Because Galaxies Are Billions of Light-Years Away, Isn’t the Universe
Billions of Years Old? 8

Some people give another explanation for why we see distant stars in a
young universe. They believe God created a beam of light between Earth
and each star. Of course, a creation would immediately produce
completed things. Instantly, they would look much older than they
really were. This is called “creation with the appearance of age.” The
concept is sound. However, for starlight, this presents two
difficulties:

1.    Bright, exploding stars are called “supernovas.” If starlight,
seemingly from a supernova, had been created en route to Earth and did
not originate at the surface of an exploding star, then what exploded?
Only a relatively short beam would have been created near Earth. If
the image of an explosion was created on that short beam of light,
then the star never existed and the explosion never happened.  One
finds this hard to accept.

2.    Every hot gas radiates a unique set of precise colors, called its
emission spectrum. The gaseous envelope around each star also emits
specific colors that identify the chemical composition of the gas.
Because all starlight has emission spectra, this strongly suggests
that a star’s light originated at the star—not in cold, empty space.
Each beam of starlight also carries other information, such as the
star’s spin rate, magnetic field, surface temperature, and the
chemical composition of the cold gases between the star and Earth. Of
course, God could have created this beam of light with all this
information in it. However, the real question is not, “Could God have
done it?” but, “Did He?”

Therefore, starlight seems to have originated at stellar surfaces, not
in empty space.

Surprising Observations.  Starlight from distant stars and galaxies is
redshifted—meaning that their light is redder than one might expect.
Although other interpretations are possible, most astronomers have
interpreted redshifted light to be a wave effect, similar to that of
the lower pitch of a train’s whistle when the train is going away from
an observer. As the wave emitter (train or star) moves away from an
observer, the waves are stretched, making them lower in pitch (for the
train) or redder in color (for the star or galaxy). The greater a
star’s or galaxy’s redshift, the faster it is supposedly moving away
from us.

Since 1976, William Tifft, a University of Arizona astronomer, has
found that the redshifts of distant stars and galaxies typically
differ from each other by only a few fixed amounts (20). This is very
strange if stars are actually moving away from us. It would be as if
galaxies could travel only at specific speeds, jumping abruptly from
one speed to another, without passing through intermediate speeds. If
stars are not moving away from us at high speeds, the big bang theory
is wrong, along with many other related beliefs in the field of
cosmology. Other astronomers, not initially believing Tifft’s results,
did similar work and reached the same conclusion.

20. William G. Tifft, “Properties of the Redshift. III. Temporal
Variation,” The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 382, 1 December 1991, pp.
396–415.

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