatedly all through the Bible. Like the mention of sunrise and sunset denoting an actual day, not a thousand years. God is a practical being. You can't design a planet without being practical!

 

[Richard.20.12]

One could also consider how solid matter is but when we get down to looking at it at atomic levels it is mostly empty space.

Empty space just as the universe is mostly empty space. Every galaxy that looks packed with stars, star clusters and nebulae is mostly empty space. As I posted today, the distance of just 1 light year is 63,000 times the vast distance between the sun and the Earth. The nearest star is 4.3 light years away. The nearest galaxy is 2.5 million. The universe is VERY empty. I'd love to know why.