There are three things to consider when answering the starlight question:

1. Scientists cannot measure distances beyond 100 light years accurately.

2. No one knows what light is or that it always travels the same speed throughout all time, space and matter.

3. The Creation was finished or mature when God made it. Adam was full-grown, the trees had fruit on them, the starlight was visible, etc.

Measuring Star Distance

To elaborate on these 3 points: First, no one can measure star distance accurately. The furthest accurate distance man can measure is 20 light years (some textbooks say up to 100), not several billion light years.

The Andromeda Galaxy. A spiral galaxy, illustrating that matter and systems are organized in the universe and not evenly distributed throughout the universe as predicted by the cosmological principle which is the basic philosophy on which the Big Bang theory rests.

Man measures star distances using parallax trigonometry. By choosing two measurable observation points and making an imaginary triangle to a third point, and using simple trigonometry, man calculates the distance to the third point.

The most distant observation points available to an earthbound observer are the positions of the earth in solar orbit six months apart, say June and December. This would create a triangle of 186,000,000 miles, which equals only 16 light minutes. There are 525,948 minutes in a year. Even if the nearest star were only one light year away (and it isn’t), the angle at the third point measures .017 degrees.

In simpler terms, a triangle like this would be the same angle two surveyors would see if they were standing sixteen inches apart and focusing on a third point 525,948 inches or 8.24 miles away. If they stayed 16 inches apart and focused on a dot 824 miles away, they would have the same angle as an astronomer measuring a point 100 light years away.

A point 5 million light years away is impossible to figure with trigonometry. The stars may be that far away but modern man has no way of measuring those great distances. No one can state definitively the distance to the stars.

Several other methods such as luminosity and red shift are employed to try to guess at greater distances but all such methods have serious problems and assumptions involved.¹

Speed of Light Is Not Constant

Second, the speed of light may not be a constant. It does vary in different media (hence the rainbow effect of light going through a prism) and may also vary in different places in space.

The entire idea behind the black hole theory is that light can be attracted by gravity and be unable to escape the great pull of these imaginary black holes. No one knows what light is let alone that its velocity has been the standard of time. If the speed of light is decaying, the clock would be changing at the same rate and therefore not be noticed as the following demonstrate:

SCIENTISTS claim they have broken the ultimate speed barrier: the speed of light. In research carried out in the United States, particle physicists have shown that light pulses can be accelerated to up to 300 times their normal velocity of 186,000 miles per second.²

The work was carried out by Dr. Lijun Wang, of the NEC research institute in Princeton, who transmitted a pulse of light towards a chamber filled with specially treated cesium gas.³^,⁴

1. For a more complex and slightly different answer to the star light question from another Christian perspective, see the book Starlight and Time by Russel Humphry available from http://www.icr.org.

2. Sunday Times from UK. “Eureka! Scientists Break Speed of Light” Jonathan Leake, Science Editor, June 4, 2000 United States.

3. See also; New York Times May 30, 2000.

4. See Seminar 7 for much more.