Light Created in Transit

Summary

• The proposal. God made the stars on Day Four and, at the same instant, made the light already on its way. A beam from a galaxy a hundred million light years off did not travel a hundred million years. It was created most of the way here. Distant starlight is then no evidence for an old universe, because the light never crossed the distance.
• The motivation is not arbitrary. Genesis has fruit trees bearing fruit on Day Three and Adam and Eve as adults on Day Six. Nothing in the account grows into place. Created light is the same idea applied to the sky, and it was the majority young-earth position for most of the twentieth century. Henry Morris held it. Philip Gosse argued the general principle in Omphalos in 1857.
• Its one technical defence failed. G. Russell Akridge argued in 1979 that conservation of energy requires in-transit creation, because a newly created charge's Coulomb field would gain energy as it expanded. Max Lorentz showed in the same journal in 2019 that the argument uses the wrong field for a non-static charge: "the argument is thus without merit." Nobody has replaced it.
• The killing objection came from inside the young-earth community, not from outside it. Danny Faulkner's version is the sharpest. Adam was created mature, but he would not have carried scars from injuries he never received, because "such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God." Created starlight carries exactly that kind of evidence. Faulkner has measured eclipsing binary stars for forty years; on created light, "we would see evidence of events (eclipses, for example) that would have never happened."
• SN 1987A is the case that broke it. The beam carries a neutrino burst caught by three detectors within thirteen seconds, a light curve that ran for four decades, a ring that lit up with the geometric delay a real light echo requires, and titanium-44 decay lines at 67.9 and 78.4 keV matching laboratory energies. On created light, none of it happened. The beam is a detailed record of an explosion that never occurred, in a star it never touched. D. Russell Humphreys, a young-earth physicist, put the consequence plainly in 1994: it makes astronomy "a study of the fiction God would have chosen to write for us in the sky."
• The position still has serious defenders and they should be read, not caricatured. Donald DeYoung's 2010 defence in the Journal of Creation is the fullest, and he concedes the decisive point himself: "Cosmologists realize that the mature creation viewpoint cannot be refuted." He also asks the best question anyone has asked of his own position: if the ages are built in, "why were these particular ages built into the recent supernatural creation? Why not 4.6 million or 4.6 trillion years for the earth?"
• The problem is bigger than light. Justin Taylor pointed out in 2005 that matter crosses cosmic distances too. Jets from active galaxies run for millions of light years and the tidal tails of colliding galaxies for hundreds of thousands, so in-transit creation cannot be confined to photons. SN 1987A's neutrino burst is the same problem in miniature.
• The verdict: not refutable, and that is the objection. George Ellis, no creationist, granted in 1975 that a 6,000-year universe with light created en route could not be refuted "experimentally or observationally." He also named the price. It breaks "the expectation that the ordinary laws of everyday physics, carefully and correctly applied, will lead to correct inferences about what exists." Every observation of the distant universe becomes uninformative. A skeptic cannot disprove created light, and neither can anyone else, which is why most young-earth astronomers went looking for something else.

This article is the case file on one answer.  The other seven, and how they compare, are in Young-Universe Cosmologies.

The claim, stated plainly

Light travels at about 300,000 kilometres per second.  The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away.  So the light arriving from Andromeda tonight left it 2.5 million years ago, and the universe must be at least that old.  That is the distant starlight problem in one paragraph, and it is the sharpest single argument against a 6,000-year universe.

The created-light answer denies the first step of the inference.  The light arriving tonight did not leave Andromeda.  God made the stars on Day Four, and at the same moment He made the beams, already stretched out along the paths between the stars and the earth.  A beam that was created 6,000 light years from here has been travelling for 6,000 years.  A beam that was created one light day from here arrived the next night.  Nothing in the beam ever touched the star it appears to come from, except the last few thousand light years of it.

The consequence is immediate and it is the whole argument, for and against.  If the light was created en route, then no light-travel time was ever spent, and the age inferred from the distance is an inference about an event that did not happen.

D. Russell Humphreys, a young-earth physicist who rejects the idea, stated it as fairly as anyone has:¹

"Also called the 'created-in-transit' theory, it holds that when God created all the particles in the universe, He also instantaneously created, in transit along their paths, all the light waves which would have been emitted by those particles for billions of years prior to their creation.  Thus, He would have created a cosmos filled with light waves, all traveling in various directions toward various destinations."¹

Humphreys adds the concession that has to be made before any criticism is fair:  "It is certainly possible that God could have done such a thing."¹  Nothing in physics forbids it.  The objections to created light are theological and epistemological, not physical, and the people who press them hardest are young-earth creationists.

Why it was the majority position

The idea did not come from a desire to dodge an inconvenient measurement.  It came from reading Genesis 1 and noticing that nothing in the chapter grows into place.

On Day Three, "the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit" (Genesis 1:12).  Fruit, on the day the tree appeared.  On Day Six, Adam and Eve are made as adults, given a command they can understand and a job they can do.  Genesis 1:29-30 assigns plants as food for man and the animals, so the plants had to be edible at once.  A seed on Day Three would have fed nobody.

Danny Faulkner, who rejects created light, still grants the force of this:²

"Proponents argue that by its very nature, creation must include some 'appearance of age,' for plants, animals, and people were not made as embryos or infants, but as mature adults, even though they did not go through the normal process of growth to reach adulthood.  We certainly see this is true of Adam and Eve, but it also would seem to be true of plants, or else they could not fulfill their God ordained purpose of providing food only 2-3 days after they appeared if they were not mature (Genesis 1:29-30)."²

Extend the same reasoning to Day Four.  Genesis 1:14-15 says God made the lights in the sky "to give light upon the earth," and then "it was so."  If their function is to light the earth, then their light was on the earth that day.  Faulkner again:  "Thus, the stars could not fulfill their purposes unless they were visible right away, so God made them with their light already en route to earth."²

Jason Lisle, who also rejects created light, sharpens the point into a difficulty for everybody else.³  On any model where light really crossed the distance at the ordinary speed, Adam on Day Six saw almost nothing:

"By conventional thinking, Adam's view of the universe would be limited to only a few light-days, in which case he would not have been able to see any of the nighttime stars.  The Solar System is within this radius.  So, the sun, moon, and planets would have been visible.  But did Adam have to wait 4.3 years for the next nearest star to 'blink on'?  If so, then the stars would not have fulfilled their purpose for years."³

That is a real problem and it is not answered by calling created light naive.  Every young-earth model has to say something about what Adam saw.  Created light says the obvious thing:  he saw the sky.

There is a second argument, and it is stronger than it looks.  Any act of creation produces something that carries a false history, because the alternative is an infinite regress.  John Whitcomb and Henry Morris made this the centrepiece of The Genesis Flood in 1961:⁴

"If God actually created anything at all, even the simplest atoms, those atoms or other creations would necessarily have an appearance of some age.  There could be no genuine creation of any kind, without an initial appearance of age inherent in it."⁴

A newly created hydrogen atom in its ground state looks exactly like one that has existed for a billion years.  A newly created adult has bone density that ordinarily takes twenty years to build.  If maturity at creation is deception, then creation itself is deception, and the objection proves too much.  Whitcomb and Morris drew the conclusion for starlight three hundred pages later:

"The photons of light energy were created at the same instant as the stars from which they were apparently derived, so that an observer on the earth would have been able to see the most distant stars within his vision at that instant of creation."⁴

Henry Morris held this view for the rest of his life.  Faulkner records it:  "the late Henry M. Morris, Jr. was fond of this solution."²  For most of the twentieth century it was the standard young-earth answer, and it was held by the people who founded the modern movement.

The literature, in dates

The position has a longer paper trail than most people assume, and the interesting feature of that trail is how one-sided it became after 1994.

Notice what is missing.  After Akridge in 1979, no one published a technical defence.  DeYoung's 2010 paper is filed under "Viewpoint," not "Papers," and it says of its own rebuttals that they "are not meant to convince critics of mature creation but to encourage discussion."⁵  Meanwhile the critical literature grew, and every critic named above is a young-earth creationist writing in a young-earth journal.

Akridge 1979, the one attempt at a proof

Russell Akridge's paper is worth reading because it tried to do something nobody else tried.  It argued that created light is not merely permitted but required, by classical electromagnetism.

The argument runs like this.  Take a point charge q created out of nothing at time zero.  Its electric field cannot be everywhere at once, because fields propagate at the speed of light.  So at time t the field fills a sphere of radius ct and is zero outside.  The energy stored in an electric field is proportional to the integral of E² over space.  As the sphere grows, more space contains field, so the total field energy grows.  Energy appears from nowhere.

Akridge's conclusion was that this cannot be right, so the field must have been created everywhere at the same instant as the charge.  And since light is made of electric and magnetic fields, the same must hold for light.  His summary is in his own abstract:⁶

"The electromagnetic fields surrounding a point charge conserve energy, preserve an orderly universe, and satisfy the mass-energy equivalence of relativity if the universe is created mature.  As a part of this mature electromagnetic field, light from the distant starts was created enroute from the star to the earth."⁶

The misprint "starts" for "stars" is in the printed abstract.

The paper also records where the question came from.  A member of the audience at a creation seminar at Dallas Bible College in May 1978 asked Harold Slusher how a 10,000-year-old universe could show light from stars millions of light years away, and Slusher answered that the light was created en route.  Akridge wrote the paper to support that answer:  "The creation of starlight enroute is actually a necessary condition for an orderly universe."⁶

Why it does not work

Max Lorentz took the argument apart in the same journal forty years later.⁷  His abstract states the finding:

"Four decades ago, Akridge (1979) argued in CRSQ that energy conservation requires the in-transit creation of light from distant sources.  Examination of his argument shows that, besides being flawed on a priori grounds, it uses an incorrect prescription for the electric field of a non-static charge;  the argument is thus without merit."⁷

Two separate failures, and the first needs no calculation.  Pair production creates charges out of nothing in particle accelerators every day.  A photon converts into an electron and a positron, and net charge is conserved, but the two new particles sit at slightly different places, so their fields do not exactly cancel.  If Akridge were right, every such event would have to instantly fill the universe with new field:

"Hence, if Akridge's argument were sound, these newly created fields would simultaneously spring into existence throughout all of space—whereas in reality, the fields propagate with the speed of light."⁷

The second failure is the technical one.  Akridge assumed that the field of a newly created charge is the ordinary static Coulomb field q/4πε₀r² inside the sphere r < ct and zero outside.  Lorentz's finding is that this is not a solution of Maxwell's equations:

"Akridge's error lies in his equation for the electric field of a non-static charge."⁷

A truncated static field has a discontinuity at the boundary, and Gauss's law and Faraday's law together forbid that shape in the absence of a matching magnetic field and current.  The correct time-dependent field satisfies energy conservation on its own.  Lorentz's verdict:  "Thus the expanding electric field does not violate energy conservation, and field-creation throughout the universe is not required.  Akridge's argument is hence without merit."⁷

The part of Lorentz worth quoting to a skeptic

Lorentz did not stop at the physics.  He used the episode to say something about how creationist peer review had worked, and it is the most candid paragraph in the whole literature:

"However, we must also note that the argument did pass peer review and appeared in CRSQ, arguably the flagship journal of creation science. … it seems unlikely that the CRS at that time included absolutely no members conversant enough with electrodynamics to pinpoint these flaws.  In any case, and for whatever reason, neither the reviewer(s) nor anyone within the 1979 membership seems to have pointed them out."⁷

He adds that the error "is by no means minor:  the argument proceeds from an unambiguously false electrodynamic premise, and peer review is intended to detect precisely this type of error."⁷

Two mentions in forty years is the whole reception history.  Glenn Morton called the paper "brilliantly argued" in 1982 and Emmett Williams called it "a very interesting paper" in 1990.  Nobody checked the mathematics.⁷

That leaves created light where it started:  a possible act of God, with no physical argument behind it.

The objection, and where it came from

The standard picture is that created light was pushed out by skeptics.  That is not what happened.  Every serious statement of the objection in the last thirty years was written by a young-earth creationist, in a young-earth journal, and the argument they use is a theological one about the character of God.

Faulkner: mature, but without a false history

Danny Faulkner's 2021 survey states it most carefully.⁸  He begins by granting the maturity argument in full, including the miracle at Cana, where the wine tasted like wine that had spent months fermenting.  Then he draws a line inside the idea of maturity:

"Our bodies have subtle evidence of things that occurred during our growth and maturing processes.  The most obvious of these are small scars of minor injuries sustained while growing up, but there are other evidences, such as the sealing off the ends of our leg bones upon completion of the growth process.  Did Adam and Eve bear in their bodies any evidence of a childhood they never experienced?  Most supporters of mature creation would opine that Adam and Eve did not.  This amounts to an affirmation that while Adam and Eve were created mature, they did not bear any detailed evidence of processes that never happened.  Such evidence would seem to be deceptive, which would violate the character of God."⁸

That distinction is the hinge of the whole debate, so it is worth restating in ordinary words.  An adult body is mature.  A scar is a record.  Maturity is a state;  a record is a claim about a particular past event.  Adam's bone density says only "this is an adult."  A scar on Adam's knee would say "this man fell off something in 3998 BC," and that would be a false statement written into his body.

Faulkner then applies the distinction to what he personally does for a living.  He has measured eclipsing binary stars for more than forty years.  These are pairs of stars orbiting so closely that no telescope can separate them.  What you see is a single dot whose brightness dips on a schedule as one star passes in front of the other.  From the exact shape and timing of those dips, an astronomer recovers the two stars' radii, their masses, their orbital period and the tilt of their orbit.  All of it comes out of a light curve.

"However, if the light of these stars were created in transit so that the light never left the stars, then we would see evidence of events (eclipses, for example) that would have never happened.  This is deceptive."⁸

This is a stronger example than it first appears.  A star's spectrum could be dismissed as a state:  it says "here is a hot ball of hydrogen."  An eclipse cannot.  An eclipse is a dated event.  Recording an eclipse that never occurred is recording a scar.

Faulkner's conclusion is the sentence most often quoted from the young-earth side of this argument:

"Since in the mature creation solution, the light from distant objects never left those objects, none of those distant objects need exist at all.  Consequently, in the mature creation solution, much of the universe could be an illusion."⁸

Note the "need exist at all."  If the beam was created 6,000 light years out and never touched the star, then the far end of the path is unconstrained.  Whether there is a star out there at all becomes an open question that no observation can settle.

Humphreys: five problems, written in 1994

D. Russell Humphreys held created light as a young creationist and gave five reasons for abandoning it in Starlight and Time.  They still cover most of the ground.¹

1. There is no biblical statement favouring it. Adam's apparent age is necessary if he is to be a functioning adult; the illusion in created light is not necessary in the same way, because God could simply have made a universe small enough to see. Humphreys notes that "except for parts of the Milky Way, most of the stars visible to the naked eye are closer than 6000 light-years."¹
2. Most observed astronomical events would never have happened.
3. It explains nothing else. It accounts for neither galactic redshifts nor the cosmic microwave background, "except to say that for some incomprehensible reason God chose to support the Big Bang theory by manufacturing seeming evidence for it in the sky."¹
4. It is untestable, "because it makes no scientific predictions."¹
5. It discourages further work. Humphreys compares it to the seventeenth-century idea that fossils were placed in rocks to test men's faith, and observes that if creationists had stayed content with that, "we would today be denied the tremendous explanatory power of flood geology."¹

His central complaint, though, is about what created light does to astronomy as a discipline:

"This sort of fictional interpretation of events that we see in the sky would deny astronomy most of its value as a study of the real world.  It would make the study of distant stars into a kind of theological literary criticism — a study of the fiction God would have chosen to write for us in the sky.  And if most of what the heavens declare to us were fictional, then according to Psalm 19:1 ('The heavens declare the glory of God'), most of the glory of God would also be fictional."¹

That last move is the sharpest thing anyone has said against created light from inside the movement.  Psalm 19 is a text creationists cite constantly.  If the sky is mostly a composed narrative rather than a report, the psalm's claim about what the heavens declare is diminished by the very theory meant to protect Genesis.

Lisle: two more objections, one exegetical

Jason Lisle rejects created light for two reasons that do not overlap with Faulkner's or Humphreys'.

The first is exegetical, and it turns the maturity argument back on itself.  Genesis 1:15 and 1:17 say the lights were placed "to give light upon the earth," followed by "and it was so."  If the beams did not come from the stars, then the stars are not giving light upon the earth at all:

"But this is the problem:  if God created the light in-transit, then the light does not really come from the stars.  In fact, it could not rightly be called 'starlight' at all but rather 'Godlight.'  If the light en-route model were true, then all stars beyond about 6,000 light years are not yet fulfilling their God-ordained purpose to give light upon the earth."³

The second is about what created light does to knowledge in general.  Lisle's term is "preconditions of intelligibility":  the things that must be true before anyone can learn anything.  The basic reliability of the senses is one of them.

"If we cannot believe our eyes for 99.9999% of the universe, then why should we trust them for the other 0.0001% that is nearby?  So, light-en-route models lead to the inescapable conclusion that our senses are not generally reliable, in which case it doesn't make sense to even attempt to understand the universe."³

His verdict on the maturity argument as a whole is worth keeping, because he accepts most of it:  "Yes, God made the universe mature.  But, no, this does not by itself alleviate the distant starlight problem."³

Taylor: the problem is not confined to light

Justin Taylor added an objection in 2005 that gets less attention than it deserves.⁹  Light is not the only thing that crosses cosmic distances.  Active galactic nuclei shoot jets of matter that extend for millions of light years and end in lobes of shocked gas.  Galaxies collide and leave tidal tails hundreds of thousands of light years long.  The Tadpole Galaxy's tail is about 390,000 light years.  None of that matter can have moved that far in 6,000 years without exceeding the speed of light.

So the in-transit fix has to be extended to matter:

"However, this suggestion would imply that God created jets of matter leading into lobes they did not produce, giving the distinct, and false, impression of great age.  It would further imply that He created galaxies with the distinct appearance of a history of interaction, which had never happened—again, giving a false impression of great age."⁹

Taylor's summary of the position is blunt:

"Besides the theological issues, the idea of a mature creation, in the sense discussed here, is more a dismissal than an explanation.  If one claimed that God created rocks with fossils already in them, he would dismiss the entire field of paleontology."⁹

He also asks the question that this article eventually has to answer.  "However, there is still the vexing question of where to draw the line.  Most creationists believe the sun was created more or less the way it is today.  What sort of things can we conclude would not be created as we see them?"⁹  His proposed criterion:  "the key issue is whether it would be deceptive for God to create something in its present form."⁹

SN 1987A: the case that broke it

Everything above is argument.  SN 1987A is the measurement, and it is the reason the argument stopped being abstract.  Humphreys built his 1994 objection on it, Faulkner returned to it in 2021 on its thirty-fourth anniversary, Lisle put a picture of it in his 2010 paper with the caption "If the light-in-transit model is correct, then this star never actually existed, and this explosion never really happened,"³ and DeYoung, defending created light, printed the Large Magellanic Cloud in his own paper with the caption "An exploding star observed here, named Supernova 1987A, is a challenge to the mature creation view."⁵

The distance matters, so start there.  The supernova is surrounded by a ring of gas that the star shed before it exploded.  The ring's brightening after the explosion is a light echo:  light from the explosion travelled sideways to the ring, made the ring's gas glow, and that glow then travelled to Earth.  Because the ring is tilted, its near edge reports first and its far edge last.  The near edge of SN 1987A's ring began to brighten 86 ± 11 days after the explosion in the N v λ1240 line, and the emission peaked at 408 ± 54 days.¹⁰  Those two numbers, plugged into t₀ = (R/c)(1 − sin i) and t_max = (R/c)(1 + sin i), give both the ring's physical radius and its tilt.  Dividing the physical size by the measured angular size gives a distance that needs no cosmology and no standard candle:  d = 51.2 ± 3.1 kpc, about 167,000 light years.¹⁰

That is straight geometry, and it is why SN 1987A is the test case.  There is no room to argue the distance down.

What the beam actually carries

Add them up and the demand on the created beam is severe.  It is not "an image of a star."  It is a synchronised, multi-messenger, four-decade record in which neutrinos, optical photons and hard X-rays all agree with one another and with laboratory nuclear physics, describing an event that on this model never occurred, emitted by a star the beam never touched.

Humphreys spelled out what the model has to say, and it is worth reading slowly because it is not a caricature.  He is describing the position he once held:

"According to the 'in-transit' theory, during creation week God would have made, about 6000 light-years away from us along the path between us and the Magellanic clouds, the light-wave images of an exploding star.  He would also have had to have made the high-energy particles (gamma rays and neutrinos), as observed, from the exploded supernova.  At the same instant of creation, further out along the path, He would have made images of an already-exploded star and its expanding shell of debris.

"To be consistent, at the end of the 160,000 light-year path, God would also during creation week have made an actual supernova remnant (a 'dead' neutron star), seemingly 160,000 years old, with a large debris shell around it.

"But according to the 'in-transit' theory, in spite of the images and particles astronomers observed, no actual supernova explosion would have ever happened!"¹

Why this is not the same as Adam's maturity

A defender can say that this is only Faulkner's scar argument at larger scale, and that if maturity is acceptable at all, it is acceptable here.  Look at what separates the two cases.

Adam's adult body is a state.  It is the sort of thing that could be true of a person with any past or none.  It carries no timestamp.  A visitor to Eden inspecting Adam could form no dated belief about him beyond "adult."

The SN 1987A record is not a state.  It is a sequence of dated events with internal cross-checks.  The neutrino burst is the first thirteen seconds.  The rise to maximum takes months.  The ring lights up on a schedule set by a geometry that can be measured independently.  The late glow tracks a decay constant measured on a laboratory bench.  Each of those measurements confirms the others.  A single mature object cannot be pulled apart this way;  a dated, cross-checked history can.

Put the two side by side.  Maturity says "this thing works now."  The 1987A beam says "on 23 February 1987 you are seeing something that happened 167,000 years ago, and here are seven independent measurements that agree about it."  On created light the second statement is false, and it was made deliberately, in detail, and in a form that survives every cross-check a scientist can devise.  It is not that God cannot do that.  It is that if He did, the sky is a composition rather than a report, and no amount of care in observing will ever tell the difference.

The defence, in its defenders' own words

Created light is usually dismissed rather than answered.  That is a mistake, because its best defenders have already made most of the concessions a critic would demand, and one of them stated the decisive objection against himself.

DeYoung's four objections and four rebuttals

Donald DeYoung is a solid-state physicist, longtime president of the Creation Research Society, and the author of the fullest modern defence, published in the Journal of Creation in 2010.  He lists four objections and answers each.⁵  He also says up front what the answers are for:  "The rebuttals are not meant to convince critics of mature creation but to encourage discussion."⁵

Objection 1:  it is an outdated assumption that takes the easy way out and cannot be tested.  DeYoung's answer is partly a tu quoque and partly a real point.  The alternatives are not in better shape:  decaying light speed, curved space and large-scale time dilation "each of these models remains unproven and tentative."⁵  Then he makes the argument that is genuinely his own, and it is the sharpest thing in the paper.  Solar physics says a photon takes between ten thousand and a hundred and seventy thousand years to random-walk from the sun's core to its surface.  On any view, the sun was shining on Day Four.  So:

"Do the solar photons we detect today come from the sun's core, or were they directly created midway from the solar core on their outward journey?"⁵

Every young-earth model has to create something mid-journey, even inside the sun.  Whatever principle rules out created starlight at 167,000 light years has to be checked against created sunlight at half a million kilometres.  This point deserves an answer and rarely gets one.

Objection 2:  where does the built-in age stop?  Fossils?  Radiohalos?  Last Thursday?  DeYoung draws a firm line and stays on the right side of it.  He rejects created fossils outright.  Fossils and strata belong to the Flood, not to creation week, and he cites the RATE project's own work placing radiohalo and fission-track formation in post-creation Earth history.⁵  As for Last Thursdayism, his answer is that biblical revelation "clearly describes 6000 years of detailed human history," so the created world is not free-floating;  it is anchored to a text with dates in it.⁵

Objection 3:  it makes God a deceiver.  Here DeYoung's answer is the regress argument again, worked through examples.  A newly created pebble that is smooth carries an apparent record of tumbling in water;  a rough one carries an apparent record of fracturing.  There is no third option.

"The reader is challenged to describe any detail of the Creation Week, large or small, which would not carry such a historic record."⁵

He then concedes the gap in his own case, which is the most honest sentence in the paper:

"It is readily acknowledged that there is a vast difference between a rounded pebble lying in the Garden of Eden, and the ongoing spectral information streaming to us from distant stars.  Did the Creation event consist of minimal, partial, or total maturity?  That is, was an artificial history of information built into starlight?  Likewise, did trees in the Garden have rings and knots?  We simply do not know."⁵

Objection 4:  it makes astronomy futile.  DeYoung's answer borrows from Vern Poythress, a Westminster theologian who is not a six-day creationist.  Poythress proposes "ideal time," an apparent age built coherently into all of nature.  On that view, studying a stellar spectrum is entirely legitimate whether the spectrum came off a star's surface or was made in flight, because the built-in history is coherent and is God's own composition.  DeYoung summarises:  "Processes which in the mature creation viewpoint did not actually occur, such as a supernova explosion, remain real events in the mind of God."⁵  He then warns his own side against the position that would make astronomy pointless:  "neither geology nor astronomy should be neglected by creationists."⁵

The two admissions that matter most

DeYoung concedes irrefutability in his own voice:

"Cosmologists realize that the mature creation viewpoint cannot be refuted, as the following quotes illustrate.  The spokesmen are not sympathetic to mature creation, yet they grasp the credibility of the option."⁵

He counts this as a strength.  This article counts it as the objection, and the reason is in the next section.

The second admission is a question DeYoung asks of himself, and no critic has put it better:

"Why does a large subset of data interpretation result in an age of 4.6 billion years for the solar system, and three times older for the universe, currently 13.6 billion years?  I strongly emphasize that these ages are not actual.  Yet they roughly converge from several distinct lines of data interpretation.  The reason simply may be confirmation bias … If this is not the case, however, why were these particular ages built into the recent supernatural creation?  Why not 4.6 million or 4.6 trillion years for the earth?"⁵

That is the created-light problem in one paragraph, asked by its defender.  Radiometric dating of meteorites, the main-sequence turn-off ages of globular clusters, white dwarf cooling, the expansion rate and the microwave background all converge on the same two numbers by wholly different physics.  A created history did not have to be consistent.  It could have been a sky full of images that told no coherent story at all.  Instead it tells one story, in great detail, with independent lines agreeing to within a few percent.  DeYoung offers confirmation bias as one possibility and admits he does not know.  His candour here is worth more than his conclusion.

Bergman: the second modern defence

Jerry Bergman published a defence in the Creation Research Society Quarterly the year after DeYoung's, and it is the most confident statement the position has had in decades.¹⁶  His thesis is the regress argument pushed all the way:

"Ex-nihilo creation from nothing always results in all created objects having the appearance of maturity.  This is true for every creation from functional life to a functional universe."¹⁶

He states the sky version without hedging:

"The sun's nuclear fusion furnace began on Day 4, at full power and in thermodynamic equilibrium.  Starlight from distant stars was created in transit, complete with a virtual history of information embedded within the light waves.  Adam and Eve could look at the night sky their first evening on Earth and see cosmic light sources much as we do tonight."¹⁶

Bergman makes DeYoung's solar-photon argument independently, and more sharply:  "For the sun to heat the earth the day it was created the photons must have been created in transit as if millions of years had passed."¹⁶  That is the strongest single sentence in the defence, and it is a real difficulty for anyone drawing Faulkner's line.

Where Bergman overreaches is on supernovae.  He writes that "the mature creation view can effectively explain how distant supernovae can be seen from the earth within a Biblical time framework," and supports it with the Adam analogy:  "Just as many medical tests on a day-old Adam would indicate he was then a 20-year-old man, likewise, the astronomical evidence would indicate a mature universe on the day it was created."¹⁶

The analogy does not carry.  A medical test on Adam returns a state.  SN 1987A returns a dated sequence whose parts cross-check each other.  Bergman does not engage that structure, and neither does any other defence in print.

DeYoung's later statement, and why he holds on

Andrew Repp's 2022 survey of creation astronomy quotes DeYoung's 2011 reply, which explains the motive rather than the mechanism:¹⁷

"I readily admit to not know the correct solution to how we see distant starlight in a young universe.  However, I fear that technical efforts to solve this problem have the potential to diminish the doctrine of supernatural creation."¹⁷

Take this seriously, because it identifies a real risk on the other side.  Faulkner makes the same point from the opposite direction:

"In short, all the processes during the creation week did not conform to how the world now operates, the description of which we call science.  So, isn't it inconsistent to expect the light travel time problem to have a naturalistic (scientific) explanation?  Is this not an assumption of uniformitarianism, something that we creationists frequently call out evolutionist on?"⁸

That objection has teeth, and the honest answer is that it cuts both ways.  Demanding a natural mechanism for a supernatural week may indeed be inconsistent.  But invoking a miracle that also plants false records is a different move from invoking a miracle that does not.  Faulkner's own proposal, a fast-travel miracle on Day Four, is as supernatural as created light and leaves the observed history intact:  "all of the processes that we see playing out, such as SN 1987A, actually happened."⁸  The choice is not between science and miracle.  It is between two miracles, one of which leaves the sky truthful.

Omphalos, Last Thursday, and where the line goes

The theological question underneath all of this is older than young-earth creationism and it has never been settled.  It deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved at.

Gosse got there first, and he got there by name

Philip Henry Gosse was a marine biologist, a fellow of the Royal Society, and the man who invented the household aquarium.  In 1857, two years before On the Origin of Species, he published Omphalos, an attempt to reconcile geology with a recent creation.  His argument is the one every later defender has repeated, stated more rigorously than any of them managed.¹⁸

Gosse's observation is that organic life runs in a circle.  Every adult came from an embryo which came from an egg which came from an adult.  Creation has to break into that circle somewhere, and wherever it breaks in, the created thing will carry evidence of the part of the circle it never traversed.  He gave that unreal past a name:

"Those unreal developments whose apparent results are seen in the organism at the moment of its creation, I will call prochronic, because time was not an element in them;  while those which have subsisted since creation, and which have had actual existence, I will distinguish as diachronic, as occurring during time."¹⁸

And then the sentence that decides the whole question:

"Now, again I repeat, there is no imaginable difference to sense between the prochronic and the diachronic development."¹⁸

Gosse means this as a defence.  It is also the objection, exactly stated, by the man who invented the position.  He then drew the consequence for how anyone could ever know when creation happened:

"The commencement, as a fact, I must learn from testimony;  I have no means whatever of inferring it from phenomena."¹⁸

What is not widely known is that Gosse applied this to distant starlight himself, 122 years before Akridge.  In his final chapter he quotes William Herschel on nebulae whose light "must have been more than nineteen hundred and ten thousand, that is, almost two millions, of years on their way," and a table from the Scottish Congregational Magazine of January 1847 working out light-travel times star by star.¹⁸  His answer:

"Beautiful, and at first sight unanswerable as this argument is, it falls to the ground before the spear-touch of our Ithuriel, the doctrine of prochronism.  There is nothing more improbable in the notion that the sensible undulation was created at the observer's eye, with all the pre-requisite undulations prochronic, than in the notion that blood was created in the capillaries of the first human body."¹⁸

Note that Gosse's version is more extreme than Akridge's.  Gosse puts the created wave at the observer's eye, not 6,000 light years out.  On that version the star need not exist even in image form along most of the path.

Omphalos was a disaster.  Gosse expected it to end the geology controversy;  his son Edmund recorded what happened instead.¹⁹  "But, alas!  atheists and Christians alike looked at it, and laughed, and threw it away."¹⁹

The most quoted response came from Charles Kingsley, a clergyman and a friend, who wrote that he could not "give up the painful and slow conclusion of five and twenty years' study of geology, and believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie."¹⁹  Kingsley was not an unbeliever and not a Darwinist in 1857.  He was a Christian who had spent twenty-five years reading rocks, and what he refused was not the young earth but the idea that his twenty-five years had been spent reading a composition.

The reason Omphalos failed is not that anyone refuted it.  Nobody could.  It failed because both sides recognised that a claim which nothing could count against was not the kind of claim they were arguing about.

Last Thursdayism, and whether the line can be drawn

The reductio is standard and DeYoung states it himself as objection 2:  "The entire cosmos could have been made just last Thursday, including people with artificial, manufactured memories."⁵  Hugh Ross put the same point in 1989:  "Taken to its logical conclusion, the appearance of age theory would imply that we could not establish [that] our past experience actually occurred."⁵

The reductio is not automatically fatal.  A slippery-slope argument fails if there is a principled place to stand on the slope.  So the real question is whether such a place exists.  Four candidate lines have been proposed, and it is worth grading them.

Faulkner's line is the only one of the four that does real work, and it is the one that rules out created starlight.  That is not a coincidence.  He formulated it while looking for a criterion that would keep Adam's maturity and reject SN 1987A's history, and it does exactly that.

There is a further problem with the criterion, though, and honesty requires stating it.  DeYoung's sunlight question is a live counterexample.  Standard solar models have photons taking tens of thousands of years to work outward from the core.  On any young-earth account, the sun shone on Day Four.  So some radiation was created mid-flight, inside the sun, and Faulkner's criterion does not obviously exclude it.  The best answer available is a difference of degree that is large enough to matter:  created sunlight would be photons in a diffusive random walk carrying no dated event record, while created starlight from SN 1987A carries a cross-checked chronology.  That answer is not airtight, and nobody has developed it properly.  It is the strongest open card the defenders hold.

The real objection is not deception. It is that nothing can bear on it

Set aside the character-of-God argument entirely, because a skeptic will not be moved by it and it is not the strongest thing here anyway.

George Ellis is a relativist and cosmologist, co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, and no friend of creationism.  In 1975 he published a paper on what can and cannot be established about the universe by observation, and he used a young-earth created-light universe as his worked example of an unverifiable model:²⁰

"In an exactly analogous way, a modern cosmologist who was also a theologian with strict fundamentalist views could construct a universe model which began 6000 years ago in time and whose edge was at a distance of 6000 light years from the solar system.  A benevolent God could easily arrange the creation of this universe not only so that suitable fossils would be present in the Earth (having been created, together with the rest of the universe, 6000 years ago) to imply a long geological history, but also so that suitable radiation was travelling towards us from the edge of the universe to give the illusion of a vastly older and larger expanding universe.  It would be impossible for any other scientist on the Earth to refute this world picture experimentally or observationally;  all that he could do would be to disagree with the author's cosmological premises."²⁰

DeYoung quotes this passage as support.  Read the next paragraph, which he does not quote, and the support turns into the bill:

"What has been violated here is the expectation that the ordinary laws of everyday physics, carefully and correctly applied, will lead to correct inferences about what exists;  for such application of these laws leads (in these unusual universes) to expectations different from what would actually be there.  To exclude this possibility, we invoke the first of our unverifiable assumptions about the universe:  whenever normal physical laws can be applied, they correctly predict the structure of the universe.  I shall call this the local predictability assumption."²⁰

Ellis is doing something more useful than scoring a point.  He is showing that observational cosmology of any kind rests on an assumption that cannot itself be tested.  Created light is the clean case where that assumption fails.  Ellis's honesty here is a gift to creationists in one respect:  it concedes that the standard model rests on a premise, not a proof.

But it also names the price of denying that premise.  Give up local predictability and you do not get a small, tidy young universe.  You get a universe in which physics correctly applied yields false conclusions about what is out there, and no observation can tell you where the falseness starts or stops.  Every measurement of a distant object becomes uninformative in principle.  That is not a claim about the age of anything.  It is the end of the subject.

Objections and responses

"Nobody can prove created light is false, so it remains an open possibility."  True, and that is precisely the complaint.  A claim that no observation can bear on is not a scientific hypothesis, and treating it as one costs more than it gains.  Gosse said it himself:  "there is no imaginable difference to sense between the prochronic and the diachronic development."¹⁸  DeYoung says it:  "the mature creation viewpoint cannot be refuted."⁵  Ellis, from the other side, says it:  "It would be impossible for any other scientist on the Earth to refute this world picture experimentally or observationally."²⁰  All three agree.  The disagreement is only over whether that is a strength.  It is not, because the same shield protects a universe created last Thursday, a universe created by a different god, and any other unfalsifiable story anyone cares to construct.  A defence that works equally well for every rival is not a defence.

"Adam had a navel.  Created light is the same principle, so rejecting one means rejecting the other."  The parallel is real but incomplete, and Faulkner's distinction is what completes it.  A navel says "this is a grown man" and nothing more.  A scar says "this man was cut, on a particular occasion, by a particular thing."  Created light does not ask for a navel.  It asks for a full medical history of injuries that never occurred, cross-referenced and consistent.

"Demanding a natural explanation for a supernatural creation week is inconsistent.  Creationists reject uniformitarianism everywhere else."  This is Faulkner's own objection against himself and it has force.⁸  The response is that the choice is not between a miracle and no miracle.  Faulkner's own 2013 proposal is a miracle:  God brought the light here on Day Four by an act that has "no physical predictions and hence nothing that we can test."²  The difference is what the miracle leaves behind.  Faulkner's miracle moves real light from real stars, so "all of the processes that we see playing out, such as SN 1987A, actually happened."⁸  Created light manufactures the record instead.  Both are supernatural.  Only one leaves the sky truthful.

"Solar photons take tens of thousands of years to escape the sun's core, so on any young-earth view some light was created in flight.  The criterion you are using would rule out sunlight too."  This is DeYoung's best argument and it does not have a clean answer.⁵  The distinction available is that a photon random-walking out of the sun's interior carries no dated event record;  it is thermalised, and by the time it leaves the photosphere it retains nothing about where it started.  Created sunlight would therefore be created maturity, not created history.  Created starlight from SN 1987A is created history, with dates and cross-checks.  That distinction is defensible but it has not been worked out carefully in print by anyone on either side, and a skeptic is entitled to press it.

"The alternatives are not doing any better, so why single this one out?"  Largely fair.  Of the eight published young-earth answers to distant starlight, three are dead, one was refuted statistically by a creationist, one was abandoned by its author, one was retracted by its author, and the two that remain reproduce standard observational cosmology exactly by construction.  All eight are graded in Young-Universe Cosmologies.  The honest summary is that the distant starlight problem is unsolved.  But "unsolved" and "solved by making the evidence meaningless" are different states, and the second is worse than the first.  Faulkner, Humphreys, Lisle and Taylor all judged it worse, and each of them is a young-earth creationist who would have preferred the easy answer.

"Calling it deception is an emotional argument about God's character, not a scientific one."  Correct, and that is why this article does not rest on it.  The scientific objection is Ellis's:  created light denies local predictability, and once local predictability is gone, no observation of anything beyond a few thousand light years means anything.  The theological objection happens to point the same direction, and it happens to be the one that persuaded the young-earth astronomers, but the argument stands without it.

"Genesis 1:15 says the lights were made to give light on the earth, and 'it was so.'  That settles it."  It settles less than it appears to, and Lisle turns the verse the other way.  If the beam was created 6,000 light years out, the star is not giving light on the earth;  something else is.  "In fact, it could not rightly be called 'starlight' at all but rather 'Godlight.'"³  On the created-light reading, Genesis 1:17 is satisfied by a photon stream the star never emitted, which is a strange way to fulfil a purpose assigned to the star.

"Every young-earth cosmology posits created initial conditions.  Created light is no different in kind."  Partly true, and worth conceding.  Lisle's anisotropic synchrony model also has to attribute observed differences between near and distant galaxies to how they were made:²¹  "Perhaps God created galaxies with systematic differences depending on their distance from our local group.  Not every sequence is a time-sequence."²¹  That is a created initial condition, and a skeptic is right to notice the family resemblance.  The difference is one of degree, and it is a large degree.  A created initial condition sets the state of real objects that then behave lawfully.  Created light sets the content of the signal and dispenses with the objects.  On Lisle's model SN 1987A really exploded.  On created light it did not.

Verdict

Created light in transit is not refutable, and that is the objection.

It is internally consistent and contradicts no measurement.  It is compatible with every observation ever made or that ever could be made, which is exactly the problem.  A model that forbids nothing tells you nothing.  Adopting it does not shrink the universe or shorten the distances;  it leaves both untouched and reclassifies everything beyond about 6,000 light years as composed rather than observed.

The strongest case for it is the maturity argument, and that argument is genuinely strong as far as it goes.  Genesis describes a world that worked on the day it was made, and any real act of creation produces objects that carry apparent histories.  That much is not in dispute here.  What the position needs, and does not have, is a reason to extend maturity from states to dated records.  Faulkner's scar test marks the boundary, and SN 1987A sits far on the wrong side of it:  a neutrino burst, a light curve, a geometrically timed ring echo and titanium-44 lines at laboratory energies, all agreeing about an explosion that on this model never happened.

Its one technical argument, Akridge 1979, is wrong on physics, and the person who showed that published it in the Creation Research Society Quarterly.  Its best modern defender concedes that it cannot be refuted, does not know whether starlight carries built-in history, and cannot say why the built-in ages converge on 4.6 and 13.8 billion years rather than any other numbers.

The people who abandoned it were not skeptics.  They were the young-earth astronomers and physicists who most wanted it to work:  Humphreys in 1994, Taylor in 2005, Lisle in 2010, Faulkner in 2013 and 2021, Lorentz in 2019.  Every one of them went looking for something else, and none of them has found a solution that survives scrutiny either.  The distant starlight problem is still open.  That is an honest place to stand.  Closing it by declaring the evidence fictional is not.

Sources