YOUNG EARTH AND DISTANT STARLIGHT (PART 1)

Ron Edwards

May 27

Creation Week entailed a series of miracles.

Throughout the account in Genesis 1, the Bible says that God spoke things into existence—eight times, "And God said … ". And after He spoke, it is often concluded with, "and it was so". The New Testament tells us,

"By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." (Hebrews 11:3)

The word of God brought the universe into existence from something that is not visible, something, unlike ordinary visible/tangible matter and energy. This is consistent with the scientific conclusion that the matter and energy that comprise the universe cannot be eternal. Thus, the cause of the universe must be supernatural.

And so the Bible describes the Word of God as powerful:

"So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it." (Isaiah 55:11)

The New Testament tells us that this agency of God, the Word by which He created everything, was none other than the Lord Jesus Christ:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (John 1:1–3)

Genesis 2 tells us that God made the first man and woman. He took dust and made the man, Adam (Genesis 2:7), and took his rib and fashioned the woman, Eve, the mother of all.

I have never had anyone demand that I explain to them how God made a man from dust. And yet there is this demand that we explain how God could have created the stars such that we can see the light from distant stars.

The Genesis account makes it clear that the creation of the heavenly bodies was just as miraculous as the creation of the first people:

And God said, "Let there be lights … And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars." (Genesis 1:14–16).

Was this any less a miracle than the creation of the man from dust? And yet there is a demand for a naturalistic explanation for how God did this! This seems to me to be quite inconsistent and unreasonable to demand such a thing as a condition of believing the Bible's account, especially the timeframe.

It's also interesting that the timeframe of six days with the seventh day of rest—the basis of our 7-day week (Exodus 20:11)—underlines the miraculous nature of God's actions. And that is part of the problem for those who don't or won't believe the timeframe, such as theistic evolutionists and long-age creationists. When they refuse to believe the timeframe, they then tend to think of 'creation' in a naturalistic way, over billions of years. And then secular ideas of how things came to be take precedence over the Bible's clear account. Thus the miraculous nature of Creation Week takes a back seat and so we have this demand for a naturalistic explanation for how we can see distant starlight.

The bottom line: Creation Week involved a series of miracles, one after the other. Thus, these are things for which we can provide no natural explanation. We do not know how God could speak the stars into existence, and thus we cannot know how He created things in such a way that we can see the light from celestial objects millions and billions of light-years distant.

In other words, the question tacitly denies the supernatural nature of the Creation Week events. In doing so it robs God of His omnipotence and limits Him to work only in ways that we can understand. This results in a very diminished view of God. In effect, those who do this are constructing a god compatible with their own limited understanding, which is a form of idolatry.

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