Distant Starlight

How can we know anything about anything

To try to explain truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. George Macdonald

Do we have to make a choice between science and the Bible?

NO!

That is NOT where the problem is, but that is what everyone seems to want to talk about.

Take science as an example. How can we know anything about the created material world around us?

How can we know anything from what we can see using natural sciences?

We all see the same things in the material world, but we don't come to the same answers.

Why is that?

How can we know anything about the Bible and what it teaches? Every person believes different things about the Bible and how it should be read.

Why is that?

Same scientific facts. Different answers.

Same Bible. Different answers.

Why is that?

The true question is this: How do we come to our answers that we get from what we can see through science or what we can read in the Bible?

How do we think about what we see using science or what we read in the Bible?

How do we analyze what we have seen and read?

How do we interpret what we have seen and read?

We use logic, but logic always has a foundation. Jesus talked about building on the Rock. That Rock is Jesus Christ. He is the true foundation. There are also the false foundations of the ungodly.

An example might help.

Question: Why do you believe in evolution?

Answer: Because my science teacher told me that evolution is scientific fact.

Question: Why do you believe your science teacher?

Answer: because he agrees with the textbook he assigned us to read.

Now, we have asked, "Why?" twice.

If we continued to ask, "Why?" we would come down to the foundation of this person's thoughts.

When we get down to the foundations, there are no more questions that can be answered. So where to the foundations come from?

There are three possibilities.

things that we make up, pulled from the air
demonic lies
divine revelation

Question: Why do you believe in creation?

Answer: Because God revealed this to me. He spoke to me through the Bible and gave me His faith so that I could believe Him.

See how quickly we got to the foundation. This is a belief that has a foundation that is solid and that cannot be moved.

In reality, the things that we make up, that are pulled from the air, are actually from demons and all the lies of demons spring from the prince of demons, Satan. So these are one and the same.

Divine revelation comes from the Almighty, Creator, God, Jesus Christ. So there are only two choices, but how do we know there are only two choices? Because God has revealed this truth to us.

The question then is how do we tell the difference between the revelation that comes from God and the lies of Satan?

The answer is that everyone who sincerely wants to do the will of God will know.

Jesus said, "If you really want to obey God, you will know if what I teach comes from God or from me"

The rejection of the revelation that comes from God is not an intellectual problem. It is a moral problem.

Jesus said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you: For everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it shall be opened." *

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Matthew 7:7-11 *

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. You can set the truth before someone, but you can't make anyone believe those things that they don't want to submit to. They have to want to obey God.

How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify itself. Richard M. Weaver

Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32)

"If we are not prepared to buy the truth at the cost of our own humbling we shall not receive it"

Lies appear to have no price upon them. They seem cheap and they abound everywhere. But for the truth there is always an obvious price to pay.

"[God] has set a day when He will judge all the world's people with fairness. And He has chosen the man Jesus to do the judging for Him. God has given proof of this to all of us by raising Jesus from death" (Acts 17:31).

"There is a judge for the one who rejects Me [Jesus] and does not accept My words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day" (John 12:48)

That also stands for every person who speaks the utterances of Jesus. When we hear them, we hear Jesus Christ, and we either accept or reject. Every person who follows Jesus Christ is commanded to only speak His utterances and not their own.

"When we love others, we know that we belong to the truth, and we feel at ease in the presence of God" (1 John 3:19)

Ravi Zacharias did two open forums in a university. On the second night, one man told him that he had brought two Atheists in the night before who said that the arguments presented were so strong that they could not contend with them, but they were going to remain Atheists because that is what they prefer to be true.

In another case of just listening to an unbeliever and drawing out his reasoning, the unbeliever finally came to his foundations.

They turned out to be assumptions that were pulled from the air. When asked why he believed his basic assumption, the unbeliever looked startled and blurted out, "I guess I'm making the whole thing up." It was quite a revelation to him since he hadn't even known that he had any assumptions. However, he decided to remain an Atheist because he didn't want God to rule over him.

Distant Starlight

Some stars are billions of light years away from the earth. Evolutionists and Old-Earthers claim that means that it would take billions of years for the light from those stars to get to the earth. This is not true, of course. Many Christians have lost their faith because of speculations regarding the age of the earth. These speculations usually put death before sin, eliminate the world-wide flood and replace it with millions of years, and eliminate the creation and replace it with billions of years. Satan is very clever: if death is before sin, then sin does not cause death; if sin does not cause death, that destroys the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

There are exactly zero arguments against a young earth that have held up under the investigation of real science. The distant starlight argument is also bogus.

Actually, distant starlight is a problem for Evolutionists--not for creationists. While we cannot tell what happened or how the universe was created using operational science, we can look at the present and what we know about physics and astronomy and realize that Evolutionists have a huge problem. An Earth and universe filled with distant stars, as we can observe using operational science, presents no hurdle at all to the concept of a young universe created by God out of nothing at all. There are several workable hypothesis that would make it possible for distant star light to reach the Earth very quickly without anything other than natural processes we already know about (see the following paragraphs); however, God is not restricted to natural processes, and what we know about natural processes is only a very small fraction of the information about natural process that actually exists. Because there is so much that we don't know, the most likely answer is that a mechanism exists (natural or supernatural) that we have not yet discovered that is the actual way that God accomplished this. All science that looks back in time is using operational science to perform historical science. The most reliable way to do historical science is by reading any historical accounts that exist (like the Bible). We do have a record of what happened and a lot about how it happened. That account in Scripture does not conflict with anything that we have discovered using operational science.

It is very common for scientists, especially scientists who don't want to believe a certain thing, to look at their data and observations through the filter of their hidden presuppositions, forgotten axioms, and the assumption that their current methods of observation and testing are the only ones available. The introduction of instruments such as the telescope and microscope have shown such thinking to be foolish, yet it prevails among scientists who have lost their sense of wonder and holy awe toward God. Extreme egotism and desire to be independent from God drives them to ignore the fact that none of their theories, the ones that they say support the concepts of Evolutionism, can stand up to scrutiny. Evolution and the concept of an ancient universe, in the final analysis, have a foundation of unsupported axioms and circular reasoning. In fact, so strong is this tendency toward error that many Evolutionists use the false logic that says that if they could possibly create a story of Evolution that would not conflict with operational science and logic that that would prove Evolutionism. In fact, it is poor logic to make such a claim. If they were able to do that, it would not even make Evolutionism likely. As it stands now, Evolutionism is not even a good hypothesis.

There are many things that we have learned about the way that time and light work in the natural that could account for this. In other words, God might have used natural means. He didn't have to, though. And the problem of distant starlight is, at present, an insurmountable problem for those who believe in billions of years, but Theistic Evolutionists rarely bring that up. Perhaps they are ignorant of the fact. The Secular universities usually filter this fact out of their courses. Resources on Answers in Genesis do allude to this problem that the evolutionistic scientists have with distant starlight.

"Black holes provide an observable confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Such physics is the basis for several young-universe cosmologies, which allow light from the most distant galaxies to reach earth in thousands of years or less." Dr. Jason Lisle, http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v3/n1/black-holes-evidence

There are several ways that the distant starlight could have reached the earth during a six-twenty-four-hour-day creation week. And these ways are consistent with what we know about physics and astronomy and realize that Evolutionists have a huge problem. There are no such explanations for the big bang theory.

Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of pioneer spacecraft:

Distant Starlight

How can we know anything about anything

Distant Starlight

Age of the Universe

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