if the light from the furthest stars takes billions of light years to reach us...?

Question

...why do some people still think the world is only 6000 years old???

Answer 1

It is an interesting question. Faith is funny thing. Someone might argue that the stars that who's light we see in the sky are not as far away as scientists believe.
Ultimately the figure of 6000 (or so) is based on life expectency of the figures in the bible. If you count all of the "A begot B who Begot C" etc, and factor in an average life expectency of say 60 years and then factor in that some of the characters in the bible are said to have longer than average lives (I have heard Abraham lived to be about 800 years old).
Along the lines of the Earth being only 6000 years old, the two points are not mutually exclusive. God could easily have created the univers several Billion years in the past but not created Earth until much more recently. I am not saying I support the idea, but you cannot get two scientists to agree on the exact age of the Earth so nothing is impossible.

Answer 2

Firstly, the question you posed, "if the light from the furthest stars takes billions of light years to reach us...?", has already made the assumption that the statement about the light from the furthest stars does take billions of years to reach Earth. My "scientific facts" and even "laws" have been proven wrong over the course of time. Laws like Newton's law, where Einstein proved it wrong.

People can believe that the Earth is 6000 years old and say:
If the earth is 6000 years old, why do some people believe that stars take billions of light years to reach us.

It is a matter of belief.


PS: So what is light from distant stars take billions of years to reach us? It just means that the Earth is much younger than the stars.

Answer 3

I just want to correct your sentence. You should say' billions of years', not billion of light years. Because light year is an unit of length. Year is an unit of time.
The world was created in 7 days and the world is only 6000 years old. These statements had no proof. Therefore it is not science.

Answer 4

Sure, there's not necessarily any contradiction.

God, the omnipotent, could surely create the universe 6000 years ago, but make everything look like it's 15 billion years old.

So the question is whether he'd fake it or simply wait 14.999994 billion years for us to get to get going.

Answer 5

Ok, if you mean "the Earth" when you say "the world", then it's completely possible. Just because the light has been travelling through space for billions of years does not mean that the earth had to be sitting here waiting for it. ; )

Note that I say it is possible, not that I believe it. I happen to believe that the Earth is much older than 6k years. However, as mentioned above, theories have been proven incorrect before, so I have to admit the possibility that the stars were made longer ago than the earth.....

Answer 6

Ummmm I don't know because although I'm agnostic I have to a peak or two at the bible and nothing in it really says any thing in the whole thing about god creating the universe that suggests it's 6,000 years old
oh and I guess it empedes on there happy time content circle whrere everything is ok there is our solar system and thats it yep small safe content haha

Answer 7

This particularly unbelievable bit of silliness is the product of the mind of Archbishop James Ussher (4 January 1581–21 March 1656).

It does NOT say so in the Bible. It is simply one man's interpretation of the genealogy (A begat B who begat C) in the Bible, assuming 25 years a generation, Which is a rough guide but hardly an accurate or precise one.

Given that in the year 1900 average life expectancy for men was 49 and for women was 50 and it would have been less than that in Ussher's time, and Biblical times, and marriage and conception would have been sooner than 25, on average, it was a strange yardstick by which to try and measure history,

Yet Ussher managed to calculate (or rather, convince himself) that the world began on the evening before October 23rd 4004 BC! Quite how he could be so unshakeably sure of the precise time and day when he was working on the basis of "25 years a generation on average" rather eludes me,

In 1648 Ussher published a treatise on the calendar. This was a warm-up for his most famous work, the Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti ("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650 and its continuation, Annalium pars postierior in 1654.

In this work, he famously claimed that the Earth was created at nightfall preceding Sunday 23 October, 4004 BC. Incidentally this was according to the proleptic Julian calendar. which is produced by extending the Julian calendar to dates preceding AD 4 when its quadrennial leap year stabilized. The leap years actually observed between its official implementation in 45 BC and AD 4 were erratic,

And of course the proleptic Gregorian calendar would produce a different date by working backwards from its official introduction by Pope Gregory XIII on 24 February 1582 via the papal bull Inter gravissimas (before Ussher did his caculations but Ussher was a Protestant and strongly critical of papists),

Other scholars calculated their own dates for Creation, such as that by the Cambridge academic, John Lightfoot (Lightfoot similarly deduced that Creation began at nightfall near the autumnal equinox, but in the year 3929 BC.) (75 years later),

So the obvious question to ask the Creationists is: how accurate is Ussher's date, given Lightfoot made it 75 years later and the Gregorian calendar has a discrepancy of 3 days in every 400 years from the Julian and will thus be 30 days out in 4000 years?

Ussher's work is still referenced by Young Earth Creationists (who believe that the Earth is approximately 6,000 years old) and has been much ridiculed as a symbol of religious ignorance.

But there are many versions of Creationism.

Young Earth Creationism is simply one branch of a burgeoning industry of religious fundamentalists trying deperately to be credibly in denial of the findings of science (Darwinian evolution, Copernican heliocentrism and geological and palaentological evidence for the earth being 4.6 billion years old. in particular).

Read about the amazing variety of tortuous mental twists they put themselves and the faithful through to try and retain the grip of religion on the minds of the people in the third link below.

My favourite is the one where they claim that God created the light of far-away stars but only in its last 6,000 years home straight on its way to us (but no light exists in the first 99.99% of the journey) and God only then, some time later, created the stars at billions of light years distance away that would have emitted that light, had they been in existence to do so,

I find that hilarious and the whole Creationism project absurd in its insistence on the literal truth of Genesis. Some people just cannot let go of an idea, even when it has been convincingly refuted. But they have to try and salvage it, even though they make themselves and everything they stand for look foolish in the process. It's rather sad, really,

Answer 8

Over four-hundred years ago the Church refused to believe that Earth rotated. The "scientific" reasoning was that if it did then everyone would be hurled off into space. That same kind of ignorance still exists in those people who insist that Earth is only 6,000 years old.

Answer 9

7 days for God could mean any amount of time really. A god-day could be 10 billion years. and the stars were created before the earth

Answer 10

arbiter00 - could you explain to us why God would do all that faking, burying all those fossils, making u-shape ice-age valleys, making strata, making a magnetic record of magnetic reversals in the sea bed rocks, making a definite sequence of evolving creatures, making distant galaxies show red shifts....the list could go on.

Do you really believe he is that tricky?