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What Does the Milky Way Say About Evolution?

Job 22:12
“Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!”

When we look at the size of the universe, it sometimes becomes easier to see evolution as credible. After all, when we see galaxies that are said to be billions of light years away, it seems Milky Waypossible that there really have been millions of years. But, in truth, the immensity of space is really not so friendly to evolution’s claim that the universe, and the earth, are billions of years old.

The Milky Way galaxy, like many galaxies, is a spiral galaxy. You have probably seen the illustrations showing spiral arms of stars wrapped around the bright center of our galaxy. The stars closest to the center of our galaxy rotate around the center more rapidly than the stars further out on the spiral arms. When these differences in speed are worked out, we discover that our galaxy, no less our earth, cannot be billions of years old. If the Milky Way was that old, the spiral arms would have long ago become nothing more than a disc of stars. Evolutionary scientists recognize this problem, calling it “the winding up dilemma.” But they have been unable to come up with an explanation that is satisfactory.

As we look at the creation for evidence of its age, the clues we have so far found can only give us an upper limit. They cannot give us an exact age. But even the size of the universe fails to support the idea that the creation is billions of years old. If instead we piece together the Biblical genealogies, which are really ancient calendars, we arrive at an age for the creation of a little more than 6,000 years.

Prayer:
Father, I praise and thank You that though You are great, You have loved me through Your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Notes:
D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D., Evidence for a Young World, Creation Matters, July/August 1999. Image courtesy of Yuri Beletsky. (CC BY 3.0)