The Speed of Light, Simultaneity and Genesis

Jason Lisle made some amazing predictions about the data that would come back from the James Webb Space Telescope.

On January 21, 2022, he made his predictions less than a month after the mission launched on December 25, 2021. In July the results began coming in. On September 9, 2022, he announced that his predictions were confirmed.

Essentially, he predicted that there would be more galaxies at further redshifts than anticipated. He predicted that the composition of the stars would contain heavier elements than expected. He also predicted that scientists would claim that stellar evolution went further into the past than they previously thought.

Lisle’s predictions were not randomly contrary to what many scientists expected to see. They were grounded on Hans Reichenbach’s conventionality of simultaneity thesis for relativity theory and Genesis 1.

Reichenbach’s thesis claimed that the constant speed of light posited by relativity theory was best represented by the two-way speed of light, not its one-way speed. No one can measure the one-way speed of light given relativity since two clocks can’t be kept synchronized when one of them moves away from the other. However, the two-way, round-trip speed of light could be measured with a single clock and a mirror.

It is that round-trip speed, the only measurable speed, that is the constant called the speed of light. That means that the speed of light going to the mirror does not have to be the speed of light coming back. So, for example, the speed of light going from the earth to a galaxy 13.8 billion round-trip light years away from the earth could go at half the round-trip speed on the way out taking 27.6 billion years to get there, but come back almost instantly on the return trip. The total distance traveled would be the distance to the galaxy (13.8 billion light years taking 27.6 billion years) plus the distance back (13.8 billion light years taking 0 years) for a total of 27.6 billion light years travelled in 27.6 billion years.

Because of Reichenbach’s thesis what we see in those space telescopes may be happening right now, not billions of years ago. From relativity theory alone, properly using the round-trip speed of light, one cannot tell.

If light from those distant galaxies arrived on Earth almost instantaneously then what we would be seeing would be how those galaxies actually look today. Such galaxies would not be expected to show any hypothesized stellar evolution and, indeed, they don’t. Their light shows heavier elements than lithium, significantly oxygen which with hydrogen are the elements of the water molecule (see Genesis 1:2, 6-8). Their size is too large and orderly. They are too close to that God-surrogate, the big bang.

But if the speed of light incoming from space were nearly instantaneous that would mean that the Earth is very, very, very, very special.

I have wondered if one could save the big bang by acknowledging as nearly instantaneous the speed of the incoming light to the earth. All of that hypothesized stellar evolution would no longer have to be there. However, that would likely be too much for secularists (or even Christians trapped by the charm of the big bang’s unbiblical beginning) to pay. They would no longer be able to assert how old the universe was. They would no longer be able to say that the Earth is just some insignificant blue dot lost in space. Rather they would be admitting that such light were specifically aimed toward the earth. And although it might save the big bang in the eyes of its followers it would demote it to an unfalsifiable, pseudo-scientific myth. So, I guess that wouldn’t save it after all.

Jason Lisle could make his predictions with confidence not only because he accepted Reichenbach’s conventionality of simultaneity thesis, but also because Genesis 1:14-19 told him that the heavens were set there “to give light upon the earth”. And, as soon as God spoke the heavens into existence, “it was so”. When the heavenly lights reached the earth, they did what they were told to do that very day, that very moment, nearly instantaneously.

Genesis 1:14-19 KJV
14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that [it was] good.
19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:2, 6-8 KJV
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
…
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.