Young Earth Creationism's Time Dilation Argument and its Defeat by Gravity Waves

One of the most significant challenges to Young Earth Creationism (YEC), which posits an age of the universe of only a few thousand years, is the “Light Travel-Time” Problem. If the universe is only 6,000 years old, how can we observe galaxies that are billions of light-years away? The light we see from them must have traveled for billions of years to reach Earth, fundamentally contradicting the young-age model.

The Time Dilation Solution

To reconcile this discrepancy, YEC cosmologies, most notably the model proposed by physicist D. Russell Humphreys in Starlight and Time, invoke cosmic time dilation based on Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. This theory states that time passes at different rates for observers in different gravitational or velocity fields. The key idea of this YEC model is that the Earth is located near the center of a spherically symmetric, finite universe.

According to this specific model:

  • Earth's Location: The Earth is situated in a deep gravitational potential well near the center of the universe.

  • Expansion: During the Creation Week, God rapidly expanded or "stretched out" the cosmos, as referenced in several biblical passages (e.g., Job 9:8, Isaiah 40:22).

  • Relative Time: This expansion created a significant difference in the passage of time. Clocks in the distant, expanding regions of space would have ticked billions of years, allowing starlight to complete its journey to Earth, while clocks on Earth, in its central, deeper gravitational well, registered only the six days of the Creation Week.

  • Simultaneous Events: In this scenario, events that happened billions of years ago in the distant cosmos's time frame (like a star's explosion) would have their light reach Earth almost immediately after its creation from the perspective of an Earth observer.

In essence, the argument attempts to create a bimodal timescale: an "old" universe time for distant light to travel and a "young" Earth time for the biblical narrative.

The Defeat by Gravitational Wave Astronomy

The time dilation argument, which is built on the premise that only the light we see is subject to this phenomenon, faces a critical defeat with the advent of multi-messenger astronomy, specifically the detection of gravitational waves (GW).

On August 17, 2017, the LIGO and Virgo observatories detected a gravitational wave event, GW170817, caused by the merger of two neutron stars. This was immediately followed, just 1.7 seconds later, by the detection of a burst of light—a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A)—by space telescopes. The source of both signals was located in the galaxy NGC 4993, approximately 130 million light-years away.

The Fatal Flaw

The simultaneous arrival of the gravitational wave and the light wave from 130 million light-years away invalidates the time dilation explanation for the following reasons:

  • Shared Speed: The observation confirmed one of the key predictions of General Relativity: that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light (c). They completed their 130-million-year journey with virtually no measurable difference in arrival time.

  • Cosmic Consistency: If the YEC time dilation argument were correct, it would have to apply to both gravitational waves and light waves. The time dilation mechanism is an effect on the fabric of spacetime itself, not just on electromagnetic radiation (light).

  • The Time-Stretching Problem: A core part of the YEC model is that the universe experienced rapid time dilation to allow the billions of years of light travel to pass, while the Earth remained young. However, if time dilation were operating as described in the YEC model to stretch time in the distant universe, the merger of the neutron stars in NGC 4993 would have had to appear not as a single, momentary event, but as a phenomenon that was stretched out over vast timescales from our perspective.

When astronomers view a physical event in a very distant, rapidly expanding universe, not only is the light redshifted (stretched in wavelength), but the time duration of the event itself is also stretched. For an event 130 million light-years away, a burst lasting only a fraction of a second should be observed on Earth to last for a much longer, time-dilated duration.

The GW170817 event arrived as a sharp, instantaneous burst of both gravity and light, consistent with an event 130 million light-years away where the time dilation is minimal and negligible exactly as predicted by standard cosmology. The fact that two fundamentally different types of waves (gravity and electromagnetic) traveling through the same 130 million years of cosmic time arrived simultaneously and in their un-stretched form provides powerful, direct evidence that time in that distant galaxy has been running at the same rate as time on Earth for at least 130 million years, directly contradicting the proposed YEC cosmic time dilation mechanism.





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