Starlight and the Convention of Simultaneity

In conversation with Dr. Jason Lisle (PhD astrophysics, Univ. of Colorado), the old objection I used to raise myself — that starlight from galaxies millions of light-years away requires a universe millions of years old — turns out to rest on an unexamined assumption.

Einstein showed that the one-way speed of light is a matter of convention, not direct measurement; only the round-trip speed is fixed. Lisle’s anisotropic synchrony convention (ASC) takes seriously that light’s outward trip can be instantaneous from Earth’s frame, which fits the observational data and, I’d add, the character of God: if light simply arrived already encoded with a history of events that never happened — a supernova that never occurred — that would make God the author of a fiction, which Scripture will not allow (Numbers 23:19).

The old “God made the light already in transit” answer is a different claim, and rightly abandoned; it really would have God painting false histories into the sky.