On this date (February 23, 2021) 34 years ago, SN 1987A erupted. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), SN 1987A was the first naked-eye supernova in four centuries. The LMC is a small satellite galaxy of our Milky Way Galaxy, about 168,000 light-years away. Keep in mind that the light-year is a unit of distance, not time. A light-year is the distance that light travels in a year, about six trillion miles. Right away, the distance of the LMC raises a problem for recent creation. If the world is only a few thousand years old (more specifically, a little more than 6,000 years), how could we have seen SN 1987A? For that matter, what about all those other galaxies that are much farther away? How can we see anything in the universe that is more than 6,000 light-years away? https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/solving-light-travel-time-problem/#:~:text=Since%20in%20the%20mature%20creation,and%20the%20character%20of%20God.
Why is this important? What is at stake?
The big problem is not that we see light from objects that are billions of light years away; the problem is that when one of them explodes, did that event, in the context of a “young earth” and a seven literal day creation, ever happen at all?
What is at stake is the veracity of the Bible. It appears in Genesis that the author is not trying to convey a metaphor, but reporting historical accounts. So if the Bible is not correct here, how do we know it’s correct in other places?
The line of reasoning thus becomes:
- God is true. There exists truth that is an accurate reflection or record of what really occurred at the creation of the Universe. As Christians we do not fear others trying to poke holes in our understanding of truth.
- The Bible is the Word of God.
- The Bible therefore must be true in the way that the authors intended it.
- If there are conflicts with the Bible and “science”, the Bible has to be correct.
- How then can we explain these apparent contradictions.
Things to keep in mind:
- Just because we don’t understand something, doesn’t mean it is not true or didn’t happen. I don’t understand quantum mechanics doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
- God “does whatever He pleases”. His memorial name, “Yahweh” means “I am who I am.” He is the King of Being. He decides what is.
- God can “do whatever he pleases” without violating the physics that he invented. Jesus makes water into wine and feeds 5,000 people with 5 loaves of bread and a couple of fishes. Did God violate physics to do this, or just do something that was highly unlikely?
- We live in a material space-time reality. We cannot conceive of another universe where, instead of space, time, matter and energy, there is @#4%xl, %&284mx, (dm93:#2p+, and /2</?x83%^^. But space, time, matter and energy are mere constructs to God. He created them, and He can freely manipulate as He chooses. Because we live in our reality, it’s hard to think and see outside of that.
- When we stand before God and can see and know everything, our understanding of the Bible at that time will be consistent with our understanding at that time of what actually happened.
We think of time, for example, like the clock speed on a computer that we call The Universe. When Time clocks the one second from February 2, 2025 at 1:43:28 to February 2, 2025 at 1:43:29, that believe that one second is clocked all over the universe.
However, the effects of relativity can have some interesting manifestations in the world. For instance, the passage of time is not at the same rate to all observers. Depending upon location, time can pass more slowly in some reference frames than in others. (https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/solving-light-travel-time-problem/)
Usually, when examples are given, this difference is in seconds, or fractions of a second.
However, no one (but maybe a budding physicist) would think it possible that he could play little league baseball with his best friend next door yesterday, and then today go visit him next door and he’s having his 70th birthday party because time acts differently at his house. But what if this could be true? C.S. Lewis captures this brilliantly in The Chronicles of Narnia, where the Pevensie children slip through the wardrobe and can spend hours or years in Narnia, then come back and virtually no time has passed in “this world”.
Could it be that while earth was clocking a day, other places in the universe were passing billions of years of actual occurrences?
