In recent letters, phone calls, faxes, and face-to-face conversations, people have asked me to comment on two books about creation, each arguing for six consecutive 24-hour creation days several thousand years ago in which the universe, the earth, and life all are formed. One is written by a Christian physicist, the other by a Jewish physicist, and both tackle the intractible problem of light travel time. To state the problem briefly, young-universe creationists must explain how light from galaxies eighty billion trillion miles away could reach the earth in about ten thousand years or less. Four hypotheses have been offered through the years: 1) that the universe is at least a million times smaller than astronomers say; 2) that the speed of light has decreased exponentially through the years; 3) that God created the light waves in transit; and 4) that light travels to earth along a geometric shortcut through space. And all these hypotheses have been shown false by scientific theory and observation.[1]
Dr. Russell Humphreys suggests a new solution to the problem in his book, Starlight and Time. His imaginative approach is based on a complex phenomenon known as gravitational time dilation. According to the theory of general relativity, time moves more slowly in the vicinity of extremely powerful gravity. For example, the wristwatch worn by a man who's being pulled (by gravity) into a black hole would tick a million times more slowly than your watch or mine is ticking right now. Humphreys postulates that the earth is at the physical center of a three-dimensional universe. According to his model, this universe was once embedded in a black hole that later developed into a white hole, and because of Earth's central position in this strong gravitational field, earth clocks would run about a million times more slowly than clocks at the most distant reaches of the cosmos. Thus, he concludes, because of the differences in the clocks, light from those distant places would have plenty of time, earth time, that is, to travel from there to here.[2]
Whether deliberately or not, Humphreys has made a huge step toward acknowledging the antiquity of the universe. His work supports, rather than denies, that "billions of years' worth of physical processes took place in the distant cosmos."[3] He also admits that his scenario was developed entirely apart from observational data and that he has yet to develop observational tests to prove or disprove his model.[4]
Such tests, however, already exist, and Humphreys's model contradicts the observational data at every turn. For now I'll mention just three of the problems with his idea. First, general relativity shows that time and space are related and, thus, that the universe must be treated as a four-dimensional, not a three-dimensional, system. Second, the universe both near and far is filled with clocks--cepheid variable stars, pulsars, supernovae, and variable quasars, to name some. And these "clocks" are all measurably ticking, so to speak, at the same rate as do phenomena near Earth. Perhaps Humphreys's most glaring error lies in his mistaking the direction of time in our observations of space. When we look at distant objects, we see them (because of light travel time) as they once were, not as they are today. They look younger, not older, just as a picture of you on your first birthday shows not how you've aged, but how you looked at the time the photo was taken. Humphreys says the opposite, the farther away we look, the more lines and wrinkles, not baby dimples, we should see, and that's simply not the case, theoretically or observationally.
A different treatment of the light travel time problem comes from Dr. Gerald Schroeder. In his book, Genesis and the Big Bang, Schroeder outlines yet another time dilation scenario, this one based on special rather than general relativity and on an appeal to the influence of velocity rather than to that of gravity.[5]
According to the theory of special relativity, time advances more slowly in systems moving at extremely high velocities. As an example of how velocity relates to time, a man making a round trip from Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy (about two million light years away) at nearly the velocity of light would come back twenty or thirty years older than when he left, while his wife, who waited as long as she could, aged four million years. Schroeder's thesis is as follows: if the Creator's frame of reference for the Genesis creation account is moving away from Earth at nearly the speed of light, then phenomena that would measure billions of years to us could take just 144 hours for Him.
Schroeder's "if" is a big one, and I don't think it stands up. The first problem I see is a contextual one. Schroeder overlooks the frame-of-reference indicator in Genesis 1:2. The creation account begins with this declaration: "The Spirit of God was brooding over the surface of the waters." This statement suggests that God's frame of reference in describing creation is on the surface of the earth, not out in space.
The second problem I see is a scientific one. Schroeder interprets the relativistically extended creation days as six equal time periods covering the 15-billion-year (or so) era from the creation of the universe to the creation of man.[6] This view runs against a wall of scientific data for the origin of the earth. Since the earth is mentioned in the first creation day of Genesis 1, his interpretation would make the earth at least 12 billion years old, but scientifc measurements of many kinds establish Earth's age as about 4.6 billion years.
If you're interested in examining an alternate view from a Jewish scholar, let me recommend In the Beginning: Biblical Creation and Science, by Nathan Aviezer, another physicist.[7] Aviezer sees, as I do, substantial biblical basis for interpreting the six creation days of Genesis 1 as long time periods.
ADDENDUM:
Since publication of his book, Dr. Schroeder has made this
statement about Genesis 1 to Dr. Ross: "We both view the six
days of Genesis as long time periods, each of different duration.
The Laws of Relativity allow for these long periods each to have
passed in twenty-four hours provided the measure of the times is
seen from a vantage not that of the Earth, but of one that
embraces the entire universe."
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