The most popular version of this generation’s view of creation states that some 15 to 20 billion years ago, the universe did not exist, nor did empty space.

Astronomer Wendy Freedman and others recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance to a galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, and her measurement suggests that the universe is expanding faster, and therefore is younger, than previously thought. In fact, it “implies a cosmic age as little as eight billion years,” reported Scientific American magazine just last June. While eight billion years sounds like a very long time, it is only about half the currently estimated age of the universe. This creates a special problem, since, as the report goes on to note, “other data indicate that certain stars are at least 14 billion years old.” If Freedman’s numbers hold up, those elderly stars would turn out to be older than the big bang itself!