Tonight I attended a public showing of The Starlight Travel Dilemma, in ‘The Heavens Declare’ series produced by Awesome Science Media.

This was the third in a three-part series upholding the biblical teaching on God’s creation of the world against the evolutionary hypothesis so current in secular teaching.

Scientists are fascinated by astrophysics and the Universe, and Christians should be also. The Universe is designed to be an evangelist tool, revealing the glory of God Ps 19:1 so that those who ignore it are without excuse Rom 1:20. Secularists are trying to wrestle it away from Christians to promote their own agenda. Christians must learn to counter-act this propaganda.

‘The heavens declare the glory of God, and the night sky shows His handywork’ Ps 19:1.

Scientists are constantly surprised by what they discover in the Universe, and Christians should use this to show how limited is man’s understanding of God’s works.

I have attended my local astronomical society for the past 20 years to familiarise myself with current knowledge so that evolutionists cannot pull the wool over my eyes with pseudo-scientific statements.

I recall during a Street Pastor session some years ago a young man trying to claim credit for his evolutionary views by claiming that he worked in a famous biology laboratory in Oxford University.  I soon established that he was not a biologist and that he knew nothing at all about what he claimed to know about evolution, and this is not a solitary case.

Astronomy is the last refuge of the evolutionist, because all their earthly arguments have been blown out of the water.

Many evolutionists look for their kick-start in life from astronomy, although agnostic Richard Dawkins thinks that he can still win the argument with mundane evidence. Dawkins wants us to transfer our wonder and admiration from God to science, from the Creator to the wonders of the creation. However, for the most part, the average evolutionist takes to the stars to try to hold their ground.

The commonest argument is that light has taken billions of years to reach the Earth from distant galaxies and therefore the Universe cannot be as young as the Bible declares it to be.

A survey of American youth demonstrated that those not schooled in the creation-evolution debate will have their confidence in Scripture shaken when they go to University and ‘overthrow the faith of some’ 2Tim 2:18.  So it is important for young people to learn these topics to deal with secular intellectuals.

The cosmos is more than a fireworks’ display, writ large, although it is more beautiful than a manmade fireworks display. It serves many purposes. 1. it declares God’s glory Ps 19:1. 2. it is necessary for the fine tuning of the Universe, our Milky Way Galaxy, our solar system and the Earth itself. 3. it is God’s laboratory where He has conducted these massive experiments that are too energetic to be performed on Earth, and Earth-bound scientists need only to observe the results of these experiments and interpret them.

Mankind has learned much from astronomical studies and modern technology has been driven forward by them. GPS systems keep our mobile phones functioning along with many other benefits. Astrophysics tries to understand some fundamental matters such as light and gravity.

Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe, D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., 1994, Master Books, Colorado, was one of a few books that I bought immediately upon reading its title and about its author. Another one is here. There are not many books that fall into that category; contrast it with the book review I read about The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom when it was published in 1987, a book to which I have often referred since then, but I bought my own copy only this month almost 32 years later!

Similarly, I sent to Australia immediately in 1987 for The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time by Barry Setterfield and Trever Norman, which summarises and discusses the implications of the observational data that points to a decrease in the measurements of the speed of light since the 17th century. In the intervening decades, photocopies of his diagrams have been posted on the door of my study. Setterfield’s seminal work about the speed of light slowing down was a useful introduction of the subject to the Christian public at that time.

Humphrey has drawn attention to the importance of White Hole cosmology and he is one of the contributors in this DVD series in which he updates his White Hole cosmology since publishing his book in 1994.

Those who want to understand the physics can buy his book, which is unusually written at different levels, both popular and scientific, but those who cannot understand the physics may benefit from a simplified version of what is being said.

It has been demonstrated that gravity bends light.  Time is related to light, and it has also been demonstrated that gravity slows down time. This is not the same subject as Barry Setterfield’s work mentioned above.

Without going into the details of White Hole cosmology, one way to think about what happened on the fourth day of Creation Gen 1:14-17 is that God stretched out the heavens Job 9:8, Ps 104:2, Isa 40:22, Isa 42:5, Isa 44:24, Isa 45:12, Isa 51:13, Jer 10:12, Jer 51:15 and Zec 12:1 to its approximate present size at the same time as He created the Sun and the stars of the cosmos.  The light from the stars arrived at Earth on the 24-hr Earth-time fourth day of Creation week, and the divinely-creative rapid stretching on that fourth day sped up time in the Universe while an ordinary 24-hr Earth-day is passing. The 24-hour time-frame on Earth is quite different from the time-dilated time-frame in the cosmos during White Hole cosmology, whose rapid events created the quantized Red Shift phenomenon witnessed by astronomers, unexplained by ‘the inflation hypothesis’ in the Big Bang hypothesis.

For those more scientifically-minded, when the collapsing Event Horizon of the white hole reached the Earth, the stars became visible instantly. The quantization of the Red Shift observed in the distant galaxies is a feature of stretched spacetime, not of moving galaxies that is commonly said in the Big Bang model and which would produce a gradual Red Shift rather than the observed quantized (in steps) Red Shift.

As for time, clocks run faster the further away they are from the centre of gravity that bends light and time. Time in the distant galaxies from the original divinely-created stretched fabric of spacetime moves much faster than time on the Earth as part of the divine stretching process so that starlight arriving at Earth appears to have taken a long time to arrive, which creates the impression of long periods of time.

The Starlight Travel Dilemma DVD is available here

Update:

3 Sep 2022: an article in Nature magazine 27 Jul 2022 discusses the unexpected findings from the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope. Some early galaxies are surprisingly complex, contrary to astrophysical theories. Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence: “That’s a problem, she says, because it contradicts earlier theories of galaxy evolution.” The article ends: “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” Kirkpatrick says, “wondering if everything I’ve ever done is wrong.”