Why do people think light-years prove the earth is older than 6000 years?

Question

God could've easily made the light closer without time passing.

Answer 1

Yes, he could have, but would he? Why would he make the universe appear to be 13.7 billion years old? Is there a reason that he would want to trick humans?

Answer 2

Okay, since you asked...

Why is it that when ever you ask a simple question about space or math or physics you insist on dumping in the "God" thing on top of it? Is it beyond you to simply ask a plain question?

Next, what is wrong with the idea that things may be older than 6000 years old? Do you have this idea that someone will stand up and tell you that you are correct, everything, I mean everything, started 6001 years ago. And he/she knows it for a fact because he or she was there when it happened...No, I don't think so. Scientists now say that the Earth is on the order of 4 Billion years old. That figure is sooooo-o far from your 6,000 years figure that I think you have a lot of catching up to do in your scientific studies if you want to post intelligent questions here.

By the way...Do you believe in Aliens...You know, people from other planets and stuff like that? Hmm-m. Since God
didn't live on Earth, he would be an Alien, Right?

Answer 3

Your God answer could be correct of course: God can do anything. But science has to provide non-God explanations. What caused the Grand Canyon? The river cut its way down through the rock, or God made a canyon and put a river at the bottom. What makes the tides? The moon's gravity or God lifts the water. What causes lung cancer? Damage to a cell's DNA by some cigarette smoke, or God put the cancer there. You can say God for everything.
But you need non-God hypotheses so that you can progress from there (e.g. study other river valleys or try to prevent lung cancer). You use the observational evidence to come up with a non-God explanation. If overwhelming scientific evidence is that an object you see is farther away than 6000 light years, then the universe must have existed for longer than 6000 years.

Answer 4

It is not light years that proves this. There is evidence about the Big Bang, which happened about 14-15 billions of years ago. The first evidence is the expansion of the universe, which is found by the fact that distant galaxies are retreating from us. Then, there is the distance of those galaxies itself, which is billions of light years; meaning that light reaching us now, in the present, has traveled for billions of years at the rate of 300.000 kilometers per second!
Lastly, there is the cosmic background radiation, which was emitted when the universe was about 300-400 thousand years old, and is detected from everywhere in the universe. Wherever you go in the universe, you can set up equipment and detect this radiation.
All of this is in concordance with the Big Bang theory, a scientific theory.

Answer 5

no god is with out sin and would not lie so to create a passed where one did not exist would be to bear false witness. also the bible does not say the world is only 6000 years old.that is a miss interpretation of metaphorical statments.the truth can be hiden from those not ready to see it but it is there if you know how to look for it. god is also not redundant as to do the same thing twice so greater lights and lessor lights have different meanings at different times.as does the tree of life and the abbyss and the waters. so keep in mind our very limited comunications skills when reading and you will see when metaphores are being used explane a thought the writers may not have grasped.

Answer 6

Light-years are a measure of distance, not of time first off. Second off, I have never heard anything about people using the concept of a light-year to explain why Earth is older than 6000 years.

Third, seeing as how radio-carbon dating, and our best science tells us that dinosaurs lived about 75 million years ago... 6000 years seems to be a bit of an understatement.

While it is true one can argue that God can do anything.... the sad thing is that people still believe in those fairy tales. God is a figment of human imagination. Simply put, people fear reprisal if they do not believe in God, they also fear death. This comes from 1000's of years of human dogma and tradition.

God and/or gods are simply humanity's way of explaining away what we can't explain. Yet, now in the age of technology and a newfound scientific rennaissance, we are discovering more and more about our origins and about our place in the Universe. Sadly enough, we have the far right conservative and traditional lobbyists all over the world trying to squelch scientific discovery for fear of losing control of a massive amount of the world.

Religion is politics, politics is religion... and both will run humanity into the ground. Science is based in solid logic, factual evidence, and is the cornerstone of the future of humanity. Religion is slowly fading away (way too slowly in my opinion) and is based in fear, conjecture, and dogmatic beliefs that go back to before sanitation or even shoes were invented. To believe a book written 2000 years ago is not only illogical, its ludicrous.

God/gods are an excuse for why the human race can't advance, science is fighting back with why we should.

Answer 7

Which hypothesis, objectively, sounds like a better fit?

A) The light we see from the Andromeda Galaxy today is light that started out at the Andromeda Galaxy 2.3 million years ago, since light travels at a well-established speed in vacuum, and we can confirm that it is 2.3 million light-years away by measuring its parallax.

B) The light we see from the Andromeda Galaxy today is light that started out from the Andromeda Galaxy in 4004 BC and was magically transported 2.294 million light-years to resume its journey at the experimentally confirmed velocity of light in vacuum, since the supernatural entity for some bizarre reason, decided to give the universe the appearance of being 13.7 billion years old, in spite of the fact that aforementioned supernatural entity allegedly created the universe only 6000 years ago.

Theory A is cleaner than theory B. It explains things in relatively few, experimentally verifiable terms. Theory B, on the other hand, invokes a supernatural entity (which we tend to reject as an explanation in natural systems, since a supernatural entity is, by definition, impossible to quantify,) as well as a magical means of making light go faster than light. Several tenants of Theory B also directly contradict the results of observations and experimentally collected data, whereas they cause Theory A no problem at all. So, as a result, the better explanation is Theory A.

This is what is known as the logical property of parsimony, i.e. we seek the hypothesis that invokes the least complexity and the fewest number of unknowns.

Answer 8

What in the world are you going on about? How the heck does the speed of light have anything whatsoever to do with the age of the Earth!

We can determine the age of the Earth by measuring the abundances of radioactive elements. The light year is merely a convenient measure of distance for astronomical purposes.

Answer 9

People don't have to look at light years to prove that the Earth is older than 6,000 years. The evidence is on Earth. Geologist can tell by looking at rocks that formed millions of years ago. They can tell the age of the rock by carbon-14 dating.

Answer 10

Science is based on the the belief that the world is at least in part knowable. But reasoning and observation become pretty much useless if you assume that some god is faking the evidence. It also doesn't make much sense to say "the heavens proclaim the glory of God" if it's all a deception.

Answer 11

Possibility one - God created the universe that we have been slowly learning about over the last 10,000 years or so.

Possibility two - God created the universe and faked its origins and systems. In doing so he created a universe in which an intelligent reasoning being would only believe in him because someone told them to.

Possibility three - There is no God.

All these are matters of opinion. There is no and can be no proof for any of them.