Making Light Work of Creation

Two things conjoin, as they sometimes do, to set me thinking.

The first was the story of Hen Browne, unpaid Guardian of Stonehenge and avid creationist. He believed that some gelatinous matter congealed on the stones of Stonehenge was the dried-up waters of the Deluge. More creditably, he walked all the way from Amesbury to the London Museum to present them with his set of models of Stonehenge "as-is" and "as-was", as we would say in these Marketing-driven times. Since poor Hen lived in Victorian ones, he was merely told to sling his hook and take his cork models with him. I can imagine him, standing there in Bloomsbury, looking at his set. Resolving not to take in "Les Mis", then an established West End hit. And then imagine him dragging his way back off to walk back to Wiltshire. A heroic, devout and yet definitely off-beam kind of a bloke.

And the other was Anita's musing on Joseph and the way he could only see part of the story. Anita refers to the light of stars taking tens of thousands of years to reach the earth.

But Hen's story, of course, would shatter Anita's analogy. If the universe were only 6,000 years old then the light from even quite nearby stars was never emitted by those stars. God must have created that light en route.

But light isn't just light, is it? It's not just an eastern glow. Because light is actually carrying information (I am also including X-ray, Ultra-violet etc raditation in this. We welcome radiation of all wavelengths and none). If the light comes from a pulsar, we can tell. If the light is being interfered with by an exoplanet we can see that. If the star whose light we see exploded as a supernova, that information will be passed on to us.

But that means that in a 6,000 year old universe, God must have encoded all this data into the light streams. Including the explosions of stars that never existed. Like Joseph, but in reverse, we have the story of a star that never was.

So either God has lied to us, or the first chapters of Genesis are a poetical and mythical theological reflection on what life's all about and not a scientific theory at all.

I know which one I'm going with.