An Introduction

Given the biblical timescale, that God created the universe roughly 6000 years ago, how are we able to see stars and galaxies that are billions of light-years away? If light takes one year to traverse a distance of one light year (about 5.88 trillion miles), shouldn’t light from a galaxy that is ten billion light years away take ten billion years to reach us? And we can see such galaxies, implying that the light has arrived. Does this imply that the universe is at least 10 billion years old?

Attempted Solutions

In this article we will continue to explore additional proposed solutions to distant starlight. Creation astronomers and physicists do not currently have a consensus position on the solution to this perceived problem. Some creationists are bothered by this fact, but it is the nature of science that we don’t know everything and therefore we make hypotheses to be tested. Furthermore, science advances only when multiple models are presented and then systematically eliminated on the basis of observations until only the most probable model remains. In this spirit, I will here present some of the positions held by creation scientists, along with the strengths and weaknesses of such proposals.

Concepts of Simultaneity

We previously introduced this distant starlight issue and then examined potential solutions and their difficulties. We now move toward a solution to the issue. This solution is surprisingly straightforward, but will require some discussion of the nature of space and time as we now understand them. To that end, we will here investigate the concept of simultaneity and how this concept has developed over time.

Objections to the Conventionality Thesis

We will here investigate common objections to the conventionality thesis – the principle that the one-way speed of light cannot be measured but is instead stipulated.

Rømer, Maxwell, and Occam

We may freely stipulate the speed of light in any one direction to be anything between ½c and infinity, and the return-trip speed is set by the constraint that the average speed of light must always be exactly c in vacuum (186,282.397 miles per second). We here explore additional objections to the conventionality thesis. These have all been refuted in the technical literature within the past century. But few people have access to such literature, and so a review is expedient.

Refuting the Critics: Distant Starlight and ASC

Someone recently sent me an internet post of a critic who thinks he has disproved the ASC solution to the distant starlight issue. Peter offered thirteen propositions in an attempt to support his conclusion. Amazingly, not even one of them is correct. We will examine his errors here. Actually, if Peter had posed his claims as questions instead, they would have been good questions. So, hopefully my response here will help people get up to speed on this fascinating area of physics.

A Refutation of Phillip Dennis’s Claims Regarding Alleged Inconsistencies in ASC

Did Phillip Dennis actually disprove the conventionality thesis (Dennis 2024)?  Did he find any genuine inconsistency with the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) and the young universe model upon which it is based? Well, no to all of the above. We show below that when the full synchrony-independent equations are used, they do not support Dennis’s conclusion but rather the opposite. Furthermore, we will demonstrate several critical errors in Dennis’s analysis and show that several of his claims are incompatible with the physics of relativity.