Why I’m an Old-Universe Creationist

How old to Christians believe the universe to be? What is the age of the universe and what does the Bible have to say about it? How does the description of the age of the universe given by science mesh with the age of the universe as described by the Bible?

These are all questions that a modern-day Christian who believes in both the validity of the Bible and the trustworthiness of science must wrestle with. An indeed many have. There are whole websites, such as Answers in Genesis which are dedicated to this very question.

There are 2 main viewpoints in Christianity concerning the age of the universe:

1. The universe is and everything in it is about 10,000 years old
2. The universe is the scientifically accepted age, about 14 billion years old

There are some variations and details on each position, but when you boil down each argument, the essentials come to these two positions.

For Christians who believe in the former position, position #1, why the 10,000 year number?

Young Universe Creationism

The line of thinking was formalized by a biblical scholar name Ussher, who created the Ussher chronology. His line of reasoning was that since the Bible presents a chronology of from Adam, the first man, all the way to Jesus Christ, we should be able to estimate how long each generation lived (using biblical data and estimates i would assume), and make a fairly accurate guess as to how much time passed between the birth of Jesus Christ and the creation of the world.

When you add all those numbers up, and add 2000 years (it’s been about 2000 years since the birth of Christ), you can an earth that’s around 6000 years old. Different theologians, arguing on different chronologies came up with different numbers. Even the man himself, Sir Isaac Newton, tried to calculate the number using biblical chronologies.

Factoring in these differences, it is safe to say that scholars who to calculate the age of the univese using biblical chronology will come up with a number that is at least less than 10,000 years old.

Current Cosmology Theory

So how what does current cosmological theory say about the age of the universe?

The “age” of the universe according to scientists would be the amount of time between present day and the Big Bang. The current estimate for the age of the universe is about 14 billion years. There are a number of ways that comsologists can arrive at that answer. One is based off of a cosmological model based off of a property called Hubble’s constant. The second method is looking at the oldest stars astronomers can find; after all, the universe must be at least as old as matter that is in it.

Briefly, let’s talk about what Hubble’s constant is: Hubble’s constant is essentially the expansion rate of the entire universe.

Hubble was the scientist credited with making the discovery that the whole universe is in a state of expansion. In general, everywhere we look in the sky, stellar objects are moving away from us, and moving away from each other.

It can be imagined this way: picture for a moment, a loaf of raisin bread. The raisins represent galaxies. When you stick that bread in the oven, and the yeast begins to rise, that loaf of bread begins to expand. It doesn’t just grow in one direction – the whole loaf expands in width, height and depth. Pick any raisin in that expanding loaf; from it’s point of view, all the raisins in the loaf seem to be moving away from it. In a very similar fashion, when we look into the sky, most objects are moving away from us.

The age of the universe can be calculated by measuring Hubble’s constant today, and extrapolating it backwards in time. When scientists do this and extrapolate backwards to the point where the universe wasn’t expanding (that is, the Big Bang), they number that comes out of the equation is about 14 billions years.

Why so old?

Tens of thousands of years is a number hard for the human mind to grasp. But millions? Billions? Where do scientists get such a large number?

The answer boils down to two main points really: the universe is massive, and things take a really long time.

Let’s expound on that for a minute.

• The Milky Way, the galaxy that we live in, is estimated to be about 100,000 ligh- years across. What that means is, it takes light 100,000 years to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other.
• Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own, is 2.5 million light-years away from us. That means light emitted from the Andromeda galaxy would take 2.5 million years just to reach our eyes.
• The sun is 4 to 5 billion years old. Scientists determine the age of the sun by looking at the oldest meteorites we can find (which would have formed in the early solar system, which would have been when the sun was born) and dating them with radiometric dating.This is close agreement with current models of stellar evolution.
• As large as our Milky Way is, a galaxy is not the largest structure in the universe. Our galaxy is gravitationally bound to a handful of other nearby galaxies. This group is so brilliantly named, The Local Group. The farthest galaxy from us in our Local Group is 7.9 million light-years away.
• There are sedimentary rock formations on Mars that are over 4 kilometers thick. Such layers would require tens to hundreds of millions of years of running water to form. In addition there must have been millions of years for all the water to have disappeared, since Mars is now extremely dry. (thanks to godandscience.org for the link)
• In the constellation Ursa Major (aka, the Big Dipper) there is a prominent spiral galaxy named M81. It has near perfect spiral arms, and an active galaactic nucleas (harboring a supermassive black hole). It is 12 million light years away. OK, enough with the piddly millions of years, let’s get big.
• “3C 272″ was the name of the first quasar ever discovered. A quasar is a small and distant but very powerful and energetic galaxy that has an active galactic nucleus. A galactic nucleas powered by a central supermassive black hole. 3C 272 is the brighest quasar in the sky. It is 2 billion light years away. A typical quasar is 4.5 billion light years away.
• The age of the Milky Way is calculated to be about 13.7 billion years old. It is almost as old as the universe itself.

What does this mean?

What’s the significance of all of these large amounts of time and distance?

The significance is that the universe is vast, covering colossal distances and it will take light (which is the fastest thing in the universe) a very long time to traverse that distance. Even baring our dating techniques, just the amount of time it would take for light to travel these amazing distances gives us time estimates in the millions and billions of years. Let me state that again – the amount of time it takes for light to reach us from these distant objects can be in the billions of years.

Given such astounding data, how to do young universe creationists respond?

The Freeze Frame

Perhaps the most common argument among young-universers is the “In Transit” model. It’s what I like to call the “Freeze Frame”. Image it this way.

Say you were to take a snapshot of your living room. A 3D freeze frame, like if you were in the Matrix and suddenly the motion froze, and you were able to rotate and look about in all directions and see things frozen in time. Now expand that freeze frame to the entire universe – planets, stars, and galaxies are all frozen, BAM!, right as you see them.

The Freeze Frame theory basically says that God, conceived of the entire universe as a shot in the freeze frame. There was nothing and then He spoke everything into being and essentially said, “Go!”, unfreezing the freeze frame.

What does this outlook on creation give you? What is its advantage?

It’s advantage is that it can give you a young universe. God could have only created everything about 10,000 years ago. He would have just created the initial beginning, the “freeze frame”, in such a way that everything looked like it was very old, but actually wasn’t. The light that seemed to be emitted from distant stars would have been created “in-transit”. In the initial “freeze frame” God created included not just the object themselves (starts, planets, galaxies, etc), but all the light, gravity,and  particles that exist between them.

A young-universe creationist, when looking into the sky is claiming that we are not seeing actual star light from distant objects, but an image that God created in transit.

Problems with the Freeze Frame

Perhaps one of the biggest problems with the freeze frame is this: how do we know that anything we see in the sky really existed? How do we know if these stars are really there? We’re seeing an image, light created in transit by God, of events that never actually happened.

Christian apologist Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason explains it like this:

If all we’re seeing is an image that God created in transit, then the only way we’re going to see the actual thing that exists is if we wait around another billion years for the light of the actual star to reach us. Who of us believes the Lord will tarry that long? Not a billion years. Which means we’ll never see it, will we? We’ll never see what God actually created, not the thing itself.

Doesn’t that throw into question the existence of anything in outer space at all? Because, in fact, since we’ll never see the thing itself– and what we see is not the thing, but an image God created in transit– well then, why would God ever need to create the thing in the first place? The image would be fully adequate for God’s purpose. The only thing God would have to create is the light image, because we’d never see the thing itself anyway. But doesn’t the Scripture seem to indicate that what we see are the very things that God created?

Another Christian aplogist site, godandscience.org, explains it similarly:

The alternative young earth explanation is that God created the light in transit. However, we know that quasars existed only during the beginning of the universe, since none are seen closer to us than billions of light years. If God created light in transit, He would have created the light in transit from a quasar that does not now exist. Likewise, we have observed supernova explosions in galaxies millions of light years away. If God created light in transit from these objects, He would have made the light from an object that does not now exist, since it appeared to have blown up millions of years before the universe was actually created. How can the universe declare the glory and righteousness of God if it declares a lie?

As we can see, taking this stance presents us with a very strange dilemma. The real heavenly bodies that do exist will never be seen. That is, the light from the original objects will take billions of years to reach us. While the stellar objects that we think we see now don’t actually exist.

Biblical Problems and Truth

Scripure clearly refers to objects in the sky as real objects and not just images.

“Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”
Genesis 15:5

God tells Abraham to count the stars – not their light images.

It is I who made the earth and created mankind upon it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.
Isaiah 45:12

God marshaled the starry hosts – not their light images.

Taking the “Freeze Frame” view undermines all observational sciences. How do we know what is real and what isn’t? What do we think exists but really doesn’t? What else is an illusion created by God?

When looking deeper, perhaps the biggest problem with this stance is that is undermines our trust in the truth of the Bible. If the Bible undeniably states that we see stars in the sky (see Deut. 4:19, Neh. 4:21, Job 22:12, and Psalm 8:3), but in actuality we don’t, then the Bible does not give us an accurate description of reality. That is, truth. In other words, the Bible has deceived us – what the Bible describes is not what is actually there.

Conclusion

We can see how holding the view of a young universe is untenable. We can see that clearly the universe appears to be very old, and we can measure that in a number of ways. The only way to have universe that is young, is to explain away that apparent age as a Godly sleight-of-hand.

We would then have a universe where not much outside our solar system (where light has had time to reach us within 10,000 years or so) is known to actually exist. Yet when we do so, we run into biblical descriptions of stars and the outside universe that indicate the existence of those actual objects and events – not just the light images in transit we would be receiving from God.

Resources

1. Starlight and the Age of the Universe, http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5639
2. Scientific Evidence for the Age of the Universe, http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/ageofuniverse.html
3. Age of the Universe, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe