Young-Universe Cosmologies

"The light travel time problem is one of the greatest challenges that recent creationists face today." — Danny Faulkner, Answers Research Journal, 2013¹

"The anisotropic synchrony convention is just that—a convention.  It is not a scientific model;  it does not make testable predictions.  It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified." — Jason Lisle, Answers Research Journal, 2010²

"I have now abandoned this model.  There are too many inconsistencies and besides we never found a full 5D (space, time and velocity) solution for the whole universe.  I have moved on, so should you." — John Hartnett, on his own Carmelian cosmology, 23 June 2021³

Summary

On 23 February 1987 a star blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy beside the Milky Way.  Two separate geometric measurements put that galaxy about 162,000 light years away.  If the universe is about 6,000 years old, the light should still be in transit.  It is not.  Astronomers watched the explosion, watched a ring of gas around it begin to glow about three months later and peak at about thirteen, and have since detected the hard X-rays of a specific radioactive isotope decaying inside the debris.

This is the light travel time problem, and it is the hardest single scientific problem for a young universe.  Young-earth astronomers say so themselves.  Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis calls it "one of the greatest challenges that recent creationists face today."¹  Andrew Repp's survey of fifty-seven years of creationist astronomy in the Creation Research Society Quarterly lists it first among the field's unresolved areas.⁴⁴

Eight kinds of answer have been published.  This article takes each one, states it in its author's own words, and checks what happened to it.  The short version:  most of them are dead, and creationists killed most of them.

The five things worth taking away

1.  The problem is much worse than "how do we see distant galaxies."  Faulkner reformulated it in 2013 and the reformulation is correct.¹  The stars were made on Day Four and Adam on Day Six.  The nearest star after the sun is 4.3 light years away.  So on ordinary physics Adam would have seen an empty night sky for four years, and stars would then have "slowly winked in over the succeeding years."¹  Any answer has to explain the sky over Adam's head, not just quasars.  Distance is not what makes the problem hard;  a few light years is already enough.

2.  The two most-cited "creation cosmologies" were left behind by the men who built them.  Russell Humphreys' white-hole cosmology (1994) is still the model most people have heard of.  He published a different one in 2007–08 built on a new metric, and Faulkner reports flatly that "Humphreys has since abandoned his model."⁵  John Hartnett's Carmelian cosmology was retracted by Hartnett himself, in writing, twice — in April 2019 and again in June 2021.⁶³  Ministry websites and books have not all caught up:  Hartnett complained in 2021 that his own abandoned model "is still promoted as a viable model" in a publisher's flagship book.⁷

3.  The decaying speed of light was killed by a creationist, using the creationists' own data.  Gerald Aardsma of the Institute for Creation Research took Barry Setterfield's own table of 163 historical measurements of c and refit it correctly — weighting each measurement by its stated error instead of treating a 1693 estimate and a 1970s laser measurement as equally good.  The trend came out as 0.0000140 ± 0.0000596 km/s per year:  zero, within the error.⁸  Creation Ministries International now lists c decay among arguments creationists should not use.⁹⁹

4.  The strongest surviving answer is not a physical model at all.  Jason Lisle's anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC) says that the light travel time problem is an error of translation, not of physics.  How you split a round-trip light signal into an outbound half and an inbound half is a matter of definition — Einstein said so in 1920, and philosophers of physics still argue about it.  If Genesis uses the convention in which light arrives the instant it leaves, the problem dissolves.  Lisle's own summary is that "the starlight problem was not so much a physics problem, but an error of exegesis."²

That argument is real, and it is not creationist crankery.  But it costs exactly as much as it buys.  A convention changes no observation — Lisle says this himself, twice, in print.²¹⁰  So ASC cannot be evidence for anything, and it cannot rescue anything that was not already a question of labelling.  What ASC removes is the look-back-time interpretation of distant light.  What it does not remove is the appearance of age.

5.  And that is the real point.  Distant starlight is the smaller half of the problem.  A synchrony convention re-labels when a distant event happened.  It does nothing to the proper time along any object's own history, and it does nothing at all to objects near enough that light travel time is negligible.  The strongest evidence for an old universe is local.  Faulkner himself published a paper in 2017¹¹ listing seventeen supernova remnants inside the Milky Way with age estimates over 7,000 years, five of them over a million years, and concluded:  "It would be difficult to reduce any of these age estimates so that they to be compatible with Davies' criterion of 7000 years."¹¹  Those objects are a few thousand light years away.  No convention and no metric touches them.

What this article concedes

Three things on the young-earth side are real and should be stated before the criticism.

The big bang has a light travel time problem of its own.  It is called the horizon problem:  patches of the microwave sky on opposite sides of us have the same temperature to one part in a hundred thousand, and on the standard expansion history they were never in causal contact.  Lisle makes this point in his 2010 paper and he is right that it is the same kind of problem.²  Inflation is the standard answer, and its distinctive signature — primordial gravitational waves — has still not been found.  The best current limit is r < 0.036.¹²

The conventionality of simultaneity is a live question in mainstream philosophy of physics, not a creationist invention.  Einstein wrote that equal light travel times on the two legs of a round trip are "in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill."¹³  The Stanford Encyclopedia's article on the subject records a debate that is still open, with Malament's 1977 theorem on one side and Grünbaum, Janis and Redhead on the other.¹⁴

One young-earth prediction about the James Webb Space Telescope was made in advance, in public, and came true.  On 21 January 2022, six months before the first deep field, Lisle wrote that Webb would show "fully-formed (fully-designed) galaxies at unprecedented distances," that this "will force secular astronomers to adjust their estimates of when the earliest galaxies formed," and that "we might see headlines like 'Webb discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.'"¹⁵¹⁵  Three weeks after the first image, Nature ran "Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies," reporting up to ten times as many distant disk galaxies as expected.¹⁶  That deserves to be scored as a hit, and it is worked through in full below — including the four reasons it buys less than it looks like, and the second prediction in the same article that is now going the other way.

Young-earth astronomy has a better record of retracting bad arguments than its critics usually allow.  Aardsma on c decay, Hartnett on his own cosmology, Faulkner on missing supernova remnants and on shrinking the universe, Repp's survey naming an argument his own community got wrong — all of these are internal, published, and dated.  A movement that polices itself in print deserves to be read.

Where this leaves the question

No published young-universe cosmology has solved the light travel time problem in the ordinary sense of "solved."  The ones that made physical claims have been refuted or withdrawn.  The one that survives works by re-defining a coordinate, which is legitimate and which by construction predicts nothing new.  The one that is honest about being a miracle says so, and says it may have nothing to test.

That is not a comfortable conclusion, and this article does not soften it.  What it does do is separate the arguments that fail on the physics from the arguments that fail only on a philosophical preference, because those are different failures and only one of them is fatal.

The problem, stated properly

It is not primarily about billions of light years

Nearly every popular statement of the problem uses quasars.  Faulkner argued in 2013 that this is the wrong framing, and it is worth quoting him at length because it changes what counts as a solution:

"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

The stars are given a job in Genesis 1:14 — signs, seasons, days and years — and a star you cannot see cannot do that job.  So the target is not "explain quasars."  It is "explain how the whole visible sky was in place within two days of the stars being made."  Lisle makes the same observation in a footnote to his 2010 paper.²

This matters for the article's whole argument.  Several proposed answers work only at cosmological distances.  None of them helps with Alpha Centauri.

The distances are measured, not assumed

The oldest answer is that astronomers have the distances badly wrong.  It is worth disposing of quickly, because the two best-known young-earth astronomers dispose of it themselves.

The base of the distance scale is trigonometry.  A nearby star shifts against the background as the Earth moves around the sun, and the shift gives the distance with no physics in it beyond a triangle.  Beyond that, for the Large Magellanic Cloud, there is a second purely geometric method:  eclipsing binary stars.  Twenty such systems give a distance of 49.59 ± 0.09 (statistical) ± 0.54 (systematic) kpc — about 162,000 light years, to one per cent.¹⁷

A third, independent geometric measurement exists for the same galaxy, and it is the one that makes the point sharpest.  The ring of gas around SN 1987A was lit up by the explosion.  The ring's angular size was measured by Hubble;  its physical size was measured from how long the ultraviolet lines took to brighten as the flash swept around it.  Divide one by the other and you get a distance with no rungs and no calibration:  51.2 ± 3.1 kpc.¹⁸¹⁸  That is about 167,000 light years, and it agrees with the eclipsing binaries.

Faulkner's own conclusion, in a 2020 Answers in Genesis article on the size of the universe:¹⁹

"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."¹⁹

And, naming the move directly:

"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."¹⁹

Faulkner added in 2013 that shrinking the distances cannot work anyway, because "for this solution to work, even the well determined trigonometric parallax method must be abandoned, but this is not physically supported."¹

Verdict:  dead, and dead on young-earth authority.

What we actually observe from 162,000 light years away

Any answer has to reproduce more than the arrival of light.  Four observations constrain the models below, and it is worth having them on the table before the models are described.

• A supernova, watched in sequence. SN 1987A brightened, faded, and its ejecta expanded, all recorded over four decades.
• A light echo with the right delay. The circumstellar ring's ultraviolet emission lines started to rise about 81–86 days after the explosion and peaked at about 408 days, because light going sideways to the ring and then on to Earth takes a longer path than light coming straight here. The near edge of the ring reports first and the far edge last. This is a geometric delay, and it is what turns the ring into a ruler.¹⁸
• Nuclear physics running at its laboratory rate. The remnant's late-time glow is powered by radioactive decay. In 2012, INTEGRAL detected two hard X-ray lines from the decay of titanium-44 in SN 1987A, at 67.9 and 78.4 keV — the same energies that isotope emits on a laboratory bench.²⁰
• Clocks that run slow with redshift. Distant Type Ia supernovae evolve more slowly than nearby ones, by exactly the factor 1/(1+z). Thirteen high-redshift supernovae give an aging rate "consistent with the 1/(1+z) factor," which "unambiguously" excludes models with no time dilation.²¹

None of these is fatal to every model below.  Some models reproduce all four by construction, which is itself the finding this article keeps returning to.

The eight answers

Faulkner catalogued seven families of solution in 2013, "in the roughly chronological order in which they have been proposed."¹  His own proposal makes eight.  They are taken here in that order.

1. Question the distances

Covered above.  Faulkner's own summary is that it "amounts to defining the problem away."¹  Repp does not even list it among the four proposals worth discussing.

2. Light created in transit

This is the oldest and, for a long time, the most popular answer:  God created the light beams themselves, already on their way, at the same moment He made the stars.  Henry Morris held it.  In the technical creationist literature its first explicit statement is Akridge 1979.⁴

The motivation is not arbitrary.  Genesis has plants bearing fruit on Day Three and Adam and Eve as adults on Day Six, so creation was mature from the start.  Faulkner grants the parallel and then explains exactly where it breaks:⁵

"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 … 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."⁵

And then the astronomy.  Faulkner has spent forty years measuring eclipsing binary stars — pairs so close together that they blend into a single point of light, whose brightness dips each time one passes in front of the other.  From the shape of that dip you can recover the sizes, masses and orbits of two stars you cannot resolve.

"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."⁵

SN 1987A is the extreme case.  On created-light-in-transit, the star did not explode.  The neutrino burst, the light curve, the ring echo, the titanium-44 lines — all of it is a detailed record of an event that never took place, written into a beam that never touched the star it appears to come from.  Faulkner draws the conclusion himself:  "in the mature creation solution, much of the universe could be an illusion."⁵  Lisle's 2010 paper reaches the same verdict for the same reason.

The position still has thoughtful defenders inside the movement.  Donald DeYoung has argued it has been rejected too quickly, and his statement of why deserves to be quoted rather than caricatured:  "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."⁴  Repp adds a related caution:  Justin Taylor pointed out that the travel-time problem "affects not only light but also matter (e.g., jets from active galaxies would require in-transit creation)."⁴

Verdict:  not refutable, and that is the objection.  It makes every observation of the distant universe uninformative.  A skeptic cannot disprove it, and neither can anyone else, which is why most young-earth astronomers went looking for something else.

The full case file on this one answer, including Gosse's 1857 original, Akridge's 1979 attempt at a physics proof and its 2019 refutation inside the Creation Research Society Quarterly, is in Light Created in Transit.

3. Light takes a non-Euclidean shortcut

In 1953 Parry Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer published a paper in the Journal of the Optical Society of America proposing that light travels along geodesics in a Riemannian space rather than in straight lines through Euclidean space, with the consequence that no light path exceeds about 15.71 light years no matter how far the source is.²²  Harold Slusher and others carried the idea into creationist writing in the 1970s and 1980s.

It did not survive contact with its own community.  Russell Akridge published a critique in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in 1984 with the self-explanatory title "The universe is bigger than 15.71 light years."²³  Faulkner's 2013 summary:  "The third solution is not much discussed anymore.  It relied upon some speculative hypothesis about the nature of light that has never been demonstrated."¹

Verdict:  dead since the mid-1980s.  It is included here because it is still occasionally repeated online, and because it is the earliest example of the pattern this article documents:  a creationist argument retired by creationists.

4. The speed of light decayed

In 1987 Trevor Norman and Barry Setterfield published a technical report, The Atomic Constants, Light, and Time, tabulating 163 historical determinations of the speed of light from 1675 onward and arguing that they show a real decline.²⁴  If c was enormously larger during creation week, distant starlight arrives in days.

The idea was popular for about a year.  Faulkner's history is accurate:  "The possibility that the speed of light was decreasing or had decreased in the past drew much attention among creationists, but soon problems with this hypothesis were pointed out."⁵

The statistical refutation, from inside

Gerald Aardsma was head of the Astro/Geophysics Department at the ICR graduate school.  In May 1988 he published a reanalysis of Setterfield's own data set.⁸  His objection was a single technical point, and it is decisive.

Norman and Setterfield fitted a straight line through all 163 points with every point weighted equally.  But those points range from seventeenth-century timings of Jupiter's moons to twentieth-century interferometry;  the quoted uncertainties "range from ± 20,000 km/s to ± 0.0003 km/s."⁸  Weighting a measurement good to three ten-thousandths of a kilometre per second the same as one good to twenty thousand is not a defensible choice.  Aardsma redid the fit the standard way:

"When I analyzed the entire data set of 163 points using the standard, weighted, linear least squares method, the decay of c was determined to be:  decay of c = 0.0000140 ± 0.0000596 km/s/year.  This result says pretty plainly that there is no discernible decay trend in the data set presented by Norman and Setterfield."⁸

He also found that the apparent trend depended overwhelmingly on one point.  Norman and Setterfield used a corrected value for Rømer's 1675 determination and an uncorrected value for Cassini's 1693 one, and Aardsma noted that "this single, anomalous point is responsible for most of the apparent 38 km/s/year decay which they report.  Furthermore, Roemer's uncorrected c determination would graph below the line at -24%, more than offsetting the uncorrected Cassini value."⁸

Faulkner independently makes the general version of the point:  early measurements have the largest error bars, later researchers know what answer is expected, and a horizontal line — no change at all — fits the data.⁵

Repp's 2022 survey records the outcome:  "a general consensus has emerged … that the purported evidence for such decay is artifactual in nature."⁴  Creation Ministries International lists "The speed of light has decreased over time (c decay)" among arguments that are "doubtful, hence inadvisable to use."⁹

The deeper problem: "c changed" is not a well-posed claim

Even if the historical data had shown a trend, there is a prior difficulty that the creationist debate mostly missed and that mainstream physics settled in 2002.  The speed of light is a dimensional constant.  Its numerical value depends on the units you pick for length and time, so "c was different" is not by itself a statement about the world.  Michael Duff put it bluntly:

"The possible time variation of dimensionless fundamental constants of nature, such as the fine-structure constant α, is a legitimate subject of physical enquiry.  By contrast, the time variation of dimensional constants, such as ℏ, c, G, e, k…, which are merely human constructs whose number and values differ from one choice of units to the next, has no operational meaning."²⁵

Duff appends a lecture in which Dirac says the same:  "Talking about whether a thing is constant or not does not have any absolute meaning unless that quantity is dimensionless."²⁵

The dimensionless quantity that a changing c would have to move is the fine-structure constant, α = e²/4πε₀ℏc.  That is measurable across cosmic distances, because it sets the wavelengths of atomic transitions in gas clouds along the line of sight to quasars.  The best current measurement, using the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope with a laser frequency comb for calibration, gives Δα/α = 1.3 ± 1.3 ± 0.4 ppm toward one absorber, and combining twenty-nine measurements gives a weighted mean of −0.5 ± 0.5 ± 0.4 ppm over redshifts 0.6 to 2.4.²⁶  Parts per million.  A speed of light large enough to cross the universe in days is not a parts-per-million effect.

Faulkner reaches the physical version of the same conclusion without the formalism:  "Its value depends upon two fundamental constants of nature, constants that govern the strength of electrical and magnetic forces.  These forces play important roles in the structure of matter.  If the speed of light were changed even a small amount, it would greatly change the structure of matter."⁵

Setterfield's answer to this was that other constants changed in compensating ways.  Faulkner records the exchange fairly:  "Opponents point out that any significant change in the speed of light would alter the structure of matter that ought to be visible in distant objects.  Supporters agree, but argue that other factors have changed to compensate."¹  A model that adjusts every constant in step so that nothing observable changes has bought its immunity at the price of its content.

The direct test nobody needed to invent

There is also a straightforward empirical check.  If atomic and nuclear physics were different in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the spectrum of that physics would look different.  It does not.  The 2012 INTEGRAL detection of titanium-44 in SN 1987A found its two escape lines at 67.9 and 78.4 keV²⁰ — laboratory energies, from a nucleus 162,000 light years away, in light that on any young-earth model left within the last few thousand years.

Verdict:  refuted, principally by creationists, and ill-posed besides.

5. Gravitational time dilation: Humphreys' white hole

This is the model most people mean by "creation cosmology," and it deserves a careful statement because it is genuinely clever and because it is usually described wrongly by both sides.  The full case file, including the 1999 and 2000 rounds of the exchange in which the model's replacement mechanism was refuted three times over, is in Humphreys' White Hole Cosmology.

What it claims

Russell Humphreys is a physicist who worked at Sandia National Laboratories.  In Starlight and Time (1994) he argued that if the matter of the universe is bounded²⁷ — a finite ball of galaxies with empty space beyond — then it has a centre of mass, and clocks near that centre run slow relative to clocks near the edge.  Make the ball small enough at the start and it lies inside an event horizon;  a white hole is a black hole running backwards, so matter and light must move outward through the horizon, and the horizon shrinks as matter leaves.

"I call it a 'White Hole' cosmology for reasons to become clearer shortly — and it just happens to solve the problem of the starlight travel-time rather neatly."²⁷

The mechanism, in his own words:

"The shrinking event horizon reaches earth early on the morning of the fourth day.  During this ordinary day as measured on earth, billions of years worth of physical processes take place in the distant cosmos."²⁷

And the summary:

"I propose that the critical moment arrived on earth during the fourth day of creation.  During that day, billions of years would elapse in the distant sky, allowing light from galaxies to reach the earth within one ordinary day of earth's time."²⁷

Note what that means.  This is a young-earth, old-universe model.  The distant galaxies really did live through billions of years.  Faulkner points this out and adds that most of the model's supporters never noticed:  "Few creationists realized that, while the white hole cosmology was young earth, it was an old universe theory."⁵

Humphreys was clear that the bounded universe is load-bearing.  Replying to critics in 1998:²⁸

"In the cosmos I have proposed, matter is bounded.  That is, stars and galaxies would be contained within an expanding spherical boundary (a conceptual dividing surface), beyond which there would be a large region of empty space.  It does not matter to my theory whether that space is ultimately bounded or not."²⁸

"A centre of mass is essential to my theory."²⁸

He was also clear, in the 1994 book, that a merely bounded universe of the observed size does not produce nearly enough dilation:  "If we assume that the matter we can observe with telescopes is all there is … then our clocks are ticking only a few percent slower than clocks near the edge.  This is not enough to solve the problem."²⁷  The white hole is what supplies the rest.

The critique

The reply came in the same journal issue that Humphreys answered.  Samuel Conner and Don Page — Page is a general relativist who worked alongside Stephen Hawking in Cambridge and co-authored with him on black-hole radiation — argued that the model does not do what it says:²⁹

"An accurate treatment of the physics indicates that this model is actually a trivial variant of the standard Big Bang model, with its attendant implications for the age of the Universe and the time required for light to travel from distant galaxies to the Earth."²⁹

Their central technical claim is a statement about general relativity that can be checked independently of anything else in the dispute:

"In fact, physical clocks located on Earth and on distant galaxies behave identically in bounded and unbounded Universes which have identical interior matter distributions."²⁹

If that is right, the boundary buys nothing:  the differential clock rates Humphreys needs are not produced by drawing an edge around the matter.  Humphreys' reply is that Conner and Page analyse his cosmos with a Robertson–Walker metric that is blind to the "Euclidean zone" of the Klein metric where clocks stop.  The exchange did not converge.

Humphreys did land one clean counter-punch, and it should be recorded because it is correct:  Conner and Page derive a gravitational field in an unbounded Newtonian cosmos using the shell theorem, which requires spherical symmetry about a point — so their own diagram quietly has a centre, and "an unbounded cosmos can have no centre."²⁸

Other criticism came from inside.  John Byl argued against the model on mathematical grounds in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in 1997.³⁰  Hartnett raised a mechanical objection that has never been answered:

"In 2003, I pointed out that there is a problem of the light-travel time within the Milky Way galaxy with white-hole gravitational-well ESC-based time-dilation cosmologies.  They cannot provide sufficient time-dilation.  That problem has not been solved, though Russ Humphreys has developed a much better model since his first ones.  I suspect though that his current model is somewhat ad hoc in the details to get it all to work."⁶

That is Faulkner's Adam problem again, in technical dress.  A model that manufactures billions of years at cosmological distance still has to get light across 4.3 light years in under two days.

The replacement, and the anomaly that evaporated

Humphreys did not stand still.  In 2007 he published a new solution of Einstein's equations describing the interior of an expanding spherical shell of mass, identified with "the waters that are above the heavens" of Psalm 148:4.  In 2008 he used it to define a new kind of time dilation he calls achronicity, in which time stops not merely at an event horizon but throughout the volume inside it.³¹

The Day Four scenario built on it is intricate.  God creates stars in a way that dents the gravitational potential;  the tension in the fabric of space is adjusted so that the boundary of the "timeless zone" sweeps outward at exactly the speed of light, freezing each galaxy as it passes;  then the tension is reversed so the boundary contracts at exactly −c, and the light released by each galaxy as it thaws follows the shrinking boundary inward and all arrives at Earth together.³¹  Humphreys presents it as one possibility, not a derivation:  "In this section I outline a speculative light transit-time scenario during Day 4.  Other scenarios are possible, so you should take this as only an example of the possibilities that achronicity opens up."³¹

There is one hard, dated problem with the foundation.  Humphreys derived the 2007 metric³² to explain the Pioneer anomaly — a small unexplained sunward acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft — and he presented that explanation as evidence for creationist cosmology generally:

"Thus the Pioneer effect supports the essentials of several creationist cosmologies:  a centre of mass, expansion of space and recent time dilation.  Big bang theorists, whose cosmology does not have a centre of mass, cannot use this explanation."³²

In 2012 Slava Turyshev and colleagues built a finite-element thermal model of both spacecraft from the design documents, drove it with the actual flight telemetry, and found the anomaly was the recoil from heat radiating asymmetrically off the vehicles:  "once the thermal recoil force is properly accounted for, no anomalous acceleration remains."³³

That is not a refutation of Humphreys' metric.  It is a refutation of the one observation he offered as support for it.  The honest description of the 2007–08 model today is that it is a speculative scenario with several free choices, no confirmed prediction, and no successor publication defending it against the disappearance of its motivating anomaly.

Verdict:  contested at the level of the physics, and set aside by its own author.  Faulkner, who is not a hostile witness, reports the situation as of 2021:  "Many supporters of the white hole cosmology don't know that Humphreys has since abandoned his model.  For several years, Humphreys has been pursuing a different approach … He is still refining this model."⁵

6. A fifth dimension: Hartnett's Carmelian cosmology

John Hartnett is a physicist at the University of Adelaide who worked on ultra-stable cryogenic oscillators.  Beginning in 2003 he adapted Moshe Carmeli's "cosmological general relativity," which adds a fifth dimension — velocity — to the usual four of spacetime, and argued that it produces enough time dilation to get starlight here inside creation week while also fitting the high-redshift supernova data without dark matter or dark energy.

The model required a specific and unusual geometry, and Hartnett stated the requirement plainly:³⁴

"The observations that place the earth near the centre of the universe are consistent with God's focus on mankind.  The Bible implies that there are a finite number of stars, which suggests that the universe is finite.  A creationist cosmology requires a finite universe that is most likely spherically symmetric about our galaxy."³⁴

He also conceded, in describing his own peer-reviewed 2013 paper,³⁵ that the bounded solution is observationally identical to the unbounded one:  "The new solution though is identical with the unbounded solution."³⁵  That is the same concession Conner and Page extracted from Humphreys' model — the boundary makes no observable difference.

Then he changed his mind, publicly and in writing, five times over — twice attacking Carmeli's underlying physics rather than his own creation model.  The full sequence is traced in Hartnett's Carmelian cosmology.

19 April 2019:⁶  "In the years leading up to 2015 I had discovered several serious inconsistencies with Carmeli's cosmology.  Besides those, there did not exist a viable 5D (space-time-velocity) version that could be used to give a robust description of the early universe on a biblical timeline."  And:  "I now believe that Lisle's ASC model is the best solution by a long shot."⁶

23 June 2021, appended to his own article defending the model:³  "I have now abandoned this model.  There are too many inconsistencies and besides we never found a full 5D (space, time and velocity) solution for the whole universe.  I have moved on, so should you."³

11 March 2021:⁷  "My own cosmological model, which I developed using Carmeli's cosmology, has too many problems and I have since abandoned it.  Even so it is still promoted as a viable model, even in their premier publication."⁷

That last sentence is worth dwelling on.  Hartnett is complaining that a major creationist ministry was still presenting his retracted cosmology to the public while declining to present Lisle's.  He is right that this happens:  the Creation Ministries International page listing arguments creationists should not use still says, in the same paragraph that retires c decay, that "CMI currently believes that both Dr Russell Humphreys' and Dr John Hartnett's cosmologies (both involving relativistic time dilation) provide viable solutions for the distant starlight problem."⁹  One of those two authors has retracted his model in writing and the other has moved to a different one.

Verdict:  retracted by its author.  Any presentation of Starlight, Time and the New Physics (2007) that does not carry the 2019 and 2021 dates is out of date.

7. Change the clocks, not the physics: the anisotropic synchrony convention

This is the strongest answer on offer and it needs the most care, because it is easy to state wrongly in both directions.  It has its own article:  The Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, which works through the physics, the fifty-year philosophical dispute, the Dennis exchange, and the exegetical case at length.

The idea

Nobody has ever measured the one-way speed of light.  Every measurement is a round trip:  send a pulse out, bounce it back, divide total distance by total time.  To get a one-way speed you would need two clocks at different places already synchronised — and to synchronise them you would need to know the one-way speed of light.  The circle is not an accident of technique;  it is structural.

Einstein saw this in 1905 and spelled it out for a popular audience in 1920.¹³  In a dialogue in chapter VIII of Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, he raises the objection himself and then gives the answer he accepts:

"That light requires the same time to traverse the path A → M as for the path B → M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity."¹³

The standard choice — light equally fast in both directions — is the Einstein synchrony convention (ESC).  Formally you can pick any split, parameterised by Reichenbach's ε, so long as the round trip still comes out to c.  The extreme case, ε = 1, makes light arriving at an observer infinitely fast and light leaving him travel at c/2.  That is the anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC).

Jason Lisle proposed it as a solution to distant starlight in 2001, publishing under the pseudonym R. Newton,³⁶ and set it out at length in the Answers Research Journal in 2010.²  Under ASC, when God makes the stars on Day Four their light reaches Earth on Day Four, because on that convention there is no such thing as light travel time toward the observer.

Lisle's argument that Scripture uses this convention has two parts.  The first is that ASC is the convention every pre-modern culture used without thinking about it, because it is the only one that does not require you to know the distance to the source:

"Of all the infinite possible synchrony conventions, only ASC does not require knowledge of the distance to the source to record the time of any event.  Since the surface of simultaneity is essentially identical with the past light cone, events happen as they are seen."²

The second is exegetical:  Genesis 1:15 says the lights were made to give light on the earth, and adds "and it was so," which he reads as saying they did so at once.  His conclusion:

"The starlight problem was not so much a physics problem, but an error of exegesis.  It is the semantic anachronism fallacy."²

Is it legitimate physics?

Largely, yes, and this article will not pretend otherwise.  The conventionality of simultaneity has a long literature — Reichenbach, Grünbaum, Winnie — and it is not settled against Lisle.  The strongest argument on the other side is David Malament's 1977 theorem, which shows that standard synchrony is the only non-trivial simultaneity relation definable from the causal structure of Minkowski spacetime alone.³⁷  Some philosophers take that to have ended the debate;  the Stanford Encyclopedia records that Grünbaum, Janis and Redhead do not,¹⁴ and quotes Grünbaum's reply that "Malament's remarkable proof has not undermined my thesis that, in the STR, relative simultaneity is conventional."¹⁴

There is one caveat that a young-earth reader should not skip, and it comes from a creationist journal.  Repp distinguishes two readings of ASC, and only one of them is defensible:

"Careful treatments of ASC present it as a redefinition of time coordinates … Other treatments seem to suggest an actual physical anisotropy in the propagation of light (i.e., that the 'one-way speed of light' toward Earth is infinite)—which would seem conclusively ruled out by electromagnetic theory."⁴

His footnote gives the reason:  "a physically infinite c in one direction would require a zero ε₀μ₀ in that direction, making either Coulomb's Law or Ampere's Law wildly anisotropic as well.  A mere coordinate redefinition—Newton's original proposal—would not suffer from this problem."⁴

Lisle is on the right side of that line.  He insists ASC is a convention and not a physical hypothesis:³⁸  "Peter is trying to refute a convention, a bit like arguing that the metric system has been empirically falsified.  But since conventions are defined, they cannot be falsified."³⁸  Popular presentations that say "light really does travel infinitely fast toward us" are stating the version Repp says electromagnetism rules out.

What ASC does and does not buy

Here the accounting has to be done carefully, because the same feature that makes ASC unfalsifiable makes it uninformative.

It changes no observation.  Lisle says so twice.  In 2010:  "It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified."²  In 2025, drawing a contrast with his separate Doppler model:¹⁰  "the difference between ESC and ASC is one of coordinates, leaving the underlying geometry and measurable observations unaffected."¹⁰

This is why the four observations listed earlier are not problems for ASC.  Take the SN 1987A light echo, which looks at first like a decisive test:  if inbound light is instantaneous, why did the ring brighten eight months late?  Lisle works this out and gets the right answer.  Under ASC the speed depends on the angle between the ray and the line to the observer, light from the star to the ring is aimed away from us and is therefore slow, and the delay comes out the same.³⁸  Everything else follows in the same way, because a coordinate change cannot alter an invariant.

It leaves the distance scale alone.  Lisle is explicit about this, and it is the single most misunderstood point in the popular literature:

"I will further stipulate that the consensus understanding of galactic distances, redshifts, and universal expansion is basically correct, having been established by good scientific procedures which are verifiable in the present."²

ASC does not shrink the universe.  It does not make galaxies nearer.  It re-labels when.

It does not, by itself, make the distant universe young.  Under ASC as Lisle sets it up, everything visible has aged about 6,000 years — slightly less at extreme redshift, because expansion produces a real cosmological time dilation.²  So the model does have observational content once you add the stipulations, and Lisle says so:  the convention makes no predictions, but "the ASC model goes beyond the mere convention and does make testable claims and is therefore falsifiable."²

The model's predictions, and where they come from

Lisle lists them.  Because the universe should look about 6,000 years old at every distance, short-lived phenomena should turn up everywhere:  hot blue stars, which burn out in a few million years;  spiral arms, which differential rotation should wind up in a billion;  ring systems and planetary magnetic fields around other stars, as in our own solar system.²

Two observations about this list.

First, none of these predictions comes from ASC.  They come from the young-age stipulation.  Any young-universe model — created light, c decay, dāšā' — predicts the same things.  Lisle concedes the point about solar-system evidence directly:  "Of course, evidence of youth within our solar system does not confirm the ASC model over and above other creation models."²  He argues the extension to distant systems is a discriminator against time-dilation models, which is fair, but it does not distinguish ASC from a miracle.

Second, several of the specific arguments are contested inside young-earth astronomy, and one of them Lisle's own colleagues have withdrawn.  The winding of spiral arms has a standard answer in density-wave theory, which Lisle acknowledges and rejects.  The "missing old supernova remnants" argument — used by Tenev, Baumgardner and Horstemeyer in 2018 as support for their variant of this model — was retired by Faulkner the previous year, in the same journal Lisle published in.  More on that below.

The most revealing exchange is about galaxy morphology.  A critic put to Lisle that distant galaxies do not look like nearby ones, which is what an old universe predicts and a young one does not.  Lisle's answer:

"Peter has also made the unfounded assumption that any difference between nearby galaxies and distant galaxies is due to differential aging.  But how could anyone possibly know this?  Perhaps God created galaxies with systematic differences depending on their distance from our local group.  Not every sequence is a time-sequence."³⁸

That is an honest answer, and it is also the moment the model stops predicting.  If an observed trend with distance can be absorbed as a created initial condition, the trend is not a test.

The one prediction that was made in advance and came true

Lisle has a better example than any of those, and it should be given its full weight.

On 21 January 2022 — before the James Webb Space Telescope had returned a single science image, and six months before the first deep field was released — he published what he expected it to find.¹⁵

"What do creationists expect to find?  I cannot speak for all creation scientists.  But I personally expect that the JWST will find quite a different situation.  Rather than galaxies just starting to form, I expect to see fully-formed (fully-designed) galaxies at unprecedented distances.  This will force secular astronomers to adjust their estimates of when the earliest galaxies formed, pushing them much closer to the supposed big bang.  We might see headlines like 'Webb discovers that galaxies formed much earlier than previously thought.'"¹⁵

The first deep field was released on 11 July 2022.  Within three weeks Nature ran a news feature titled "Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies," reporting that "Webb's distant galaxies are also turning out to have more structure than astronomers had expected," that there appear to be "up to ten times as many distant disk-shaped galaxies as previously thought," and that a team led by Ivo Labbé had found massive galaxies at redshifts 7 to 10.¹⁶  An astronomer quoted in it said she was "lying awake at three in the morning… wondering if everything I've ever done is wrong."¹⁶

That is what an advance prediction looks like, and on its own terms it was a hit.  It was dated, public, specific enough to be recognised when it happened, and it named the headline almost verbatim.  Nothing in this article's assessment of ASC should be read as denying that.

Four things have to be said alongside it.

It is not a quantitative prediction, so it cannot be scored against the standard model.  It names no redshift, no stellar mass, no number of galaxies.  And the standard model does not predict that galaxies at the redshifts Webb reaches would be formless — it predicts they exist and are smaller, bluer and less massive than nearby ones, which is a claim about numbers.  Two models that both say "you will see galaxies" are separated only by how many, how big, and how early, and Lisle's 2022 article gives none of those.

Lisle's account of what the standard model expects has been challenged inside a young-earth journal.  In 2024 he made a quantitative version of the argument from JWST galaxy sizes, and Luke Barnes — a cosmologist writing in the Answers Research Journal — replied that the comparison assumed galaxies of fixed physical size at every redshift, which no version of ΛCDM claims:  "the 'standard model' prediction of Lisle (2024) is both inadequate and inexcusable.  It is a straw man."³⁹  That is a different paper from the 2022 prediction, and it does not retract it.  It is a warning about how the "secular astronomers expect X" half of these predictions gets set up.

The strongest form of the anomaly has weakened since 2022.  The Labbé candidates were photometric, and the paper said so — its published version calls them candidates "to be confirmed with spectroscopy."  Every one that has since been observed spectroscopically came in at a lower redshift than its photometric estimate, and one of them turned out to be a broad-line active galactic nucleus at z = 5.6 rather than a massive galaxy at z = 8.1.  What survives is real but smaller:  galaxies at z ≈ 10–14 are more abundant and more ultraviolet-bright than pre-launch models expected.

And the prediction does not come from ASC.  It comes from the young-age stipulation, exactly like the blue stars and the spiral arms.  A miracle model predicts it too.  Worse, on ASC's own terms "mature" cannot mean what it means in the Webb literature:  Lisle's footnote says distant galaxies have aged less than 6,000 years, so a galaxy with 10¹⁰ solar masses of stars in it is not something ASC explains — it is something ASC has to attribute to how the galaxy was created.  Which is what Lisle says, in the morphology answer quoted just above.

His second prediction in the same article has not gone as well.  He wrote that Webb would not find genuine Population III stars — the first generation, containing no elements heavier than lithium — and pre-empted the obvious escape:  "I predict it won't be zero as required by the big bang model."¹⁵  As of 2025 that stood:  a review of the field could still say "there have been no unambiguous direct detections of Population III (Pop III) stars."⁴⁰  In March 2026 a fifty-two-author team led by Roberto Maiolino reported a helium-1640 emitter three kiloparsecs from GN-z11 at z = 10.6, spectrally resolved, with no metal lines detected, and concluded that "Population III stars are the most plausible explanation for the observed He II emission, with no satisfactory alternative from other classes of sources or mechanisms."⁴¹⁴²  That is a preprint and a non-detection of metals is an upper limit rather than a proof of zero, so the prediction is not yet decided.  But it is moving the wrong way for it, and a fair scorecard has to carry both halves.

The internal critique: Phillip Dennis

The sharpest published criticism of ASC comes from another young-earth creationist.  Phillip Dennis — who states his own position plainly, "I am a young earth creationist who is thoroughly committed to a literal seven days of an actual Creation Week"⁴³ — published two papers in the Answers Research Journal in 2024⁴⁴⁴³ arguing that the ASC model is internally inconsistent:

"The ASC model explicitly assumes the mathematical structure of Minkowski space and the foundations of special relativity (SR).  Minkowski space presupposes an isotropic physical speed of light.  The assumption of Minkowski space, as correctly embraced by Lisle, is incompatible with the conclusions of ASC which purports that the incoming speed of light can be made arbitrarily large."⁴⁴

His technical complaint is that ASC transforms the time coordinate and then keeps using the ordinary radial distance when computing a speed:  "One cannot use both the ESC distance and the ASC distances and times within a derivation and expect a valid calculation."⁴⁴

The most useful result in the exchange is in Dennis's Appendix B, and it cuts both ways.  Writing the Minkowski line element in ASC coordinates and restricting to a surface of constant ASC time gives

ds² = 4ε(1 − ε)(dr² + r²dΩ²)⁴⁴

At Lisle's limiting case ε = 1 that factor is zero.  The ASC surface of simultaneity has no proper radial extent at all;  it is a null cone.  This is the rigorous form of the point made above:  under ASC the question "how far away is that galaxy right now" has no invariant answer, so ASC cannot support a claim about the present state of the universe in either direction.

Lisle replied in a ten-part series on his own site, arguing that Dennis's derivations smuggle in ESC by assuming an isotropic c in the metric they start from.  Dennis replied to the reply.  Neither party has persuaded the other, and neither discusses what any of it implies about the size or contents of the universe.

Repp, surveying the field in 2022, notes that the exchange is thin on the ground:  ASC "has not received more attention, particularly of the negative type," in Faulkner's earlier phrase.¹  For a proposal that is now the leading young-earth answer, that is not a healthy state.

The variant: creation time coordinates

Tichomir Tenev, John Baumgardner and Mark Horstemeyer proposed a reformulation at the 2018 International Conference on Creationism.⁴⁵  They accept Lisle's approach and try to repair what they see as its weakness — that a purely observer-centred convention is subjective:

"Our solution is a reformulation of Lisle's solution (Newton 2001, Lisle 2010), but ours spells out the required initial conditions, without which Lisle's solution is ambiguous.  It also replaces Lisle's use of the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention, which is an observer-specific subjective definition of simultaneity, with the CTC synchrony convention, which is a divinely-prescribed objective definition of simultaneity."⁴⁵

Their creation time coordinate at a star is "the elapsed time since that star was created plus three days," and two events are simultaneous when their CTCs match.  The initial conditions place every stellar creation event just outside the past light cone of Earth's Day Four and inside that of Day Five.⁴⁵  Like Lisle they take the model to predict that "stellar objects should appear youthful," and they offer one line of observational support for it:  the supernova remnant census.⁴⁵

Two comments.  This is a real improvement in one respect:  it makes the required initial data explicit rather than leaving them implied, which is the standard Baumgardner virtue.  And their supernova-remnant section is careful work, not a repetition of the old argument — they check Ken Davies' 1994 numbers and find an error in his favour, noting that once the detectability factor is applied to the young case as well, a 7,000-year-old galaxy predicts "only 126 expected SNRs instead of 268," against about 200 actually observed.  They say plainly what that implies:  "On the face of things, that would suggest that either the galaxy is somewhat older than 7,000 years or else the estimated average time between SN explosions is too large.  We suspect that the latter is the more likely explanation."⁴⁵

Their surviving claim has two parts:  200 observed Sedov-phase remnants against 2,256 expected if the Galaxy is older than the Sedov lifetime, and — the part they call "even more striking" — that "there are no observed third (snowplow) phase SNRs, given that they are expected to persist as readily detectible entities for hundreds of thousands of years."⁴⁵

The second half of that was contradicted the year before, in the same community, by the astronomer at Answers in Genesis.  Faulkner's 2017 paper is titled "Are Old Supernova Remnants Really Missing?  Re-Evaluating a Well-Known Young-Universe Argument," and its abstract says:  "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."¹¹  His table marks at least three of the seventeen as stage three, including one pair of independent age determinations that agree exactly at 20,000 years.¹¹  Tenev and colleagues do cite Faulkner 2017 and answer him on their p. 87, arguing that apparently old remnants "may be explainable by yet unknown processes that have caused the SNRs to expand faster than our current models predict" and that their own case rests on the paucity of remnants rather than on any single remnant's age.  That reply cannot be confined to one side of the comparison, because the expected counts are computed from the same expansion models.  Coordinate Cosmologies:  Dennis and Tenev works the exchange through.

Dennis's own model

Dennis is not merely a critic;  he has his own general-relativistic proposal, presented at the same 2018 conference.⁴⁶  He builds it by taking a closed Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker spacetime and cutting away part of its past, choosing a hyperboloidal surface as the first day of creation.  His own description of what that achieves is the most candid statement in this whole literature of what all of these models have in common:

"The resulting space-time is a subset of the usual FLRW space-time and thus preserves the FLRW causal structure and the observational predictions such as the Hubble law. … All properties of light arriving from distant galaxies retain the same features as those of the FLRW space-time.  This follows from the fact that the solution presented is an open subset of the FLRW space-time so that all differential properties and analysis that applies to FLRW also applies to our solution."⁴⁶

The model reproduces standard cosmology exactly, because it is standard cosmology with a different starting surface.  His conclusion states the consequence, and the second sentence is the one worth sitting with:

"We have presented a consistent YEC cosmological model that satisfies the EFE and reproduces the observational consequences of both the FLRW space-time ('big bang') and any modifications such as inhomogeneities.  The model only differs from conventional solutions in that it uses an initial condition ('creation hypersurface') that supports a young earth.  There can be no unprejudiced objection to this solution."⁴⁶

He is right, and that is the difficulty.  A model built to be observationally identical to the standard one cannot be objected to on observational grounds — and cannot be supported on them either.

Verdict on the ASC family:  the strongest answer available, and it works by relabelling.  It is not refuted, and on present evidence it cannot be.  That is its problem as well as its strength.

8. A miracle: Faulkner's dāšā' proposal

Faulkner's own answer, published in 2013 and restated for a general audience in 2021, is the most theologically self-aware of the eight and the most explicitly untestable.

His starting point is a pattern he finds in Genesis.  Plants on Day Three did not appear instantly;  the text uses a causative verb, dš', of the earth bringing forth vegetation, and the plants had to be bearing fruit by Days Five and Six.  So Day Three describes rapid, directed, miraculous growth — "something like a time-lapse movie of plant growth today."¹  He proposes that Day Four worked the same way:

"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

The difference from created-light-in-transit is the one that matters to him, and it is a real difference:  on his model the light did leave the stars, so the events it records actually happened.  "With the mature creation solution, none of these distant events occurred."⁵  On the dāšā' proposal SN 1987A really exploded.

The cost is stated by Faulkner himself, more frankly than any critic would put it:

"Since my modest proposal appeals to a miracle, there may be no physical predictions and hence nothing that we can test."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?  Would this imply a transition region that still might be reaching the earth today?  Might there be some implication for the Hubble relation…?  Alas, I do not know."¹

"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

He is not embarrassed by this, and he has a serious argument for why nobody should be:  the creation week was not a normal week.  Plants growing to fruit-bearing maturity in a day, animals formed from the ground, matter appearing where there was none — none of that is operating physics.  "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?"⁵

That is a fair challenge and it should be answered rather than dismissed.  The answer is that a miracle is a perfectly coherent thing to believe and a useless thing to argue from.  If the appeal is to a miracle, then the young-earth position on distant starlight is not a scientific position at all;  it is a theological one that declines the scientific question.  Faulkner is entitled to that.  What nobody is entitled to is to appeal to a miracle and also claim the light travel time problem has been solved in the way a physical model solves a problem.

There is also an internal difficulty Faulkner does not resolve.  If the Day Four miracle brought in the light already emitted, what about the light emitted afterwards?  Light leaving the Large Magellanic Cloud a year after Day Four takes 162,000 ordinary years to arrive.  On the face of it the sky would show a frozen snapshot, not a supernova in 1987.  Faulkner's answer is 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 which requires the accelerated transmission to be ongoing rather than confined to Day Four — and that is a different proposal from the one the paper describes.  He acknowledges the gap:  "These and many other questions must be addressed for my proposal to be taken seriously by fellow creation scientists."¹

Verdict:  coherent, honest, and outside science by its author's own description.

The others, briefly

Two further proposals appear in the literature and should be named.

The biosphere or "soft gap" model (Gray 2005) applies the creation week to the Earth's biosphere while allowing the Earth and the universe to be much older;  the stars became visible on Day Four because the atmosphere cleared, not because they were made then.  Faulkner notes it "has met with much opposition among recent creationists,"¹ and it is really an old-universe position wearing a six-day week.

An infinite initial c with a slowing front was proposed by D. M. Harris in 1978:  light was initially infinitely fast, and a zone of finite speed spread outward from the Earth at the Fall.⁴  It has the same difficulties as c decay plus a discontinuity nobody has modelled.

What all eight have in common

Line them up and a pattern appears that is more informative than any individual verdict.

Every surviving model reproduces standard observational cosmology exactly, by construction.  Dennis says it outright:  his spacetime is "an open subset of the FLRW space-time," so every observational prediction is identical.⁴⁶  Lisle says it about ASC:  the difference is "one of coordinates, leaving the underlying geometry and measurable observations unaffected."¹⁰  Hartnett said it about his own bounded universe:  "identical with the unbounded solution."³⁵  Conner and Page said it about Humphreys' bounded universe:  clocks "behave identically in bounded and unbounded Universes which have identical interior matter distributions."²⁹

Four models, four authors, one result.  Each of them differs from the standard picture in how spacetime is labelled or where its initial surface is drawn, and in nothing that a telescope can see.  That is why none of them has ever been refuted by an observation, and it is also why none of them has ever predicted one.

None of them explains the cosmic microwave background.  This is the largest single gap and the most useful statement of it is internal.  Repp, in the Creation Research Society Quarterly:

"There is currently no generally accepted explanation for the CMB in a creationary framework:  for instance, Humphreys (1994b) explains it as relict light from the first day, whereas Faulkner (2016) explains it as blackbody radiation from a water boundary ('the waters above')."⁴

"The situation worsens when we consider the power spectrum of the CMB—that is, the patterns exhibited by its minute temperature variations (anisotropies) … The yet more detailed CMB mapping by Planck … seems to have laid to rest the idea that these anisotropies are artificial.  However, there has been little if any attempt to explain them within a creation framework."⁴

Faulkner's own water-boundary proposal comes with his own disclaimer.⁴⁷  His worked example gives a temperature of 30 K against the observed 2.7255 K, and he concedes:  "Here I arbitrarily picked values for the temperature and redshift for the water … At this time I have no model expectations of exact temperature of the water or its redshift, but it is easy to pick pairs of their values that would result in a match with the CMB."⁴⁷  A proposal that can be tuned to any temperature predicts none.

They disagree with each other about the most basic question.  Is the distant universe old?  Humphreys says yes:  "billions of years worth of physical processes take place in the distant cosmos."²⁷  Lisle says no:  "when we look at any region of the universe, we are seeing it at an age of roughly 6,000 years."²  These are not two descriptions of one model.  They are contradictory claims about the history of the same galaxies, held simultaneously by the two most prominent young-earth astronomers of the last thirty years, and popular creationist material frequently cites both without noticing.

The part no cosmology touches

Suppose ASC is granted in full.  Suppose Genesis uses it, the convention is legitimate, and there is no light travel time problem at all.  What changes?

Less than the debate implies.  A synchrony convention assigns time labels to distant events.  It does not touch proper time, the time actually elapsed along an object's own history, which is an invariant and is the same in every coordinate system.  And it does not touch anything close enough that light travel time is negligible in the first place.

That leaves the age evidence essentially intact:

• The Earth and the solar system. Radiometric ages of terrestrial rocks and meteorites, the counted layers in ice cores and varves, the helioseismic age of the sun. All local. Not one of them involves a light travel time longer than eight minutes.
• Objects a few thousand light years away. Here the ASC/ESC difference is at most a few thousand years — smaller than the ages in dispute. Faulkner's 2017 supernova remnant paper is the cleanest example, and it is a young-earth publication. He tabulates seventeen Galactic remnants with ages above 7,000 years, "five of the SNR ages are at least a million years; the greatest is 4.5 million years," and states: "It would be difficult to reduce any of these age estimates so that they to be compatible with Davies' criterion of 7000 years."¹¹
• The observed state of distant objects. Under ASC every visible object has aged about 6,000 years in its own proper time. So every indicator of a longer stellar history — main-sequence turnoffs in globular clusters, cooling white dwarfs, the structure of galaxy mergers caught in progress — has to be explained as created that way. Lisle accepts this consequence explicitly: "Perhaps God created galaxies with systematic differences depending on their distance from our local group. Not every sequence is a time-sequence."³⁸

The upshot is that ASC converts the distant starlight problem into the appearance-of-age problem, which is the problem created-light-in-transit had all along and which Faulkner rejected as deceptive.  It does not make the appearance of age go away;  it moves it from the light beam to the object.

This is the single most important thing in this article for a reader deciding what to make of young-earth astronomy.  Distant starlight is the argument everyone has heard of, and it is not where the weight lies.

Objections and responses

"You've only shown the models are unfalsifiable.  So is the multiverse."  Fair, and the comparison is apt.  An unfalsifiable model is not thereby false;  it is thereby unable to earn support from evidence.  The article's claim is narrow:  none of these models can be confirmed by observation either, so nobody should present them as scientific results.  The same standard applied to the multiverse cuts the same way, and this project applies it there too.

"Malament refuted the conventionality thesis in 1977, so ASC is simply wrong."  Overstated.  Malament's theorem is real and is a serious argument, but the philosophical literature has not converged.  The Stanford Encyclopedia's survey records Torretti and Norton reading it as decisive and Grünbaum, Janis and Redhead reading it as not, with Grünbaum's rebuttal published as recently as 2010.¹⁴  An article that declares this settled against Lisle is claiming more than the field does.

"ASC must be wrong because relativity says the speed of light is c."  Relativity says the round-trip speed of light in vacuum is c in every inertial frame and in every direction.  It does not fix the one-way speed, which is what ASC changes.  Lisle answers this objection specifically:  a round-trip measurement in two perpendicular directions is "a prediction of both ASC and ESC."³⁸  This is the most common bad objection to ASC and it should be retired.

"The SN 1987A light echo disproves instantaneous inbound light."  It does not, for the reason Lisle gives and works out:  the light that lit the ring travelled away from us before coming back, so it is slow under ASC, and the delay survives.³⁸  In general, a coordinate change cannot alter an observable;  any objection that would work has to attack the convention itself, not its consequences.

"Humphreys' white hole was refuted, so young-earth cosmology has failed."  Also overstated, in the other direction.  Conner and Page's argument is strong and Page is a first-rate relativist, but Humphreys replied, disputed the metric they used, and caught a real error in their own reasoning about centres of mass in an unbounded cosmos.²⁸  The honest description is that the exchange was not resolved and that Humphreys has since moved to a different model.

"If distant starlight is unsolved, doesn't that settle the age of the universe?"  No — but not for the reason usually given.  It does not settle it because distant starlight is not the strongest evidence either way.  The strongest evidence is local and it is covered in this project's articles on radiometric dating, radiocarbon, and the age of the solar system.  Winning or losing the starlight argument changes very little about those.

"Aren't you just repeating what secular astronomers say?"  Check the sources.  The refutation of c decay is by the head of ICR's astro/geophysics department.  The withdrawal of the Carmelian cosmology is by its own author.  The retirement of the missing-supernova-remnant argument is by Answers in Genesis's staff astronomer, in an Answers in Genesis journal.  The statement that the CMB power spectrum is real and unexplained by creationists is in the Creation Research Society Quarterly.  The internal critique of ASC is by a young-earth creationist in the Answers Research Journal.  Nearly every negative verdict in this article was reached first by someone inside the movement.

What would settle it

Not much, and that is the finding.  But three things would move the needle.

A prediction that differs from standard cosmology and can be checked.  Not "the universe should look young," which every young-earth model predicts and which turns on separate arguments about stellar physics.  Something that follows from the cosmology and from nothing else.  No published young-universe cosmology currently has one.

An isotropy calculation for the bounded models.  Humphreys, Hartnett and Faulkner all require a matter distribution with a centre, with the Earth close to it.  For any spherically symmetric structure with a radial gradient, sitting off-centre by a fraction a/R produces a microwave dipole of order a/R.  The observed dipole is fully accounted for by the Sun's motion at 370 km/s, which caps any additional contribution at about one part in a thousand in radius, or one part in 10⁹ by volume.  The published constraints of this type were all built against void models for cosmic acceleration, not against bounded-matter cosmologies, so the numerical exclusion does not transfer without work — but nobody in the young-earth literature has done that work, and the models owe it.

A creationist treatment of the CMB power spectrum.  Repp asked for this in 2022 and nothing has appeared.  The acoustic peaks are the sharpest quantitative prediction in cosmology and the standard model got them right in advance.  Any competing cosmology that cannot address them is not competing.

An honest closing

The young-earth position on distant starlight is in worse shape than its popular literature suggests and better shape than its critics usually allow.

Worse, because the two models most often named in print have been left behind by the men who built them, because the decaying speed of light was refuted forty years ago by a creationist and is still repeated, and because the answer that survives buys nothing observational and its own author says so.

Better, because the conventionality of simultaneity is genuine physics that has not been closed against Lisle, because the big bang's horizon problem is a real parallel and inflation's signature has not been found, and because this is a field that has retracted argument after argument in print, over its own name, in its own journals.  That is more than most movements manage.

The correct summary is Repp's, and it was written by a creationist for creationists:  light travel time is one of the field's unresolved areas.⁴  A reader who wants a young universe should know that the problem is open, that the best available answer works by redefining a coordinate, and that even a complete victory on distant starlight would leave the age of the Earth, the sun, and the nearer stars exactly where the evidence has put them.

Every source behind this article, with what it says and which way it cuts, is catalogued in a companion page:  the literature.

Sources