: : If our galaxy formed 6,000 years ago, we could still receive light emitted from distant parts of the universe 10,15 or 20 billion years ago, provided the universe existed at that time. : GOOD POINT

: It is possible the universe is old: in the bible, God formed this physical universe from the waters of the deep (could also mean nothing). But the point of the bible is that everything in the physical universe is created around the Earth; so, like the canvas the painting is on, why does it matter how old the universe is?

Dear Hunter: Not so. God created light along with the universe in one week, by your measure. So we could not see light emitted millions of years ago because according to the bible light did not exist then. Regarding the galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years in diameter. So if light was greated some 6,000 years ago, we could only see a small percentage of the galaxy today. A careful reading of Genesis can clear all the miscomceptions. After god created light, a day or so later he created the lights in the heavens. Now assuming we have the speed of light correctly as well as its constancy, the lights in the heavens were seen in one or two days. That means that the heavens were at most one ligth-week away from the earth. Well the sun is 93 light-minutes away from the earth, but the nearest star is 4.83 light-years away. So if god created stars as we have come to understand them, humans on earth could have seen the first star after 5 years, and it would have taken 100,000 years to see the entire Milky Way. So if you accept the existence and size of the Milky Way, then you have to enhance the length of a day of god's time by a factor of 365 times 100,000, or one of god's days equals 36 million years. Actually that's not so different from the Hindu concept of a day of god's time. The only alternative is to assume that the earth is like that movie where a town was surrounded by a hemisphere and the lights of the heavens came from lights on the hemisphere.