Sunday School With the Liberty Bell Press,
One of the most common questions thrown at creationists is to ask them to explain how light could have traveled millions of years across the universe, if the universe is only 6,000 years old.
Such a question actually contains its own misunderstanding of the facts. It is an issue of terminology. The distance to stars is usually measured in
light years. A light year is a unit of
distance, not a unit of
time. It obviously has a relationship to time, in this sense: Light is observed to travel at a speed of approximately 186,000 miles per second, through a vacuum. Therefore, in a year, we can calculate that the light should have traveled:
186,000 x 365.25 x 24 x 60 x 60 = 5,869,713,600,000 miles, or about 6 trillion miles