What if the Ordinary Days of Creation Weren’t Ordinary?

A few months ago the Institute for Creation Research posted the following to their social media account:

“God might have allowed clocks in deep space to tick at much faster rates in order to let distant starlight reach us during the literal 24 hours of the creation week’s Day 4.” — ICR (@ICRscience), April 26, 2026

I responded with a video on my YT channel (see below) but here I expand on those thoughts.

Statements like this one have a way of sliding past our notice if we read quickly. It sounds technical, even sophisticated. To the naïve reader it gives off a “we have done the physics” vibe. But I want to suggest that this single sentence, posted apparently without any sense of irony, quietly dismantles one of the most important arguments that young-earth creationist organizations have spent the last sixty years constructing. Let me explain what I mean.

I should say at the outset that the distant starlight problem is a genuine challenge for young-earth creationism, and I do not fault ICR for taking it seriously. The problem is simple to state: the observable universe is billions of light-years across, which means the light reaching us from distant galaxies has been traveling for—by ordinary physical reckoning—billions of years. If the universe is only six to ten thousand years old, how did that light get here? This is not a question invented by critics of young-earth creationism. It is a question that YEC physicists and astronomers have wrestled with for decades, and it deserves a serious answer. What I want to examine here is not whether ICR is right to take the problem seriously, but what their proposed solution costs them both theologically and rhetorically and I don’t think they have fully reckoned with that cost.

A Crowded Field of Abandoned Solutions

Before evaluating the specific claim in ICR’s tweet, it is worth pausing to survey the landscape of YEC solutions to the starlight problem, because that landscape itself tells us something important. Over the past thirty years, YEC physicists have offered a succession of cosmological models to explain how distant starlight could reach a young Earth, and the history of those models is, to put it gently, not a history of convergence on a settled answer.

The most famous of these is physicist Russell Humphreys’ “white hole cosmology,” first published in his 1994 book Starlight and Time. Humphreys proposed that the early universe resembled a white hole—essentially the time-reversal of a black hole—and that Earth was located near its center. As the universe expanded rapidly, relativistic time dilation meant that billions of years could elapse in distant space while only days passed on Earth. The model attracted considerable enthusiasm in YEC circles, and it continues to be cited in YEC literature today. What is less widely known is that Humphreys himself has abandoned it—not once, but twice—moving through a second and then a third relativistic model as problems were identified with each earlier version.

Around the same time, Australian physicist John Hartnett developed a variation on general relativistic cosmology, building on the work of secular cosmologist Moshe Carmeli, which he offered as an alternative solution to the light-travel time problem. Hartnett too has since abandoned that model. He has now embraced a completely different approach called the Anisotropic Synchrony Convention (ASC) which was proposed by ICR’s former Director of Physical Sciences, Jason Lisle.

Lisle’s ASC is the most currently fashionable solution in YEC circles, and it works quite differently from the time-dilation approach implied in the ICR tweet. Rather than proposing that time literally ran faster in deep space, Lisle argues from the philosophy of physics that the one-way speed of light which is the speed of light traveling in a single direction, rather than the round-trip speed we can actually measure, is not fixed by any physical observation and is therefore a matter of convention. Under the ASC, one can legitimately define simultaneity such that light traveling toward an observer arrives instantaneously. On this view, the stars were genuinely created on Day 4, and their light reached Earth on Day 4.This is not because clocks elsewhere ran faster, but because of how one chooses to define “when” an event occurs.

This is all worth knowing because it creates an immediate puzzle: ICR’s social media post seems to be promoting the time-dilation approach—faster deep-space clocks—while ICR’s previous lead physicist advocates for the ASC approach, which makes a fundamentally different set of claims about the physics involved. These are not minor variations on the same idea. They rest on different physical mechanisms, different philosophical frameworks, and different implications for what we can say about the age of the universe.

If ICR’s scientists cannot agree on which solution to their own problem they actually endorse, that is itself a data point worth noting. For the purposes of this post, however, I want to focus on the time-dilation approach suggested in the tweet, because it is the version that creates the most serious internal problems for YEC’s core theological arguments.

The Cornerstone Argument and What It Requires

To understand why the tweet matters, we need to understand what is at stake in YEC’s “ordinary days” argument, because that argument is not a peripheral feature of young-earth creationism—it is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure.

For decades, organizations like ICR, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Ministries International have argued with considerable force that the days of Genesis 1 are ordinary, sequential, twenty-four-hour days—days that an ordinary human being can understand because they are exactly the kind of days we experience. The argument runs through several streams of thought simultaneously. Linguistically, YEC scholars point to the Hebrew word yom combined with the “evening and morning” framework of Genesis 1 as evidence that the text intends literal days. Theologically, they appeal to Exodus 20:11, where the Fourth Commandment provides the rationale for the human work week: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.” The analogy between divine time and human time is the point. Your work week is structured after God’s creation week because God’s creation week was a week just like yours—or rather, yours is patterned after his.

YEC communicators have also made much of the confessional language of the Westminster Confession of Faith, which states that God created “in the space of six days.” ICR’s own website includes articles arguing that this confessional phrase was intended to refer to ordinary calendar days, appealing to the writings of Westminster Assembly members to establish that they understood the days to be literal and sequential. The appeal to the Confession is strategic: it frames the ordinary-days argument not merely as a preference of twentieth-century American fundamentalism, but as the settled conviction of the Reformed tradition going back to the seventeenth century.

The word “ordinary” is a key in all of this. The days must be ordinary in the sense of being universally comprehensible, humanly relatable, and physically consistent. The Sabbath commandment only works, in YEC reasoning, if the days of creation week were the same kind of days that an Israelite farmer would observe on his calendar. A day is a day is a day. That is the argument. And it is an argument that carries genuine rhetorical force with the conservative evangelical and Reformed audiences to whom YEC primarily speaks.

What Faster Clocks in Deep Space Actually Imply

Now let us return to the tweet and follow its logic carefully, because following YEC arguments carefully is, I have found, where the most interesting discoveries tend to occur.

ICR proposes that “God might have allowed clocks in deep space to tick at much faster rates” during the creation week. The purpose of this proposal is to explain how light from distant galaxies (which are billions of light-years away) could have reached Earth during Day 4. For the light to have made that journey within twenty-four Earth hours, the physics must accommodate it somehow. If clocks in deep space ran trillions of times faster than clocks on Earth, then from the perspective of those deep-space regions, billions of years would have elapsed—providing ample time, as ICR’s own scientists have noted, for light to traverse the vast distances of the observable universe.

Let us be clear about what this means. On this model, during Day 4 of creation week—a twenty-four-hour period by Earth clocks—the universe itself experienced something on the order of billions of years. The stars did not merely appear old; the physical processes necessary to produce the light we observe actually occurred over cosmic timescales in those regions of space. The universe, in any meaningful cosmological sense, is not six thousand years old. It is billions of years old as experienced by the matter and energy within it. What is young, on this model, is Earth time. Earth clocks are young. The universe, by its own internal clock, is ancient.

And that brings us to the problem.

If Day 4 was an ordinary twenty-four-hour day as experienced on Earth, but billions of years elapsed in deep space during that same day, then in what sense did God create the universe “in the space of six days” in any way that an ordinary human being can relate to? The Confession’s phrase “in the space of six days” was meant to describe the duration of God’s creative work. But the duration of God’s creative work, on this model, was not six days when measured by any cosmic frame of reference. It was billions of years. The six days are real only if you restrict your measurement to the surface of the early Earth—a choice that seems curiously arbitrary when the whole point of the creation account, in YEC interpretation, is to describe God’s creation of the entire universe and everything in it.

The Fourth Commandment parallel fares no better. The commandment appeals to God’s creation week as the model for the human work week. Your six days of work and one day of rest mirror God’s six days of work and one day of rest. But what exactly are you mirroring, if God’s “six days” included a Day 4 during which billions of years elapsed in the universe he was creating? The symmetry between divine time and human time which is the very symmetry on which the Sabbath argument depends, has been quietly dissolved. The days of creation week were not ordinary days in any universal sense. They were ordinary days only by one particular local clock, in one particular location, while the rest of creation experienced something utterly different.

Am I overstating my case here? There are thoughtful people who have grappled seriously with questions of time, simultaneity, and the creation narrative, and those questions deserve more than a dismissive wave. But the YEC position has not been characterized by that kind of nuance. It has been characterized by confident, repeated insistence that the days of Genesis 1 are ordinary days that anyone can understand, that the Sabbath commandment seals the case, and that anyone who departs from a literal reading is accommodating secular science at the expense of scriptural authority.

The tweet reveals that when the physics becomes inconvenient, even ICR is willing to entertain a cosmology in which time runs at radically different rates in different parts of the universe during the very week they insist was composed of ordinary days. These two positions cannot both be maintained without serious qualification.

The Accusation They Level at Others

There is a second problem here, and it is in some ways more significant than the first, because it goes to the question of intellectual consistency. YEC organizations have built a substantial part of their public identity around a specific accusation directed at old-earth Christians, theistic evolutionists, and Christians who accept mainstream science: the accusation is that these believers are allowing “secular science” to force a reinterpretation of Scripture. The argument runs like this: God’s Word is clear. The plain reading of Genesis 1 gives us six ordinary days. But evolutionary scientists tell us the universe is billions of years old. And so, under pressure from this scientific consensus, some Christians begin to reinterpret Scripture—finding framework hypotheses, analogical days, and day-age readings that conveniently accommodate the scientific consensus. In doing so, they let fallible human science sit in judgment over infallible divine revelation.

This is a serious accusation, and it has been remarkably effective with conservative evangelical audiences who are rightly concerned about the authority of Scripture. But consider what the ICR tweet requires us to accept.

Why does ICR need any solution to the starlight problem at all? The answer is that modern astronomy has established through multiple independent and convergent lines of evidence, including stellar parallax measurements, the period-luminosity relationship of Cepheid variable stars, Type Ia supernovae used as standard candles, the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the redshifts of distant galaxies, that the observable universe is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter and that the most distant objects we can observe lie some 13 billion light-years away. ICR does not dispute the observational finding that distant galaxies are extraordinarily far away. What they dispute is the inference that the light from those galaxies therefore took billions of years to reach us.

But here is the critical point. The entire intellectual apparatus of the time-dilation solution including faster-ticking deep-space clocks, differential rates of temporal passage across the cosmos, the application of general relativistic physics to the early universe, all exists because modern science has established the reality of a universe that is billions of light-years across. Without that modern scientific finding, there would be no starlight problem to solve. The very reason ICR needs to invoke exotic relativistic physics is that the findings of modern astronomy demand an explanation that simple six-thousand-year physics cannot provide. ICR has accepted what modern astronomy reveals about the scale of the universe. They have then turned to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was a product of twentieth-century physics, not biblical exegesis, to find a mechanism that might be compatible with their reading of Genesis.

This is, in the most precise sense possible, allowing modern scientific findings to reshape how one understands what the creation week involved. It is doing exactly what YEC accuses old-earth Christians of doing, with the crucial difference that it is being done while simultaneously denying that this is what is happening.

I do not say this to score a rhetorical point. I say it because intellectual consistency matters, and because the Christians who populate the churches ICR serves deserve to see this tension named clearly. If it is legitimate for ICR to deploy Einsteinian time dilation in response to what modern astronomy has discovered about the universe, then it is certainly legitimate for old-earth Christians to engage the same scientific findings and draw different conclusions about what they imply for biblical interpretation. The question of which conclusions one draws is genuinely worth debating. But the claim that one side of that debate is faithfully reading Scripture while the other is capitulating to secular science is not sustainable when both sides are working with the same modern scientific data.

The ICR Hedge and What It Tells Us

I want to draw attention to something that might otherwise be easy to miss in the tweet: the words “God might have allowed.”

This is a hedge. When ICR writes about the days of Genesis 1 being ordinary days, about the global Flood, about the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 pointing to a young earth—there is no “might have” in that discourse. The language is confident. The plain reading is clear. The text means what it says. But when the physics of the observable universe creates a problem that resists easy resolution, suddenly the mode shifts: God might have allowed this. This is speculation dressed in the language of possibility. What is being admitted, whether intentionally or not, is that this solution is a hypothesis constructed after the fact to rescue a prior commitment, not a reading derived from Scripture itself.

No reader of Genesis 1, approaching the text in the absence of modern cosmology, would ever have derived the conclusion that clocks in deep space were ticking trillions of times faster during Day 4. That conclusion comes entirely from modern physics, worked backward into the text. The tweet is not a case of Scripture interpreting Scripture. It is a case of modern astrophysics presenting a problem, and a physicist-theologian offering a speculative physical mechanism in response. That is a perfectly understandable thing to do. But it should be acknowledged for what it is.

Natural Revelation and the Integrity of Creation’s Testimony

There is a final dimension of this problem that I find most theologically significant, and it is the one that I suspect will resonate most with confessional evangelical readers who take seriously the doctrine of natural revelation.

The Westminster Confession’s first chapter affirms that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence, do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable.” Calvin’s own theology of the sensus divinitatis and the theater of God’s glory elaborates this at length: creation is a genuine and reliable vehicle of divine self-disclosure. It tells us something true. What it reveals may be limited and insufficient for saving knowledge, as the Confession goes on to say, but it is not deceptive. The book of nature does not lie.

Every serious YEC solution to the starlight problem—whether time dilation, the ASC, or something else—must grapple with the fact that the observable universe presents an overwhelming, convergent, and internally consistent appearance of enormous age. The cosmic microwave background, the distribution of galaxies, the light curves of supernovae, the ratios of radioactive isotopes in ancient rocks, the layered record of ice cores, the fossil sequence—these are not isolated data points that happen to look old. They form a coherent narrative in which multiple independent lines of evidence tell the same story, cross-checking and confirming one another at every turn. This is what a genuinely old universe would look like. It is also, apparently, what ICR’s young universe looks like.

Now, if God created the universe with clocks in deep space running trillions of times faster during the creation week and if the universe genuinely experienced billions of years of physical history during that period, producing light that carries information about stars and galaxies that actually formed and evolved over cosmic timescales, then what exactly is natural revelation communicating to us? If the creation’s testimony to its own age is not a reliable guide to its actual age, in what sense does it function as revelation at all? The psalmist declares that “the heavens declare the glory of God.” But if those heavens are constructed in such a way that their most fundamental self-disclosure—the light they send to us, carrying information about their own history—communicates something systematically false about when and how they came to be, then the declaration of the heavens becomes very difficult to interpret.

I raise this not to suggest that there is an easy answer, but because I believe this is where the conversation should be. The evangelical protestant tradition, and others for that matter, has always understood natural revelation and special revelation as two books written by the same Author, and has expected that they will ultimately agree. The persistent challenge that the physical creation poses to young-earth chronology is not a reason to doubt Scripture. It is an invitation—in the spirit of semper reformanda—to ask whether our reading of Scripture is as carefully attended to the full range of evidence as it should be. That question is not a concession to secularism. It is an act of theological integrity.

A Closing Observation

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that the distant starlight problem is insoluble, or that everyone who takes it seriously is acting in bad faith. I am not saying that ICR’s physicists have no serious arguments to make. Jason Lisle holds a legitimate doctorate in astrophysics, and his engagement with the philosophy of simultaneity and the conventionality of the one-way speed of light touches on real questions in the foundations of physics, however much I disagree with his conclusions. The starlight problem is a genuine difficulty, and genuine difficulties deserve genuine engagement.

What I am saying is that a casual tweet stating that “God might have allowed clocks in deep space to tick at much faster rates in order to let distant starlight reach us during the literal 24 hours of the creation week’s Day 4” carries implications that cut directly against the ordinary-days argument that ICR has championed for decades. It implies that the universe is billions of years old by any cosmic measure. It implies that modern scientific findings about the scale of the universe are what forced this reinterpretation of the creation week. And it reveals, in its hedging language, that this is speculation rather than exegesis. These are not minor problems. They are the kind of problems that deserve an honest answer.

The faith of the Christians in our churches does not need to be protected from honest questions. It needs to be built on something more durable than the proposition that the universe looks young, when every careful examination of that universe suggests the opposite. A faith that depends on God having arranged the clocks of deep space to mislead us about the age of creation is a faith built on a very fragile foundation indeed.

Blessings, Joel

References

Answers in Genesis. “In the Space of Six Days.” June 26, 2020. https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/in-the-space-of-six-days/

Answers in Genesis. “The Distant Starlight Problem: What Are the Possible Answers?” https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/distant-starlight/

Hebert, Jake. “Seeing Distant Starlight in a Young Universe.” Institute for Creation Research, June 30, 2022. https://www.icr.org/content/seeing-distant-starlight-young-universe

ICR (@ICRscience). Twitter/X post, April 26, 2026, 5:07 AM.

Institute for Creation Research. “Creeds and the Six Creation Days.” https://www.icr.org/article/creeds-six-creation-days

Humphreys, D. Russell. Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe. Master Books, 1994.

Lisle, Jason. “Anisotropic Synchrony Convention—A Solution to the Distant Starlight Problem.” Answers Research Journal 3 (2010): 191–207.