Anyway, if we are to believe that the world is only 6000 or so years old, where does light years come into it? Cos that talks about BILLIONS of years!
The first thing to note is that light years is a misleading term. When astronomers use the term "light years", they refer to distance - not time. A light year is the amount of distance that light can travel in a year. There is no reference to time in the definition. As to how creationists respond to such a question, there are quite a few theories, some reasonable, others not:
1. Created light theory - God made light "in transit" so that the stars from billions of kilometres away could be seen on day 4.
2. A decaying "c" theory: As we go back in time, the speed of light increased and at some point, it was close to infinity.
3. Relativistic cosmology: This is the most promising theory of how we can see stars billions of light-years away in a young universe. Dr Russell Humphreys has proposed a new explanation in order to solve this problem and outlines it in his book
Starlight and Time. A brief review of his theory can be found by clicking the following link <
http://answersingenesis.org/docs/267.asp> .
I find that the article "How can we see distant stars in a young universe?" <
http://answersingenesis.org/docs/405.asp> from AiG is very good at explaining this new theory. It was this article that inspired me to go out and buy the book,
Starlight and Time by Dr Russell Humphreys, and have a read over it myself...
Let us briefly give a hint as to how the new cosmology seems to solve the starlight problem before explaining some preliminary items in a little more detail. Consider that the time taken for something to travel a given distance is the distance divided by the speed it is traveling. That is:
Time = Distance / SpeedWhen this is applied to light from distant stars, the time calculates out to be millions of years. Some have sought to challenge the distances, but this is a very unlikely answer.
Astronomers use many different methods to measure the distances, and no informed creationist astronomer would claim that any errors would be so vast that billions of light-years could be reduced to thousands, for example. There is good evidence that our own Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across!
If the speed of light (c) has not changed, the only thing left untouched in the equation is time itself. In fact, Einsteins relativity theories have been telling the world for decades that time is not a constant.
Two things are believed (with experimental support) to distort time in relativity theoryone is speed and the other is gravity. Einsteins general theory of relativity, the best theory of gravity we have at present, indicates that gravity distorts time.
This effect has been measured experimentally, many times. Clocks at the top of tall buildings, where gravity is slightly less, run faster than those at the bottom, just as predicted by the equations of general relativity (GR).
When the concentration of matter is very large or dense enough, the gravitational distortion can be so immense that even light cannot escape. The equations of GR show that at the invisible boundary surrounding such a concentration of matter (called the event horizon, the point at which light rays trying to escape the enormous pull of gravity bend back on themselves), time literally stands still.
Using different assumptions
Dr Humphreys new creationist cosmology literally falls out of the equations of GR, so long as one assumes that the universe has a boundary. In other words, that it has a center and an edgethat if you were to travel off into space, you would eventually come to a place beyond which there was no more matter. In this cosmology, the earth is near the center, as it appears to be as we look out into space.
This might sound like common sense, as indeed it is, but all modern secular (big bang) cosmologies deny this. That is, they make arbitrary assumption (without any scientific necessity) that the universe has no boundariesno edge and no center. In this assumed universe, every galaxy would be surrounded by galaxies spread evenly in all directions (on a large enough scale), and so, therefore, all the net gravitational forces cancel out.
However, if the universe has boundaries, then there is a net gravitational effect toward the center. Clocks at the edge would be running at different rates to clocks on the earth. In other words, it is no longer enough to say God made the universe in six days. He certainly did, but six days by which clock? (If we say Gods time we miss the point that He is outside of time, seeing the end from the beginning.)
There appears to be observational evidence that the universe has expanded in the past, supported by the many phrases God uses in the Bible to tell us that at creation he stretched out (other verses say spread out) the heavens.
If the universe is not much bigger than we can observe, and if it was only 50 times smaller in the past than it is now, then scientific deduction based on GR means it has to have expanded out of a previous state in which it was surrounded by an event horizon (a condition known technically as a white holea black hole running in reverse, something permitted by the equations of GR).
As matter passed out of this event horizon, the horizon itself had to shrinkeventually to nothing. Therefore, at one point this earth (relative to a point far away from it) would have been virtually frozen. An observer on earth would not in any way feel different. Billions of years would be available (in the frame of reference within which it is traveling in deep space) for light to reach the earth, for stars to age, etc.while less than one ordinary day is passing on earth. This massive gravitational time dilation would seem to be a scientific inevitability if a bounded universe expanded significantly.
In one sense, if observers on earth at that particular time could have looked out and seen the speed with which light was moving toward them out in space, it would have appeared as if it were traveling many times faster than c. (Galaxies would also appear to be rotating faster.) However, if an observer in deep space was out there measuring the speed of light, to him it would still only be traveling at c.
There is more detail of this new cosmology, at laymans level, in the book by Dr Humphreys, Starlight and Time, which also includes reprints of his technical papers showing the equations.
It is fortunate that creationists did not invent such concepts such as gravitational time dilation, black and white holes, event horizons and so on, or we would likely be accused of manipulating the data to solve the problem. The interesting thing about this cosmology is that it is based upon mathematics and physics totally accepted by all cosmologists (general relativity), and it accepts (along with virtually all physicists) that there has been expansion in the past (though not from some imaginary tiny point). It requires no massagingthe results fall out so long as one abandons the arbitrary starting point which the big bangers use (the unbounded cosmos idea, which could be called what the experts dont tell you about the "big bang").
All stars (except the Sun) are thousands and millions of light years away. Let's say that there's a star that's exactly one million light years away. That means that the light that you are seeing right now came out of the star 1,000,000 years ago.
Actually, the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is only 4.2 light years away (although I thought originally that it was closer, somewhere close to 3 lightyears) according to <
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html>. As you can see from the list, the top 26 cloest stars are all well within 12 light years. In fact, our galaxy is estimated at being 100,000 light years across.
If one was to ignore gravity's affect on time, i.e. assume that there is no differences in gravity anywhere between this star and Earth, then you would indeed be correct with your example, 1 million light years = 1 million years. In the real universe, it doesn't work quite like that...
