Can the light year distance of a star determine the age of the earth?

Question

If a star is 40 billion light years away how does that affect the age of the planet and how do christians who think the earth is six thousand years old reconcile that to the creation theory?

Answer 1

Christian creationists, when pressured, tend to come to the conclusion that their god created the Earth to look like it's billions of years old, and also created light already on the way towards Earth from distant stars.

If you ask them if that doesn't mean that their god wants us to believe that the Earth and the Universe are billions of years old, they'll tell you that it's a test of their faith. If you point out that it's not very nice to deceive people in that way, they'll sometimes tell you that God doesn't have to be nice.

Answer 2

They claim that the speed of light has not been constant and was faster in earlier history. Whilst not wanting to rule out a variable speed limit for light from a scientific point of view, such claims by fundamentalists have absolutely no bearing on current scientific knowledge whatsoever. It just makes them look rather silly.

Answer 3

sorry, but many christians do not believe that the earth to be 6000 years old. they are only made by the christian theorists who lived hundreds of years ago, and the public were governed to believe those theories. modern christians follow modern science and their faith, believe me its possible.

Answer 4

The age of 6000 years propagated by a few Christians is actually a mix of two problems: first of all, it takes a rough biblical pedigree as granted and fills the holes with assumptions.

Next, it does a critical translation error. The Babylonians, during the time of Moses, did not have a solar calender yet, they used lunar calendars and counted months instead of solar years. So, until a point, the age of the people was not around 900 years (like in some wrong bible translations), but actually 900 months - about 75 years. A biblical age at that time.

This counting of age changed one point at the bible (don't ask me which exactly, the scientists of the Vatican know that well, but these people also don't claim that the world is only 6000 years old.), and so, the age of the world is around 2000 to 3000 years only, according to such calculations.

But also, the light year distance does not give you an accurate age of the Earth or the Universe. Physics are not that simple. The best way to find out about the age of Earth is the radioactive decay of some isotopes. There are many such tests, which all use the same method. You measure the ratio between undecayed isotopes and the resulting isotopes after the decay. Then you need to apply some correction factors depending on the type of rock and where you found it, for reducing the measurement errors of the resulting isotopes (there can be some of such isotopes already inside, when the rock got formed).

By that, and by combining many such tests, we know that the oldest parts of Earths Crust are about 4 billion years old.