Creation Station
Space
The Speed of Light — An Absolute in the Universe, or Is It?
by Sean Meek, Director of Project CREATION
The
average science book treats the speed of light as an absolute. This is
an area that both evolutionists and compromisers have used as evidence
against the Universe being only a few thousand years old. The argument
is, how can a Universe be a few thousand years old, when it would take
billions of years for light to travel to Earth from distant stars? This
argument has been all too successful in persuading many to put the
fallible ideas of men above the teachings of the Bible.
Several years ago Creationists Barry Setterfield and Trevor
Norman became two, of a number of scientists, who have proposed that
the speed of light has been decreasing since it was created. Using data
collected over the last 300 years they found a steady decrease in its
speed. Not surprisingly they were harshly criticized, but not refuted.
Their findings have recently received new attention with a report by
Reuters that a team of (evolutionist) Australian scientists from
Sydney's Macquerie University, say it is possible that the speed of
light has slowed "over billions of years". They have proposed that the
speed of light may not be a constant, a revolutionary idea that could
unseat one of the most cherished laws of modern physics - Einstein's
theory of relativity. (August 7, 2002 - Reuters).
What I find most interesting about what has happened is that what was
supposed to be an absolute fact of science, may not be after all. This
could very well answer the question of how the Universe can be both
very large and very young. It would mean that the current speed of
light may indicate the distance to stars, but would say nothing about
their age.
Evolutionists regularly claim that evolution is as confirmed a
fact of science as the constancy of the speed of
light. But all true science is tentative, always subject to change. But
evolutionism is not science; it is an anti-God religion and will not be
affected by any discovery of true science.
Prominent evolutionist Richard Lewontin makes this abundantly clear in
the following quote. "We take the side of science (evolution) in spite
of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite , of its
failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life,
in spite of the tolerance of the scientific (evolutionist) community
for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have
a prior commitment to materialism (atheism). It is not that the methods
and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an
apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material
explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying
to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism (atheism) is an
absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." "Billion and
Billions of Demons", p. 31. New York Review (Jan 9, 1997)
One of the most unfortunate things in all of this are those Christians
who seek to compromise the Bible with evolution, by whatever name that
compromise is given. True science never contradicts the Bible, but
evolutionist stories often do.
