Faulkner's Miracle

Summary

• Danny Faulkner's answer to distant starlight is a miracle, and he says so on the first page. His 2013 paper in the Answers Research Journal proposes that on Day Four God brought the light of the stars to Earth "at an abnormally accelerated rate," on the pattern of the rapid growth of plants on Day Three.¹¹ The abstract calls it "an appeal to a miraculous event rather than a physical process."¹ He reached it by elimination, after "more than 30 years looking for a solution" and a survey of seven earlier families of answer.¹¹
• It has one real advantage over light created in transit, and it is the advantage Faulkner cares about. On his view the light actually left the stars, so the supernova really exploded. On created light it did not.² See light created in transit for why he rejected that alternative.
• He states the cost himself, more plainly than any critic has. "Since my modest proposal appeals to a miracle, there may be no physical predictions and hence nothing that we can test."¹ On when we start seeing light that arrived the normal way: "I have no clue."¹
• A miracle is not an illegitimate belief. It is an unusable argument. Someone who already holds that God made matter out of nothing has no principled reason to refuse a second miracle two days later. The problem is downstream: a proposal that fits every possible observation forbids none, so no measurement can support it and none can count against it. This project reaches the same verdict about created light in transit, from the opposite side.
• It was refuted in print in 2014, by a fellow young-earth physicist, and almost nobody cites the exchange. John Hartnett showed the proposal is caught in a fork. Suspend the physics and there is nothing to test. Keep the physics and there are consequences: stretch the intervening space and light arrives with a huge redshift, compress it and light arrives with a huge blueshift, stop the process on Day Four and the problem returns for everything emitted afterwards. "You can't have your cake and eat it too."³³
• Faulkner's published reply conceded almost all of it. "I freely admit that my proposal is an unscientific one."⁴⁴ He called it "the barest outline of a solution," said the unresolved transition problem was "not satisfying" even to him, and withdrew the connection to the stretching language: "rapidly transporting light and stretching of space would appear to be two different things."⁴⁴⁴
• Jason Lisle reached the same conclusion independently in 2020. Comparing one miracle to another explains neither, and "God did it fast somehow" restates the problem rather than solving it.⁵⁶ He re-derived the redshift objection and asked for the general-relativistic calculation to be done.⁶ Thirteen years after the proposal, nobody has done it.
• The 2021 restatement makes a much larger claim than his own record supports, calling dāšā' "the only answer for the light travel time problem that is consistent with the miracle of creation and the character of God."² By January 2026 the confidence is gone. Faulkner still holds the proposal but gives it 180 words ending in a question, and writes of all five solutions including his own: "Is there evidence for any of these solutions to the distant starlight problem for recent creation? Probably not."⁷⁷
• The Hebrew argument is weaker than the paper's framing suggests, and Faulkner says so. dāšā' occurs exactly twice in the Hebrew Bible. The "stretching out the heavens" verbs nāṭāh and māṯaḥ never occur in Genesis 1 at all, and māṯaḥ is a hapax legomenon confined to Isaiah 40:22 alongside a second hapax, dōq. His own verdict: the language "is likely not specific enough to enlist as certain evidence for the defense of my view."¹ He is right about one point that costs his own side something: "stretching out the heavens" does not describe cosmic expansion.¹
• The decisive test is not whether the light got here. It is what the light shows. A miracle that delivers the beam does nothing about the age of the object it came from. Faulkner's own 2017 paper is the proof. He tabulates seventeen supernova remnants inside our own galaxy with age estimates over 7,000 years, "five of the SNR ages are at least a million years; the greatest is 4.5 million years," and concludes: "It would be difficult to reduce any of these age estimates so that they to be compatible with Davies' criterion of 7000 years."⁸⁸ Those objects are a few thousand light years away. No light-travel argument of any kind touches them. He published that himself, against a young-earth argument he had used, which is to his great credit.
• A second unsolved problem is the light emitted after Day Four. Hartnett called it "the lights would all go out."⁹ Faulkner confines the miracle to Day Four, yet also says we see the universe "in something close to real time."⁴¹ Those cannot both hold for SN 1987A, 168,000 light years away and seen in 1987. He has not said which he means.
• Verdict: not refuted, and not refutable. The proposal is internally consistent, theologically respectable, and empty of scientific content. It should be presented as what its author says it is.
• This is the last of the nine model articles, so here is the pattern. Of the eight published answers to distant starlight, three were retired inside the movement, two were withdrawn by their own authors, and the survivors reproduce standard cosmology by construction and by their authors' own statements. The one still standing without qualification is an appeal to miracle, offered by the field's most careful practitioner, who does not claim it is science. See the parent survey for the full ledger.

Who Faulkner is, and why the proposal deserves a careful reading

Danny R. Faulkner took his PhD in astronomy at Indiana University in 1989 and taught astronomy and physics at the University of South Carolina Lancaster for over twenty-six years, chairing its science division from 2009 to 2012.  He joined Answers in Genesis in 2013 and his listed tenure there runs to 2025.¹⁰  He sits on the board of the Creation Research Society.  His research field is eclipsing binary stars, pairs orbiting so close that a telescope sees one point of light;  the brightness dips as one crosses in front of the other, and the shape of the dip gives the sizes, masses and orbits of two stars nobody can resolve.  He says he has "more than four decades of experience" observing them.²²

Three things in his record matter here.

He told his own side to stop shrinking the universe:  "In each case, they produce distances that are millions and even billions of light-years.  While all of these methods suffer from error, those errors would not reduce the distances down to just thousands of light-years."¹¹¹¹  And:  "Many recent creationists worry about the light travel time problem and entertain possibilities of the universe being far smaller than generally thought as a way out of this dilemma.  But thinking this stumbles over something that ought to be obvious."¹¹  The cosmic distance ladder article works through why he is right.

He rejected light created in transit as deceptive, using his own observing specialty as the argument:  "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," and so "much of the universe could be an illusion."²²

And he published a paper retiring a popular young-earth argument because the data went against it.  That is the 2017 supernova remnant survey, and it turns out to be the most important document in this article.

The problem, restated the way Faulkner restated it

Almost every popular statement of the light travel time problem uses quasars.  Faulkner argued in 2013 that this framing is wrong, and the correction is the most useful thing in the paper.

The stars were made on Day Four.  Adam was made on Day Six.  The nearest star after the sun is 4.3 light years away.  So on ordinary physics Adam's night sky would have been empty except for the moon, and would have filled in slowly over the following decades.

"But while it is possible for us to see most of the naked eye stars and today, some millennia after the Creation Week, it would not have been possible for Adam to have seen any stars (other than the sun) for at least four years after his creation.  The stars were made on Day Four, and Adam was made on Day Six.  The nearest star after the sun is 4.3 lt-yr away, so Adam could not have seen even the closest star for more than four years, and then stars would have slowly winked in over the succeeding years."¹

He adds a purpose argument.  Genesis 1:14 assigns the lights a job:  to mark signs, seasons, days and years.  Seasons are reckoned by where the sun sits against the background stars, so without those stars the job cannot be done.

The reformulation costs the young-earth position something and gains it something.  It costs, because a solution now has to move light 4.3 light years in under two days, a factor of about 800 even for the nearest star.  It gains, because it kills a bad answer:  shrinking the universe by a factor of a thousand would still leave Alpha Centauri four light years away.  "For this solution to work, even the well determined trigonometric parallax method must be abandoned, but this is not physically supported."¹  The reformulation is correct and this article accepts it.

What Faulkner proposed

The paper first lists seven families of earlier answer "in the roughly chronological order in which they have been proposed":  question the distances;  light created in transit;  non-Euclidean light paths;  a decrease in the speed of light;  the biosphere model;  general-relativistic cosmologies;  and time conventions.¹  Each has its own article in this series, linked from the parent survey.

Then comes his reason for an eighth:  "If there were one solution that worked, there would not be so many solutions, and there would not be such sharp disagreement."¹  That is fair, and worth pausing on.  A field with eight competing answers to one question is a field that has not answered it.  Faulkner is one of the few people in that field who says so out loud.

The proposal itself runs to two sentences.

"As a part of God's formative work, light from the astronomical bodies was miraculously made to 'shoot' its way to the earth at an abnormally accelerated rate in order to fulfill their function of serving to indicate signs, seasons, days, and years.  I emphasize that my proposal differs from cdk in that no physical mechanism is invoked, it is likely space itself that has rapidly moved, and that the speed of light since Creation Week has been what is today."¹

Four claims are packed into that, and they need separating.

The light really left the stars.  This is the point of the proposal and what distinguishes it from created light in transit.  SN 1987A really exploded and the light that arrived in 1987 records a real event.  Faulkner's 2021 phrasing:  "all of the processes that we see playing out, such as SN 1987A, actually happened.  With the mature creation solution, none of these distant events occurred."²

The speed of light has not changed.  That separates it from Setterfield's c decay, which "follows a mathematically described decay" and "relies upon physical mechanisms whereas this new proposal relies upon God's miraculous intervention."¹  See the decaying speed of light.

Space did the moving, not the light.  "Rather than light moving very quickly, I suggest that it was space itself that did the moving, carrying light along with it."¹  This is the only quasi-physical content in the paper, and Faulkner later withdrew it.

No mechanism is required.  "However, I wish to emphasize that I do not require a physical mechanism for this proposal."¹  That sentence is the proposal's centre of gravity.  The rest is illustration.

Why he called it dāšā'

The name comes from Day Three, not Day Four.

Genesis 1:11 has God say "Let the earth bring forth grass."  The verb is dāšā' in the hiphil, a causative form:  let the earth cause to sprout.  By Days Five and Six the plants have to be bearing edible fruit, because Genesis 1:29-30 gives them to animals and people as food.  Fruit trees do not do that in a day.  So Day Three, on a plain reading, describes growth at a rate no plant achieves now.  Faulkner's picture of it is the most memorable line in the paper:  "It is very easy to imagine this very rapid Day Three sprouting and growing to maturity of plants as resembling a time-lapse movie of plant growth today."¹

His argument is a parallel.  Plants on Day Three could not do their assigned job unless they matured abnormally fast, and they did.  Stars on Day Four could not do their assigned job unless their light arrived abnormally fast.  In 2021 he offered a second name that says the same thing:  "An alternate name for this solution is matured creation, emphasizing that God did not instantly create things mature during the creation week but rapidly matured them upon creating them."²

That name is better and it makes the position clearer.  Faulkner is not claiming the world was made looking old.  He is claiming it was made young and aged fast, under direct divine action, within the week.  The difference is real.

Two honest observations about the naming, neither fatal.

The verb does not carry the idea, and Faulkner says so:  "Lexically speaking, dš' does not indicate anything about how the earth brought forth plants;  however, contextual clues indicate that the use of dš' in Genesis 1:11 involves a rapid-growth process."¹  The speed comes from the six-day framework, not from the word.

And the verb is rare.  dāšā' occurs exactly twice in the Hebrew Bible:  the hiphil at Genesis 1:11 and a qal perfect at Joel 2:22, where the wilderness pastures "are green."  That count is from a word-by-word search of the morphologically tagged Westminster Leningrad Codex, and it matches Brown-Driver-Briggs, which lists those two verses and nothing else.¹²¹³  A verb with two attestations cannot settle much on its own, which is presumably why Faulkner rests the argument on context instead.

Faulkner noted in 2026 that Genesis uses "two Hebrew verbs" for the Day Three growth.⁷  He is right.  Verse 12 reports the result with a different verb, yāṣā' in the hiphil, "and the earth brought forth."¹²  That one is no help to the argument either:  yāṣā' occurs 1,076 times in the Hebrew Bible and is the ordinary word for going out or bringing out.  Neither verb says anything about how quickly.

The theological argument, and why it is a real argument

The obvious reaction is that invoking a miracle is cheating.  Faulkner anticipated that reaction and answered it, and his answer is better than the reaction.

"I anticipate that this appeal to a miraculous solution likely will be the greatest criticism of this proposal.  As creationists, we ought not to be so resistant to believing in miracles.  We might as well enquire as to the physical aspects of the virgin birth or resurrection of Jesus.  Both of these events are objective reality, but both were miraculous."¹

He sharpened it in 2021 into a charge against his own colleagues:  "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?"²

The argument is sound and should be stated at full strength.  Someone who holds six-day creation already holds that matter appeared where there was none, that light existed on Day One before the sun, and that a man was formed from dust.  None of those is a physical process.  If a person accepts several suspensions of ordinary physics inside one week, a further one on Day Four is not a new kind of claim.  Demanding that Day Four alone yield to physics is arbitrary, and nobody in the young-earth literature has explained why it should be the exception.

Two supporting points of his are also correct and are usually got wrong.  Genesis does not describe the creation week as uniformly ex nihilo:  "God formed man from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7) and woman from his side (Genesis 2:21-22).  Neither creation was ex nihilo."²  The verb used of the lights in Genesis 1:16 is ʽāśāh, "make," regularly used of fashioning something from material already there;  Faulkner works through the lexical case and credits Lee Anderson for the Hebrew.¹¹  Nor does Genesis describe the week as instantaneous:  "The process of the creation of man, plants, land animals, and flying things from the ground required at least a little time."²

Three things follow that Faulkner does not draw out.

First, the miracle is postulated, not reported.  The resurrection analogy works only if the two cases are alike, and here they are not.  Genesis 1:14-19 says God made two great lights and the stars and set them in the expanse.  It does not say he accelerated their light, moved space, or shortened the journey.  The Day Four miracle is inferred from the fact that a six-day reading requires something.  Lisle put his finger on it:  the proposal appeals "to a past miraculous action which is not specifically recorded in Scripture."⁶  A Christian may still believe it, since Scripture does not report everything God did.  But an unreported miracle inferred to close a gap is not the same kind of claim as a reported miracle with named witnesses, and the analogy quietly borrows the credibility of the second for the first.

Second, the uniformitarian charge cuts Faulkner's own work.  Every result he has published assumes present physics held in the past.  His eclipsing binary orbits assume Newtonian gravity.  His supernova remnant ages assume the Sedov expansion law.  His rejection of c decay is an explicit appeal to unchanged physics:  "If the speed of light were changed even a small amount, it would greatly change the structure of matter.  There is no evidence that this has ever happened."²  So he does not reject uniform physics.  He suspends it for one event and keeps it everywhere else, which is coherent only with a rule saying where the boundary falls.  He says he does not have one.

Third, and decisively, a miracle that explains everything explains nothing in particular.  Suppose the sky were empty beyond the solar system, or every galaxy sat within 3,000 light years, or distant objects showed no redshift.  Faulkner's proposal accommodates each of those exactly as well as it accommodates the sky we have, because "God did it miraculously" is compatible with any outcome.  A claim that no possible observation could count against is also a claim that no observation supports.

The proposal's own account of its cost

The paper does not hide any of this.

"Admittedly, I have left much unsaid.  Since my modest proposal appeals to a miracle, there may be no physical predictions and hence nothing that we can test.  Still, even a miracle can leave some observable evidence."¹

"But what of the details of the transition between the miraculous transmission of light over great distances to the relatively slow pace today, all accomplished on Day Four? … Alas, I do not know."¹

Compare that with how the rest of the literature behaves.  Setterfield's c decay came with a decay curve fitted to 163 measurements.  Humphreys' white hole came with a metric.  Hartnett's Carmelian model came with five dimensions of tensor algebra.  All three are now retired, two by their own authors.  Faulkner's proposal came with a list of things its author could not answer, and it is the one still standing.  The lesson is not flattering to the field:  the proposals with the most machinery were the ones that could be checked, and checking them killed them.

The exchange nobody cites: Hartnett and Faulkner in 2014

The proposal has been criticised in print exactly twice, both times by the same man, both times in 2014, and the exchange is almost never mentioned.  It is the most important document in the proposal's reception and it deserves a section of its own.

John Hartnett, then a physicist at the University of Western Australia and the author of his own creation cosmology, published "Critique:  Faulkner's Miraculous Translation of Light Model Would Leave Evidence" in the Answers Research Journal on 19 November 2014.³  Faulkner's reply ran in the same issue, immediately after it.⁴

Hartnett's four objections

It was not new.  Hartnett had considered the same idea in his 2007 book and rejected it there.  He reprints his own paragraph:

"There is a way around this issue, a really complex and ad hoc miracle that would enable the creation of a beam of light from source to observer so that the observer appears to see current information. … This hypothesis is untestable and, though not impossible, seems implausible, to put it mildly.  Miracles in the Bible are rare and special events, the purpose of which is clearly understood and/or revealed.  This does not fit that category;  it looks more like a convenient set of miracles invented ad hoc to overcome a difficulty."³

That is a theological objection and it is the sharpest anyone has made.  Biblical miracles come with a stated purpose and a stated occasion.  This one is inferred backwards from a problem.

The dilemma.  Either the physics was suspended along with everything else, in which case there is nothing to check;  or it was not, in which case the physics has consequences that are not observed.

"If you say that while God did this He also suspended all the other laws of physics necessary to translate the light (the photons), from the source to the receiver, but only when it arrives in the solar system those laws again all apply, then the proposal is untestable.  (There is nothing else to do.)  If you say that while God did this all other laws still apply then if He did it by accelerating the speed of the light we should see massive blueshifts for all sources, but we don't."³

The wavelength argument, run in both directions.  Lisle would restate this six years later.  Hartnett got there first and did it more completely.

"If however the mechanism was related to the stretching of the fabric of space, which Faulkner does suggest (2013, p. 283), then the sign of the time dilation is wrong. … that expansion acting on photons, travelling in spacetime, must mean a decrease in the photon energy, i.e. an increase of wavelengths, hence a massive redshift.  We see a redshift but it is very small, of order unity or less for most of the universe."³

"If you were to propose the reverse and compress the space between the emitter and the receiver to get say a 14 billion to 1 compression factor (so light from the edge reaches us in one year) that also means the photon energies are increased by this factor, and we should see today enormous blueshifts.  You can't have your cake and eat it too.  You can't say this process stopped at the end of Day 4, and light now travels at normal rates, otherwise you still have a light-traveltime problem."³

That passage closes every door at once.  Stretch the space and you get a huge redshift.  Compress it and you get a huge blueshift.  Stop the process at the end of Day Four and the light travel time problem comes straight back for everything emitted afterwards.

And the verdict.

"I am sorry to say that Faulkner's proposal here is not new and it does not have any substance at present.  Currently, therefore, it fails in what it sets out to do.  Unless these objections are answered it is not a solution to the problem."³

"If you contain the substance of the model to the totally miraculous, in the sense that you postulate that none of the obvious observations are possible due to God suspending all relevant laws so that these known aspects of physics do not apply in this instance, it is an ad hoc proposal which can never be refuted."³

Hartnett's own standard, stated at the end, is worth recording because it is a creationist stating a scientific commitment rather than defending a conclusion:  "I expect a creationist solution to include the fact that everything we see in the universe obeys the current testable laws of physics, which are the creation of God."³

Faulkner's reply, which concedes almost everything

The reply is the single best source on what Faulkner thinks his proposal is.

He opens by saying nobody had engaged with it at all:  "I had expected that its publication would have generated discussion, but until now it has not.  This lack of discussion has been disappointing to me, so I am delighted that my friend, John Hartnett, has responded with some objections."⁴

He concedes the scope:  "let me acknowledge that what I have proposed is the barest outline of a solution to the light travel time problem."  A reviewer had made him change the title from A New Solution to A Proposal for a New Solution for that reason, and he agreed.  "Even after nearly a year and a half, I regret that I have not advanced my proposal as far as I had hoped that I would have."⁴

He pins down the timing, which matters for everything that follows:  "I propose that the behavior of light has been the same since the Creation Week, and probably since Day Four.  That is, I confine the miracle to Day Four."⁴

He backs away from the stretching mechanism.  This is six years before Lisle's critique and it is not usually noticed:

"For instance, numerous Old Testament statements of God stretching the heavens appear to be in the past tense.  As I've previously noted, these could be a descriptions of what I propose happened on Day Four.  However, rapidly transporting light and stretching of space would appear to be two different things, so I wish to be tentative on that connection for now."⁴

That is a withdrawal rather than a rebuttal.  Once "stretching of space" is disconnected from "rapidly transporting light," the redshift calculation has nothing to bite on.  It also cuts the proposal loose from the Hebrew argument that gave it its shape, which is a real cost given how much of the 2013 paper is spent on nāṭāh and māṯaḥ.

He states the transition problem himself, in more detail than anyone else has:

"There remains a perplexing question for my proposal that I have not yet mentioned. … For nearby stars, we long ago transitioned from rapidly transported light to light merely moving at the speed of light.  This would be true for anything within approximately 6000 light years.  However, light from objects more distant than 6000 light years still must have been transported very rapidly for at least part of their journey to us.  Would the transition from one mode to the other leave some physical evidence?  It would be easy to suggest that the answer to that question is no, but that raises the question of why.  Even to me, the suggestion that that is just part of the miracle is not satisfying."⁴

And then the sentence that settles what kind of claim this is.

"I freely admit that my proposal is an unscientific one, but to argue otherwise would amount to the suggestion that we could develop a scientific theory of creation."⁴

That is the author of the proposal, in a peer-reviewed young-earth journal, in 2014.  It should be quoted every time the dāšā' solution is presented, and it almost never is.

The reply ends "I look forward to further discussion of this important topic," and mentions "refining my proposal."⁴  No refinement has been published in the twelve years since.

Lisle's critique in 2020, and what it adds

Six years after Hartnett, Jason Lisle went over the same ground on his own site.⁵  He does not cite Hartnett and may not have known of the exchange, so the overlap is independent.  He concedes at the outset that a Day Four miracle is possible:  "Since this act allegedly happened during the creation week when God was doing all sorts of miraculous acts which He is not doing today … we must concede that such an act is possible."⁶

Two of his three points are new, and both are good.

Comparing two miracles explains neither.  This is the best paragraph anyone has written about the proposal, and it lands because Lisle chose an analogy from inside the faith.

"There may indeed be validity to the comparison of God 'shooting' the light from stars to earth with God 'sprouting' the plants on day 3.  But comparing one miracle with another doesn't really explain either.  Suppose I said, 'I have a model to explain how Jesus rose from the dead.'  As you eagerly await my explanation with due skepticism, I then say, 'He did it the same way He raised Lazarus from the dead.'  My answer may well be true, but have I really explained either miracle?"⁶

The Day Three parallel is the load-bearing part of Faulkner's argument.  Lisle's point is that it carries no weight:  saying two events belong to the same category tells you nothing about either one.

A model needs a mechanism, and this one has none.  "Faulkner's Dasha proposal, without giving a specific mechanism (even a miraculous one), seems to be equivalent to saying 'God did it fast somehow.'  While no biblical creationist would disagree, the proposal 'God did it fast somehow' is not a model or a solution, but merely a restatement of the perceived problem."⁶  He grounds this in a theological argument of his own.  Isaac Newton believed God moved the planets, and that belief did not stop him working out how.  "Newton wasn't satisfied to simply say, 'God makes the planets move somehow.'"⁶  Divine agency and physical description are not competitors.

And the wavelength argument, arrived at again.  Lisle grants that moving or stretching space "is an interesting and legitimate idea," notes that general relativity already describes what happens when space moves "even if the cause of that motion is miraculous rather than natural," and runs the check in an endnote:  stretching space stretches the wavelengths it carries, the factor needed to bring light from distant stars to Earth within two days "would have to be a factor in excess of a trillion," and "such an extreme redshift is not observed."⁶⁶

The arithmetic is easy and worth doing.  Light from an object thirteen billion light years away arriving inside two days needs a factor of about 2.4 × 10¹².  On the other side, the most redshifted light anyone detects is the cosmic microwave background, stretched by roughly a thousand, and the most redshifted galaxy confirmed by spectroscopy is MoM-z14 at z = 14.44, a stretch of about fifteen.¹⁴¹⁴  Taken as a claim about the metric, the proposal needs a shift nine orders of magnitude beyond anything measured.  Faulkner's 2013 answer to the question was "Were properties of the light, such as wavelength and frequency, altered during this process?  I would suppose not."¹  That is the weakest sentence in the paper.  In general relativity a wavelength shift is not something a modeller gets to suppose;  it follows from the metric.

Two things in fairness.  The only reply available is the one Faulkner had already given in 2014:  detach the transport from the stretching and no wavelength calculation applies.⁴  What that costs is the entire physical content of the proposal, and Hartnett had already named the move:  confine the model to the totally miraculous and "it is an ad hoc proposal which can never be refuted."³  And Lisle's objection was an invitation, not a refutation:  "However, the premise is interesting, and perhaps a model will be developed in time."⁶  He asked for the general-relativistic calculation.  Hartnett had asked six years earlier.  As of August 2026 nobody has done it.

Faulkner's 2021 restatement, and what changed in it

Faulkner returned to the topic on 23 February 2021, the thirty-fourth anniversary of SN 1987A, in a general-audience article surveying every solution the movement has tried.²  It is the best short history of the field by anyone, and it is where he reports that Humphreys abandoned the white hole model and that most of that model's supporters never noticed.²

Three things changed.

The mechanism is gone.  The 2013 paper said "it is likely space itself that has rapidly moved."  The 2021 article says the opposite:

"Note that I am not suggesting this was done through the physics of general relativity or by altering physics so that the speed of light changed.  Rather, I'm suggesting that God miraculously brought the light to earth from the farthest reaches of the universe right after he filled the universe with astronomical bodies."²

That completes a retreat that began with the 2014 reply to Hartnett.  It is not an answer to the wavelength objection.  It is a withdrawal from the ground where the objection applies.  After 2021 there is no metric to calculate with, so there is nothing left for a physicist to check.

The claim got stronger.  The 2013 paper called it a "modest proposal" and asked others to help develop it.  The 2021 article ends:

"The other solutions to the light travel time problem rely upon physics, the way that the universe now operates.  We recognize the role of the miraculous in so much of the rest of the creation week, so why must we restrict ourselves to a natural, physical mechanism to solve the light travel time problem?  The dasha solution is the only answer for the light travel time problem that is consistent with the miracle of creation and the character of God."²

That is a much larger claim than the 2013 paper made, and it is made without new evidence.  Seven years earlier the same author had called his proposal "the barest outline of a solution" and "an unscientific one."  Nothing was established in between.  Nor does the 2021 article mention Hartnett's published critique, which had appeared in the same journal, or Lisle's, which had appeared four months earlier.  This is the one place in Faulkner's writing on the subject where the rhetoric outruns the argument, and it should be said plainly.

A better name appeared.  "Matured creation," as against mature creation.²  On mature creation the universe was made looking old.  On matured creation it was made young and aged fast under direct divine action.  That is the clearest statement of what Faulkner actually holds.

Where Faulkner stands now

Faulkner has not abandoned the proposal.  He restated it on 5 January 2026, in an Answers in Depth article surveying five solutions.⁷  But the confidence is gone, and the change between 2021 and 2026 is the clearest signal available about what he now thinks.

The whole dāšā' section of the 2026 article is about 180 words.  It cites nothing, answers no objection, does not mention Hartnett or Lisle, and does not cite his own 2013 paper.  It ends in a question rather than a claim:

"In similar manner, could God have created the stars on day four and then miraculously brought the light to earth the same day so that the stars were visible from earth?  I chose the word dasha for this solution to the light-travel time problem because that is one of the two Hebrew verbs used to describe how God miraculously grew and matured the plants on day three."⁷

Then, in the next section:

"Is there evidence for any of these solutions to the distant starlight problem for recent creation?  Probably not."⁷

And the conclusion:

"Which solution, if any, is correct?  We don't know. … I spent decades fretting over the distant starlight problem until I settled upon the dasha solution.  Along the way, I came to realize that the distant starlight problem is of no large consequence.  Compared to the creation of this incredibly large universe that God created, the distant starlight problem is rather trivial.  For a God big enough to create the universe, getting the light to earth by day four of creation week is small potatoes."⁷

Set the four datable statements side by side.

The 2021 line is the outlier.  On either side of it Faulkner says his proposal is not science and that there is no evidence for it.  Anyone quoting the 2021 sentence without the other three is quoting the one statement its author's own record does not support.

Three other things in the 2026 article are worth having.  Its section on the anisotropic synchrony convention is about four times as long as its section on Faulkner's own proposal, and it is expository and protective of Lisle rather than competitive.  It records two abandonments plainly:  "Many recent creationists like the white hole cosmology, not realizing that Humphreys abandoned that model years ago in favor of second and now a third relativistic model. … Similarly, John Hartnett offered a solution that was a variation of Einstein's theory of general relativity, though Hartnett has since abandoned that model."⁷  And his objection to created light in transit is unchanged:  "If God merely made the light in transit with detailed light curves showing these eclipses, then we are seeing evidence of processes that never happened.  That seems deceptive and not in line in what we know about God."⁷

His output elsewhere has moved on.  In Answers Research Journal volumes 15 through 19, covering 2022 to 2026, he published on the philosophy of science, thermodynamics and the Earth's rotation, and nothing on starlight or cosmology.  His two 2025 relativity primers do not mention the anisotropic synchrony convention, the light travel time problem, or any of the men who have written about it.¹⁵

How the literature received it

The proposal is thirteen years old and it has been engaged with barely at all.  That is a research finding rather than an impression, so the method is set out in a footnote:  full-text searches of the Creation Research Society Quarterly index, Lisle's site through its WordPress API, Hartnett's blog and Answers in Genesis' site search;  title-and-abstract sweeps of every Answers Research Journal volume from 14 to 19;  and the six ARJ cosmology papers of 2022 to 2025 read in full.¹⁶

What those searches found:

• Two substantive published critiques, both by Hartnett, both in 2014. The journal critique and Faulkner's reply, covered above.
• One further statement of the objection, on Hartnett's blog on 22 November 2014, which is the sharpest formulation anywhere and is treated in the next section.
• Jason Lisle's 2020 article. "Dasha" appears in exactly one post across his entire site. He has not returned to it.
• One fair survey treatment, by Hannah Klein on the New Creation Blog in 2022, which gets the model right and makes the same central criticism: "this is entirely an appeal to a miracle. There isn't any scientific description of what this rapid acceleration of light may have looked at, or what physical evidence we might find in the cosmos of this event having occurred."¹⁷¹⁷ Her verdict on the field as a whole is worth having: "All the varied and diverse models that have been proposed to answer the light travel time problem highlight the lack of a cohesive model of creation astronomy."¹⁷
• Two passing citations in the CRSQ, one of them wrong. A 2026 paper cites the proposal to "Faulkner (2017)," which is his dark matter paper, and describes it as light created in transit under "the theological principle of mature creation," which is the position Faulkner built it to avoid.¹⁸¹⁸

And what they did not find.  Andrew Repp's 2022 survey of fifty-seven years of creation astronomy in the CRSQ lists four proposals for the light travel time problem and dāšā' is not among them;  a full-text search of that article for "dasha" returns nothing.¹⁹  Not one of the six ARJ cosmology papers published between 2022 and 2025 cites Faulkner 2013;  "Faulkner" appears in them twice, both times in acknowledgements.

Two limits belong with those findings.  No engagement was found at creation.com, but that check saw titles and snippets only, and Creation Ministries International publishes Hartnett, so a full-text pass there could still turn something up.  The 2018 International Conference on Creationism proceedings could not be re-reached and were not searched.

The picture is of a proposal that its own author now calls untestable, that was refuted once in 2014 by a colleague, and that the field has largely stopped discussing.  Faulkner said in 2014 that the silence disappointed him.  It has continued.

The Hebrew: what "stretching out the heavens" does and does not say

Faulkner grounds the physical side of the proposal in a phrase that runs through the Old Testament poetry.  He writes:

"This understanding is consistent with the concept of the stretching (nṭh) or the spreading out (mtḥ) of the heavens found in the Old Testament (for example, Job 9:8;  Psalm 104:2;  Isaiah 40:22;  42:5;  44:24;  45:12;  51:13)."¹

This section takes that seriously and checks it, because the whole difference between Faulkner's proposal and a bare assertion runs through this phrase.  Everything below was checked against the morphologically tagged Westminster Leningrad Codex and Brown-Driver-Briggs, with the Septuagint as an independent ancient witness to how the phrase was read.¹²¹³²⁰

The verbs, counted

nāṭāh (נטה) occurs 216 times in the Hebrew Bible.  Brown-Driver-Briggs glosses it "stretch out, spread out, extend, incline, bend," and its Qal senses are stretching out a hand or a rod, stretching a measuring line, pitching a tent, and bending or turning something aside.¹³  Gesenius groups the heavens usage directly with tent-pitching:  "to stretch, to unfold … e.g. a tent, Gen. 12:8;  26:25, heaven;  Isa. 40:22."²¹²¹  It is an ordinary word for spreading fabric.  It is not a technical term and it is used of God's arm as often as of the sky.

māṯaḥ (מתח) occurs exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, at Isaiah 40:22.  BDB's entry is one line:  "spread out;—only Qal Is 40:22."¹³  A word with a single attestation gets its meaning from its context and its parallel, and here the parallel is nāṭāh.

Isaiah 40:22 contains a second hapax legomenon in the same clause.  The noun dōq, the thing the heavens are stretched out like, also occurs only there.  BDB glosses it "veil, curtain (as thin)."¹³

So the verse carrying most of the weight has two words in it that occur nowhere else, and their meanings are recovered from that one verse.

Neither verb appears in Genesis 1

A word-by-word search of Genesis 1 and 2 in the tagged Hebrew text returns no occurrence of nāṭāh and none of māṯaḥ.¹²  The Day Four account, Genesis 1:14-19, says God made two great lights and the stars and set them in the expanse.  It does not say he stretched anything.

So Faulkner is importing an image from Hebrew poetry into a prose narrative that does not use it.  That is legitimate in principle;  Psalm 104 is widely read as a poetic retelling of Genesis 1.  But it is an inference across genres, not a reading of the Day Four text.

Faulkner says this himself, and the concession is the most important sentence in the paper's exegesis.

"Of course, it must be remembered that the aforementioned biblical references to the stretching of the heavens appear in poetic passages that are unlike the record of Day Four in Genesis 1:14-19, which bears all the markings of prose (Boyd 2005).  Consequently, 'stretching' in these instances may be a metaphorical device that refers to nothing more than the creation of the heavens in their expanse.  In other words, the language employed is likely not specific enough to enlist as certain evidence for the defense of my view.  Nevertheless, the language surely does not preclude the position I have advanced."¹

"Not specific enough to enlist as certain evidence" is an accurate self-assessment.  "Does not preclude" is the honest remainder:  the text permits the reading without supporting it.

Past act or continuing act: the grammar does not decide

Faulkner's second exegetical argument has a different target.  Many Christian apologists identify "stretching out the heavens" with the expansion of the universe.  Faulkner used to and no longer does:  "Many Christians today identify this stretching with expansion of the universe, something that I did for some time but am much more skeptical of now."¹

His argument is that these passages describe a completed act, resting on the parallelism in Isaiah 51:13 where "stretched out the heavens" stands beside "laid the foundations of the earth":  "Since the latter act is certainly to be understood as an action completed in the past, the former should be as well."¹

The Hebrew is more mixed.  Across the ten passages where God is said to stretch out the heavens, the verb is a finite perfect three times and a participle seven times.  A Hebrew participle carries no tense of its own;  it takes its time reference from context.  So in seven of ten cases the grammar leaves the question open rather than answering it, and Isaiah 51:13 is one of the seven.  Both members of Faulkner's parallelism, nôṭeh and wᵉyōsēḏ, are participles.

The Septuagint translators, working in the second century BC, faced this and split.

Two things fall out of that table.

Faulkner is mostly right, and the concordists are mostly wrong.  Eight of the ten ancient renderings are past.  The biblical writers overwhelmingly treat the stretching as something God did, not as something the sky is doing.  Reading it as a prediction of Hubble expansion asks the phrase to carry a present continuous sense the ancient translators mostly did not find in it.  Faulkner gave up a popular apologetic argument on textual grounds, against his own interest, and he was right to.

But not entirely right, and the exception is the verse he does not cite.  Zechariah 12:1 puts three Qal participles in a row:  God is the one "stretching out the heavens, founding the earth, and forming the spirit of man within him."  The third is something God does for every person born.  The Septuagint translator read all three as present participles, and the parallel structure makes it hard to read the first as past while the third is ongoing.  Faulkner cites seven passages "for example" and this is not among them.  There is no sign he was avoiding it;  it is simply the one that most resists his reading.

Notice what the table does to any argument from the participle.  Job 9:8 and Psalm 104:2 have the identical Hebrew form, nôṭeh šāmayim.  The Greek translator rendered the first as an aorist and the second as a present.  The form decides nothing.  Anyone arguing tense from a Hebrew participle here, in either direction, is arguing from context and should say so.

The imagery is a tent, and Faulkner reads it correctly

On the picture itself Faulkner is on solid ground, and the ancient evidence is better than the argument he gives.

"Notice that Isaiah 40:22 likens the spreading out of the heavens as to spreading out a tent or curtain.  In ancient times tents and curtains likely were made of animal skins.  When stored, a tent would be rolled up, and then be unrolled to set up.  Thus, the stretching was the unrolling and spreading of the tent material."¹

Three independent supports.  Psalm 104:2 says God stretches out the heavens kayrî'āh, "like a curtain."  yᵉrî'āh occurs 54 times in the Hebrew Bible and 44 of those are in Exodus, where it is the word for the tabernacle's cloth curtains.¹²  The Septuagint translator of that verse rendered it δέρρις, a leather tent-covering:  Faulkner's guess that the material was animal skin is what a Greek-speaking Jewish translator assumed two thousand years before him.²⁰²²  And the Septuagint of Isaiah 40:22 makes the architecture explicit, with God setting up the heaven "as a vault (καμάραν)" and stretching it "as a tent to dwell in."²²  A καμάρα is an arched chamber.  The image is a covered structure over a floor, not an expanding volume.

But notice what the image is for.  Isaiah 40:22 sits inside an argument about God's greatness over human rulers.  The inhabitants of the earth are "like grasshoppers," God pitches the sky as a tent "to dwell in," and the next verse says he "brings princes to nothing."  The clause is there to establish scale and sovereignty.  Reading a photon transport mechanism out of it asks a rhetorical comparison to do work it was never doing.  That objection applies to Faulkner's use of the verse and equally to the expansion apologetic he rejects.

Faulkner withdrew the connection himself, in 2014

One more thing has to be recorded here, because it changes what the whole section is worth.

When Hartnett's critique came out, Faulkner's published reply included this:

"For instance, numerous Old Testament statements of God stretching the heavens appear to be in the past tense.  As I've previously noted, these could be a descriptions of what I propose happened on Day Four.  However, rapidly transporting light and stretching of space would appear to be two different things, so I wish to be tentative on that connection for now."⁴

That is Faulkner disconnecting the "stretching out the heavens" language from his own proposal, in print, in November 2014, one year after publishing it.  He has not reconnected them.  The 2021 and 2026 restatements do not mention nāṭāh or māṯaḥ at all.

So the popular label for the proposal, "God stretched out the heavens on Day Four," describes a version its author set aside twelve years ago.  What remains is dāšā', which is a name borrowed from Day Three rather than an argument from Day Four.

The verdict on the exegesis

The Hebrew permits Faulkner's proposal and does not support it.  That is his own verdict, stated in his own paper, and it is correct.  A reader who came to the article expecting the Hebrew to settle the question in either direction should leave without it.  Nothing in dāšā', nāṭāh, or māṯaḥ tells anyone how fast light moved on Day Four, and the one place a Hebrew text describes Day Four uses none of those words.

The test that decides it: does the miracle solve the whole problem?

Everything above concerns whether the proposal is a scientific model.  This section is narrower and more damaging:  granted in full, on its own terms, does it do the job it was built for?

It does half the job, and the half it leaves undone is the larger half.

There are two separate questions about a distant object.  How long did its light take to get here?  And how long has the object itself existed?  The first is answered by the distance and the speed of light.  The second is answered by the object's own state:  how far a shell has expanded, how much a star has burned, how cool a white dwarf has become.

Faulkner's miracle answers the first.  It says nothing about the second.  Bringing a beam to Earth in a day does not make the thing that emitted it young.

This is not an outside criticism.  The best documentation of it in print is Faulkner's own.

Faulkner's 2017 supernova remnant survey

For more than two decades young-earth writers used a specific argument:  if the galaxy were billions of years old there should be thousands of old supernova remnants, and astronomers see only a couple of hundred.  Keith Davies developed it in 1994 and it became a staple.  In 2017 Faulkner went back to the data.  The abstract says what he found.

"For more than two decades, recent creationists have used the supposed lack of old supernova remnants, and particularly the lack of stage three supernova remnants, as an argument for recent origin.  However, reexamination of the data shows that there indeed are old supernova remnants, and that stage three supernova remnants have been identified.  Therefore, this may not be a good argument for recent origin, and I discourage recent creationists from using it."⁸⁸

His Table 1 lists seventeen remnants with age estimates above 7,000 years.  Here it is in full.

Thirteen of the seventeen have upper estimates above 30,000 years.  Five reach a million or more.  Faulkner flags one caveat on his own table:  the two objects with GSH designations are classified as superbubbles rather than single supernova remnants, though he notes that if they come from several near-simultaneous explosions "then they, too would be in stage three."⁸

Faulkner's own summary:

"Five of the SNR ages are at least a million years;  the greatest is 4.5 million years.  It would be difficult to reduce any of these age estimates so that they to be compatible with Davies' criterion of 7000 years."⁸

The doubled "they to be" is as printed.

Why these particular objects are decisive

Three features of that table matter, and each closes an escape route.

They are inside our own galaxy, a few thousand light years away.  Faulkner gives the numbers.  The Crab Nebula is at 1,930 parsecs, which he converts to 6,300 light years.⁸  The Lupus Loop is at 1,200 parsecs, about 3,900 light years.⁸  The Monoceros Loop is at 1,600 parsecs, about 5,200 light years.⁸  At those distances light travel time is a few thousand years at the outside.  A Day Four miracle that shortens a 13-billion-year journey to two days is not needed here and changes nothing here.  Neither does a synchrony convention, nor a bounded metric with time dilation.  Every proposed solution to distant starlight is irrelevant to these objects, because these objects do not have a distant starlight problem.

The ages come from the objects' own expansion, not from the light.  A supernova remnant is a shell of gas pushed outward by the blast.  Its age comes from how big the shell is and how fast it is still moving, checked against the physics of how such shells slow down.  That calculation is local to the remnant.  No assumption about the speed of light or the synchrony of distant clocks enters it.

Two independent clocks agree in at least two cases, and Faulkner says so in his own voice.  W44 gives a shock-model age of about 20,000 years, and the pulsar inside it gives about the same age from its spin-down rate, a completely different measurement.

"The concordance of these two ages determined from very different methods, one for the SNR and one for the pulsar, is a powerful argument that these ages are reasonably correct."⁸

The same thing happens at the million-year end.  SNR G055.0+00.3 is called "a highly evolved supernova remnant, with an estimated age of approximately 1,000,000 years, matching the 1.1 × 10⁶ years characteristic age of PSR J1932+2020, the pulsar thought to be associated with SNR G055.0+00.3."⁸

A young-earth astronomer, publishing in a young-earth journal, calls a 20,000-year age "reasonably correct" and reports a matched pair of million-year clocks four thousand light years from Earth.  That sentence is worth more than any external critique in this article, and it is worth more precisely because of who wrote it.

What this does and does not show

It does not show that Faulkner's proposal is false.  Nothing shows that, which is the point of the earlier sections.

It shows that the proposal answers a smaller question than the one people think it answers.  Grant the Day Four miracle in full.  W44 is still a shell 20,000 years into its expansion, with a pulsar 20,000 years into its spin-down, a few thousand light years away in the plane of the Milky Way.  Nothing about the delivery of its light touches that.

So the light travel time problem is a subset of the age problem, and it is not the hard part.  The hard part is local.  The anisotropic synchrony convention article reaches the same conclusion about Lisle's answer, and the coordinate cosmologies article about Dennis's and Tenev's.  All three relocate when distant events are said to have happened.  None touches the state of anything.

There is an irony here, to be recorded without gloating.  Tenev, Baumgardner and Horstemeyer cited the missing-supernova-remnant argument as support for their creation time coordinates model in 2018, the year after Faulkner had told the movement to stop using it, in the same journal, and they did not cite him.²³²³  The best data against a young universe from local objects is in a young-earth journal, and the young-earth literature has not absorbed it.

Faulkner's own concession, and the escape route he closed

Two more passages from the 2017 paper anticipate the two replies a young-earth reader will reach for.

The first says more than the rest of the paper.

"One could argue that the existence of old SNRs argues against the recent creation model.  This is true, but there are other, better arguments one could use.  For instance, the vast size of the universe and the relatively slow speed of light observed today amounts to an argument against recent origin.  Creationists long have recognized this difficulty, calling it the light travel time problem.  Many solutions to the light travel time problem have been forthcoming, many of which attempt to explain the appearance of some long processes, such as the existence of SNRs."⁸

"This is true" is the concession.  A young-earth astronomer states in a young-earth journal that old supernova remnants argue against recent creation, and does not soften it.

The last sentence is where the difficulty bites, and it bites hardest on Faulkner's own proposal.  It is fair for the general-relativistic models:  Humphreys' white hole really does manufacture elapsed time in the distant cosmos, so a remnant that looks 20,000 years old can have had 20,000 years.  See the white hole cosmology.  It is not fair for dāšā', which moves light and gives a shell of gas no extra time to expand.  Of all eight answers, his is the one this evidence bears on most directly, and the 2017 paper does not notice.

The second passage closes the next escape hatch, that the ages come from evolutionary models and can therefore be discounted.

"One may object that the age estimates are from interpretations of data using models, and that those models are evolutionary and hence suspect.  However, Davies assumed the same sorts of models.  That is, the essence of Davies' argument was that using evolutionary models, one reaches an untenable conclusion within the time frame of those evolutionary models.  To reject those models once old ages for SNRs are known would be to undercut Davies' entire thesis."⁸

That is the right answer.  You cannot use a model to generate a prediction, cite the failed prediction as evidence, and then reject the model when fuller data makes the prediction succeed.  Faulkner also went back through the seven quotations Davies had used in support and found that in context none said what the argument needed.  In one case an omitted clause reversed the sense:  Cox's "considerable surprise and loss of confidence" continues "in simple models such as those in this paper."⁸  He then says plainly that he does not think Davies did it on purpose, and reports Davies' own account of his intent.⁸

That is what checking your own side looks like.  This article's judgment on the dāšā' proposal is negative, and the reason it can be trusted is that the man who made the proposal writes like this.

The extension that would rescue it, and why it does not help

One move would save the proposal from the supernova remnants, and Faulkner has come close to it without making it.  His 2021 name for the proposal is "matured creation," described as God "rapidly matur[ing]" things "upon creating them."²  Applied only to light, the remnants stand as an unanswered problem.  Applied to objects as well, the problem goes away:  God could have run W44's shell through 20,000 years of expansion in a day, as he ran a fruit tree through several years of growth on Day Three.

That would buy consistency, since the Day Three parallel is about maturing things rather than moving light.  It would also preserve what Faulkner cares about most.  The events would still be real, and his eclipsing binary objection to created light would not apply, because nothing would be recorded that did not occur.  That is a genuine difference from mature creation and it should be granted.

What it costs is the last thing in the proposal that could be checked.  A shell that covered 20,000 years of expansion in one day was moving about fifty-five times faster than the velocity now measured in it by Doppler shift, so the compression must have ended before anyone looked.  Every observable is then identical to a 20,000-year-old remnant, and the claim that it is 6,000 years old has no consequence anyone can test.  The same reasoning covers stellar burning, white dwarf cooling and every other local clock.

Faulkner has not made this move and this article does not attribute it to him.  But it is the only route from the dāšā' proposal to an account of the local evidence, and it ends where the rest of this article ends.

The second unsolved problem: Hartnett's "lights go out"

There is a further difficulty, and unlike the supernova remnants it is internal to the proposal.  Hartnett stated it in 2014, on his own blog, three days after the journal exchange.

"If God accelerated the light across the cosmos only during Creation Week when He has suspended the laws of physics and stopped that miraculous process at the end of Creation Week or even end of Day 4, then the light from sources way out there in the cosmos would still take billions of years to get here.  The moment the miraculous translation stopped the photons would travel at constant speed c and for the Earth observers in such a universe the lights would all go out."⁹⁹

The argument needs no physics beyond the definition of a light year.  The miracle delivers whatever light was in flight during Day Four.  Light emitted afterwards travels at c.  So from any star more distant than the number of years since creation, we would now be seeing nothing at all.

Faulkner had already pinned himself to the premise Hartnett needs:  "I propose that the behavior of light has been the same since the Creation Week, and probably since Day Four.  That is, I confine the miracle to Day Four."⁴  And he states the consequence himself, without resolving it:

"For nearby stars, we long ago transitioned from rapidly transported light to light merely moving at the speed of light.  This would be true for anything within approximately 6000 light years.  However, light from objects more distant than 6000 light years still must have been transported very rapidly for at least part of their journey to us.  Would the transition from one mode to the other leave some physical evidence?  It would be easy to suggest that the answer to that question is no, but that raises the question of why.  Even to me, the suggestion that that is just part of the miracle is not satisfying."⁴

Take SN 1987A as the concrete case.  It sits in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which Faulkner puts at "about 168,000 light-years away."²  On his view the star existed and really exploded, and the light arrived in February 1987.  Two readings are available and they cannot both be right.

Reading one:  the miracle stopped, and the light we now see left on Day Four.  Then the explosion happened during creation week, the miracle carried its light most of the way, and the last stretch took the intervening six thousand years.  That is coherent.  It also means we are not seeing the universe in real time, which contradicts Faulkner's repeated statement that "we probably are looking at the entire universe in something close to real time, regardless of how far away individual objects may be."¹

Reading two:  we really are seeing close to real time.  He says this in 2021 as well:  "I don't believe the light has been traveling to us for much more than 6,000 years."²  Then a 168,000 light year gap was crossed in at most 6,000 years, meaning light averaging more than twenty-eight times c throughout history.  That is not a Day Four miracle but a permanent condition, and it contradicts "I confine the miracle to Day Four."

His own answer to the choice is the one he gave in 2013 and never revised:  "Exactly at what point we begin to see light from certain stars that have traveled to us in the 'normal way' rather than in the Day Four miracle, I have no clue."¹

Hartnett's closing thought is the fairest statement of where it leaves things, and it is a creationist declining an escape route that was open to him:  "Of course, God is omnipotent and could have created some way where we cannot differentiate the light translated across the vast cosmos miraculously from that appearing as it is travelled across the vast expanse taking billions of years.  But I believe we will not be led astray if we seek and trust God's laws."⁹

The contrast with the anisotropic synchrony convention is instructive rather than competitive.  Under ASC there is no Day Four event to end.  Light directed toward an observer is defined to arrive instantly, always, as a matter of coordinate choice, so one account covers Adam's sky and SN 1987A with no extra miracle and no transition to explain.  That is a real structural advantage Faulkner's proposal lacks.  What ASC pays for it is that a coordinate convention makes no claim about the world at all, which is the subject of its own article.  Both end up uncheckable, by different routes.

Compared with light created in transit

The two proposals are usually lumped together and they should not be.  Faulkner spent real effort separating them and the separation holds.

The difference matters theologically and scientifically.  Created light in transit puts a record of events that never happened into the sky, which Faulkner calls deceptive and which the created light article works through in detail.  It also makes every distant observation uninformative, because the beam's content was chosen rather than caused.  On Faulkner's view the content was caused, so distant astronomy is about real objects doing real things.  That is a large gain and it should be credited.

The two positions still arrive at the same terminus by opposite roads.  Created light cannot be tested because the evidence was manufactured.  Dāšā' cannot be tested because the delivery is unconstrained:  a miracle with no specified mechanism, duration or endpoint is compatible with any sky.  George Ellis made this point in a mainstream astronomy journal in 1975, using a 6,000-year universe as his worked example of a model nobody could check.²⁴²⁴  His argument transfers to dāšā' without a change of wording.

Faulkner's proposal is better than created light in transit on every count except the one that decides whether it is science.

Objections and responses

"You are ruling out God in advance.  A Christian has no business objecting to a miracle."  Nothing here objects to a miracle.  The claim is narrower and Faulkner agrees with it:  a miracle with no specified mechanism cannot be tested, cannot be confirmed, and predicts nothing.  "I freely admit that my proposal is an unscientific one."⁴  Believing it is a theological act and a permitted one.  Presenting it as a solved problem in astronomy is a different act, and that is the one this article objects to.

"The creation week was not ordinary physics, so demanding a physical account of Day Four is uniformitarianism."  This is Faulkner's own challenge and it is fair.²  Two things follow.  The consequence has to be accepted:  if the young-earth answer to distant starlight is that God did it miraculously, then there is no young-earth scientific answer to distant starlight and none should be claimed.  And the suspension needs a boundary, because Faulkner's own published work assumes present physics held in the past, and he says he does not know where the line falls.  Hartnett's version is cleanest:  "I expect a creationist solution to include the fact that everything we see in the universe obeys the current testable laws of physics."³

"The big bang has a light travel time problem too, so this criticism is selective."  The horizon problem is real and the parallel is genuine.  Patches of the microwave sky on opposite sides of us match to one part in a hundred thousand and were never in causal contact on the standard expansion history.  Faulkner makes the point in 2026 and Lisle made it in 2010.⁷²⁵²⁵  Inflation is the standard answer and its distinctive signature, primordial gravitational waves, has not been found:  the best limit is r < 0.036.²⁶  So Faulkner is right that inflation is unconfirmed.  Where he overstates is "What is the evidence that cosmic inflation happened in the early universe?  There is none."⁷  Inflation requires near-zero spatial curvature and a spectrum of density ripples slightly tilted from scale invariance;  Planck measures the tilt as n_s = 0.9649 ± 0.0042, eight standard deviations from scale invariance and on the side the simplest models require.²⁷²⁷  That does not prove inflation and does not settle the horizon problem.  It is the asymmetry that matters.  A model that has been checked and passed some tests while failing to produce its signature is in a different position from one whose author says it may have no predictions at all.  See the standard model overview, including where its evidence is weak.

"Faulkner never claimed it was science, so judging it as science is unfair."  Correct, and this article says so repeatedly.  The judgment is aimed at the use the proposal gets, not at the man who made it.  It appears in apologetics presentations as one of the answers young-earth astronomers have developed, alongside models with metrics and equations, and its author's own verdict travels with it about as often as never.

"The supernova remnant ages come from evolutionary models, so they can be discounted."  Faulkner closed this himself:  the argument they replace used the same models.  "To reject those models once old ages for SNRs are known would be to undercut Davies' entire thesis."⁸

"This is just light created in transit with extra steps."  No, and the difference is real.  On created light the beam never touched the star and the events it records never happened.  On Faulkner's view the beam left the star and the events happened.²  What the two share is not their content but their standing:  neither can be checked.

"Doesn't 'stretching out the heavens' support it?"  Faulkner said in 2014 that it probably does not:  "rapidly transporting light and stretching of space would appear to be two different things."⁴  He had already written in 2013 that the language "is likely not specific enough to enlist as certain evidence for the defense of my view."¹  Neither verb occurs in Genesis 1.

"Lisle's anisotropic synchrony convention answers all this, so what does Faulkner's failure matter?"  ASC hits the same wall from the other side.  It is a coordinate choice, so by construction it makes no observational claim, and Lisle says so:  it "cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified."²⁵  It does nothing about the supernova remnants either, for the same reason Faulkner's proposal does nothing about them.  See the ASC article.

"So the young-earth position on distant starlight has nothing left?"  That is not the finding.  The eight published answers divide into two groups.  One group made checkable claims and was checked, mostly by young-earth writers.  The other makes no checkable claims and survives.  Faulkner's is in the second group and he says so.  A reader is free to hold a young earth on other grounds.  What no reader should do is believe that distant starlight has been solved.

The pattern, and what to make of it

This is the last of nine articles on young-universe cosmologies.  Here is the ledger.

Three of those were retired by creationists.  Two were withdrawn by the men who built them.  The survivors reproduce standard observational cosmology exactly, and their authors say so in print.  The one that remains standing without qualification is an appeal to miracle, offered by the most careful practitioner in the field, who has told his own readers twice that it is not science and once that there is probably no evidence for it.

There are two ways to read that record and only one of them is fair.

The unfair reading is that young-earth astronomy is a graveyard of failed ideas.  It is a small field.  Faulkner, Lisle, Humphreys, Hartnett and a handful of others have carried nearly all of it, mostly part-time, mostly without funding, in journals nobody outside the movement reads.  A field that size producing eight distinct proposals in sixty years is working, not idling.

The fair reading is harder and it is the one this project holds.  The field's honesty is better than its results.  Aardsma killed c decay in an ICR publication.  Akridge killed the non-Euclidean shortcut in the CRSQ.  Hartnett retracted his own cosmology twice, in writing, with dates.  Hartnett refuted Faulkner's proposal in the Answers Research Journal and Faulkner published the reply conceding it.  Faulkner told his own community to stop using the missing-supernova-remnant argument, and then wrote "One could argue that the existence of old SNRs argues against the recent creation model.  This is true."  Lorentz demolished Akridge's created-light physics in the CRSQ in 2019.  Every one of those is internal, published, dated, and against interest.

That record deserves respect and it does not deliver a solution.  Distant starlight remains the hardest scientific problem a young universe faces, and thirteen years after the most recent proposal its author says there is probably no evidence for any of the answers, including his own.  A skeptical reader should take from this article that the young-earth astronomers writing today are more honest than their popularisers, that they have refuted more of their own arguments than their critics have, and that on this question they have not succeeded.

Danny Faulkner has said all three of those things himself, at various times, in print.  Quoting him accurately is the whole of the case.

Sources

Faulkner's primary papers

The published critiques

The Hebrew and Greek texts

Other works cited

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