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Explaining a misunderstanding about a YEC cosmology

Was the fourth day an ‘ordinary’ day?

Photo by Nathan Smartt

Our June 25 article, New Creation Cosmology, disturbed one reader:

Russ Humphreys replies,

Dear Chris,

I’m glad you want to defend the Biblical record of a young universe, created in six days of ordinary length, according to Exodus 20:11 and many other clear passages. I’m sorry you didn’t see that my new cosmology rests comfortably within that constraint. Perhaps you missed one very important phrase in the article’s first paragraph (emphasis added):

“ … all during one ordinary-length day on Earth, the fourth day of creation.”

By “ordinary-length,” I mean that as measured by clocks (and by all physical processes) on Earth, the fourth day was the same length of time as an ordinary day of the week at present. If you had been on the earth during the fourth day, you would have experienced just one day of ordinary duration. You would have experienced only 24 hours worth of thoughts, words, meals, sleepiness, clock ticks, and earth-turning.

According to my new theory (which of course could be wrong), on Earth there was one instant during the fourth day when God created the stars and brought their light here.¹ If you had been on the night side of the earth and awake, you would have seen the sky black one instant and filled with stars the next. During that transition, no time would pass on Earth.

I doubt you would have felt the instant of timelessness, even though in that instant billions of years worth of events happened in the distant cosmos—billions of years as measured by distant clocks.² If you could have seen (you couldn’t) what happened in the far cosmos during that instant, it would have been like seeing a movie in extreme fast forward.³ A billion-year epic in the blink of an eye! Although the fourth day was of ordinary length, it was nonetheless extraordinary in what happened elsewhere in the cosmos!

Perhaps the core of the problem is that you feel the billions of years registered by the distant clocks are the ones that really count. Most people feel that time is something absolute, running continuously and unchangingly at the same rate everywhere. There may be such a time behind the scenes, but that is not the time we experience. The physical time in which we are enmeshed is a created thing, like space, matter, and energy. It had a beginning and will have an end.

We know from experiments that time flows at different speeds in different places. For example, clocks run faster on the tops of mountains than at sea level. The clocks in GPS satellites run faster than clocks on Earth and the calculations of position have to account for this, otherwise the position given will be seriously in error. These are real, measurable effects.

So time dilation is a reality. My new cosmology simply takes advantage of that fact, as do the other three relativistic creation cosmologies as well. God chose that His creation, physical time, would flow at different rates in different places.

It is indeed confusing not to have the same time everywhere. But we do have reason to give preference to Earth clocks. They are the ones that count both personally and biblically. In Genesis chapter 1, God set up a system whereby we could measure time by means of the Earth’s rotation and its orbital motion around the Sun relative to the stars and constellations. And He gave us times according to those clocks. It was in six days E.S.T.—Earth Standard Time—that God made the universe, He said in Exodus 20:11 and elsewhere. So when someone asks you, “How old is the universe?” you should say, “By whose clocks?” By the only ones that matter, the cosmos is 6,000 years young!

Well, I’m not much concerned with my credibility. If credibility, especially in the academic world, motivated me, I should never have become a young-world creationist! I’m more interested in what Christ thinks of me. I hope that, when I see Him, I can be in line, though far behind Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell and Henry Morris, for whatever honors (the “Noble Prizes”?) He may award scientists who are faithful to Him.

Sincerely,

Russ Humphreys

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