Joel Duff raises a useful challenge in his recent Naturalis Historia article, “What if the ‘Ordinary’ Days of Creation Weren’t Ordinary?” His immediate target is an Institute for Creation Research suggestion that relativistic effects might have allowed vastly more proper time to elapse in distant regions of the cosmos while approximately twenty-four hours passed on Earth.
Duff sees a tension. Young-earth creationists commonly insist that the days of Genesis 1 are ordinary days. Yet some are willing to entertain a cosmology in which remote regions of the universe accumulated radically more proper time during those same days. If billions of years elapsed elsewhere during Day 4, he asks, in what meaningful sense was Day 4 ordinary?¹
That is a fair question for any proposal that uses “ordinary” without qualification.
But the question must be framed more carefully.
The claim is that the days were ordinary. Nobody claims that creation was ordinary.
Creation of the universe is extraordinary by anyone’s reckoning.
That distinction should precede the cosmology.
Ordinary days, extraordinary acts
There is a category distinction embedded in the phrase “ordinary days of creation.”
An ordinary temporal interval can contain an extraordinary event:
ordinary temporal interval ≠ ordinary event occurring within it
If Christ turned water into wine on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, Tuesday would remain Tuesday. The event occurring during it would be miraculous.
Genesis presents the most extraordinary series of events imaginable: the creation, ordering, and commissioning of the universe itself. There is no ordinary natural process of universe creation against which Genesis 1 can be calibrated. “Let there be light” is not described as an accelerated version of a process that humans can observe and reproduce. Neither is the divine creation of living things, nor the creation of Adam.
Thus, the young-earth claim is narrower than critics sometimes imply:
The temporal intervals described in Genesis are ordinary terrestrial days. The creative acts occurring within those intervals are extraordinary divine acts.
Once that distinction is granted, there is no obvious reason to assume that the amount of physical change accomplished during a creation day must be bounded by the amount of change ordinarily accomplished by present providential processes in twenty-four hours.
To impose such a requirement would assume ordinary process rates precisely at the point under dispute: the commissioning of creation itself.
And creation, by any account, is not ordinary.
Scripture before cosmology
Before asking whether a particular relativistic cosmology succeeds, Christians should first ask what Scripture reveals about God’s relationship to created temporal processes.
The prior question is not:
Can a specific model make distant starlight fit within a young-earth chronology?
It is:
Does Scripture portray ordinary temporal succession, celestial timekeeping, and ordinary process rates as inviolable constraints upon divine action?
The biblical pattern strongly suggests that it does not.
Joshua’s long day
Joshua 10:12–14 records Joshua’s command that the sun stand still at Gibeon and the moon in the Valley of Aijalon. The passage says that the sun “did not hurry to set for about a whole day,” and it emphasizes the exceptional character of the event: “There has been no day like it before or since” (Joshua 10:14, ESV).
The text does not provide a spacetime metric. It does not tell us whether Earth’s rotation stopped, whether the relevant celestial motions changed, whether light propagation was altered, or whether some other physical relation was supernaturally governed.
It reveals the event without revealing the mechanism:
revealed event ≠ revealed physical mechanism
But Joshua’s long day makes a narrower point clear. God may subordinate the ordinary relationship between celestial motion, daylight, and terrestrial temporal experience to his purpose. The day remained a day even though the physical circumstances were extraordinary.
Hezekiah’s reversed shadow
In 2 Kings 20:8–11 and Isaiah 38:7–8, God gives Hezekiah a sign: the shadow on the steps of Ahaz moves backward ten steps.
Again, the mechanism is not supplied. The narrative reports an observed reversal in an astronomical temporal marker.
That matters because Genesis 1:14 assigns the heavenly lights a temporal role: they are “for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.” The celestial bodies by which humans ordinarily reckon time are themselves created things. Scripture later depicts their normal behavior as subordinate to the Creator’s action.
There is little biblical warrant, therefore, for elevating the current regular operation of celestial markers into a metaphysical constraint upon God.
Mature states and inferred histories
The Cana narrative bears directly on the logic of historical inference.
Wine ordinarily entails a history:
vine growth → grape development → ripening → harvest → pressing → fermentation → maturation
At Cana, Christ turns water into wine (John 2:1–11). The master of the feast recognizes the result as genuine and excellent wine. Yet, according to the text, it did not arise by the ordinary chain of agricultural and chemical processes.
Suppose someone had chemically examined that wine immediately after its creation. Its properties might ordinarily be taken as evidence of fermentation and maturation. The measurements could be correct. The wine would be real. But the inferred ordinary history would be false.
Thus:
observed mature state ⇏ ordinary developmental history
when Scripture independently identifies a miraculous cause.
This is not an arbitrary “creationist principle” invented to evade evidence. Cana is an explicit biblical example of a real material state that did not arise through the ordinary causal pathway normally associated with it.
The same general pattern appears in Christ’s healings. The restoration of a withered hand, the healing of blindness, and other miracles present genuine functional endpoints without the ordinary developmental, surgical, neurological, or rehabilitative paths by which such outcomes normally arise.
S(dysfunctional) → S(functional), via divine action
Likewise, in the feeding of the multitudes, bread and fish are genuinely material and nourishing, though the normal histories of planting, growth, harvesting, milling, baking, conception, growth, and capture are not the source of the multiplied provision.
The fig tree gives the inverse case. A living tree reaches a state of radical withering rapidly, rather than through the ordinary temporal process of deterioration. Scripture therefore shows both rapid maturation or restoration and rapid decline.
The point is not that science cannot infer histories. It plainly can, and ordinarily does so fruitfully. The point is that an inference from present state to ordinary prior process requires a premise:
the presently observed process = the process that generated the state
Where Scripture identifies an extraordinary divine act as the cause, that premise does not apply.
Adam: maturity is not age
Genesis itself provides the clearest creation-level example.
Adam is created as a functioning human being. He possesses mature bodily systems, cognition, language, motor coordination, rationality, and the capacity for immediate interpersonal and moral interaction. He recognizes Eve and speaks propositionally about her.
Under ordinary biological conditions, these characteristics imply an extended developmental history. A scientist encountering Adam shortly after his creation, without access to Genesis, could examine his bones, musculature, nervous system, cognition, dentition, and language. Every ordinary developmental model would point backward toward years of biological history.
The observations could be accurate.
The inferred childhood would still be false.
mature state → ordinary developmental pathway → elapsed developmental time
Genesis denies the middle premise for Adam.
Therefore:
state maturity ≠ state age
when God directly instantiates the state.
This distinction is essential to any doctrine of mature creation. But it must be used carefully.
Adam’s mature skeleton does not require a fictional childhood. Cana’s wine does not require fictional vines, vintners, harvests, or fermentation histories. Functional maturity is not necessarily fabricated history.
Yet not every observation is merely an indicator of generic maturity. Many astronomical observations appear to record specific, interconnected events: supernovae, variable stars, gravitational interactions, stellar collisions, orbital effects, and ordered sequences of change. Those call for more careful treatment.
A responsible creation model should prefer actual states and actual events over fictitious encoded histories.
On this point, Duff’s challenge is valuable. “Created maturity” cannot become an all-purpose escape hatch used whenever an observation is inconvenient. If it becomes immune to all evidential constraint, it ceases to explain anything.
Distant starlight and proper time
The distant-starlight issue remains a serious modeling question. We observe light from sources conventionally understood to be at immense distances. Under presently measured light-propagation assumptions and a simple uniform-time picture, that light appears to require vast amounts of elapsed time to reach Earth.
But the inference is often stated too strongly:
observed distant light ⇒ Earth must be billions of years old
That conclusion assumes that the relevant elapsed time must be shared uniformly by Earth and by all remote regions of the cosmos.
General relativity does not make that assumption. It distinguishes coordinate time from proper time, and it allows clocks following different worldlines or existing under different gravitational conditions to accumulate unequal elapsed durations. In a schematic form:
T(Earth) ≪ τ(remote region)
General relativity therefore defeats the assumption that elapsed proper time must be globally identical. It does not establish that the particular spacetime geometry required by a young-earth model exists. That remains a quantitative modeling problem.
If Earth experienced an ordinary terrestrial day while remote physical systems accumulated much more proper time, then light could have a substantial real travel history without requiring the same vast duration to have elapsed for terrestrial observers. That would materially reduce the narrow light-travel-time problem. It would not, by itself, provide a full cosmological model.
That distinction matters, and it is worth being precise about what does and does not follow from it. That Earth experienced ordinary terrestrial days remains compatible with a literal-day reading of Genesis. That distant clocks accumulated more proper time is possible in principle within relativity. That distant light may have had a real extended history follows only if a sufficiently large and coherent time differential in fact exists. But that Earth must therefore be billions of years old does not follow automatically, and neither does the conclusion that a complete young-earth cosmology has been established. Each claim here is logically independent of the next, and the argument fails the moment one is treated as given rather than earned.
ICR has presented differential clock rates as a possible way that distant regions might experience much greater elapsed time while Earth records a short chronology; it has also discussed other approaches, including issues surrounding the one-way speed of light and synchronization conventions. Creationist literature recognizes that distant starlight is not exhausted by light-travel time alone and that a complete cosmology must address a broader set of astronomical observations.²³
So the appropriate conclusion is neither triumphalism nor surrender:
Distant starlight is a substantial cosmological question, not a simple logical disproof of a young Earth.
What “ordinary” should mean
Duff’s objection lands if a creationist means this:
T₂ = every physical system in the universe accumulated the same proper time during each creation day
But Genesis does not plainly teach T₂.
The textual claim at issue is more limited:
T₁ = Genesis describes six ordinary terrestrial creation days
Exodus 20:11 grounds the human work-and-Sabbath pattern in the creation week:
6 days of labor + 1 day of rest
That is an Earth-oriented and humanly meaningful pattern. It establishes the significance of the terrestrial week for human obedience. It does not explicitly require that a clock in a distant galaxy accumulate precisely the same proper time as a clock on Earth.
If a particular model posits billions of years of proper time elsewhere during Earth’s Day 4, then “ordinary” should not be used as shorthand for uniform clock time across all of creation. That concession is appropriate. But it does not mean Earth’s Day 4 ceased to be an ordinary day in the frame Genesis uses.
The better formulation is:
The creation days were ordinary terrestrial days, though the creative events within them were extraordinary, and Scripture does not require cosmically uniform proper-time accumulation.
That is not an evasion. It is a more precise statement of what the text actually needs to establish.
Wheeler–DeWitt and the question of time
The Wheeler–DeWitt equation, introduced in DeWitt’s 1967 canonical treatment of quantum gravity,⁴ is a caution against treating a single, universal, external clock as an unquestionable metaphysical necessity. In canonical quantum gravity it is often represented schematically as:
ĤΨ = 0
Unlike the ordinary Schrödinger equation, iħ ∂Ψ/∂t = ĤΨ, this contains no external time parameter. That absence is the well-known “problem of time” in quantum gravity: general relativity treats spacetime and temporal structure dynamically, ordinary quantum mechanics treats time as an external parameter, and canonical attempts to unite the two make the straightforward external parameter disappear.⁵⁶
This does not mean time is unreal, that temporal succession is illusory, that a young-earth cosmology has been established, or that the specific metric a distant-starlight solution would need has been generated. What it undermines is a narrower and unwarranted confidence: that physics requires one universal, globally synchronized clock against which every cosmic event must be measured. Proper time in relativity is local to worldlines, and at the frontier of quantum cosmology even the fundamental status of an external temporal parameter remains unsettled.⁷⁸
The restrained implication is:
Terrestrial timekeeping need not be identical to a universal cosmic time parameter.
That supports the theological modesty required here without proving it. Scripture does not say that every created clock was synchronized with Earth throughout the creation week, and physics gives no simple basis for treating universal synchronization as self-evident.
The proper burden
A complete, detailed cosmological mechanism would be required if someone claimed to possess a finished scientific account of distant starlight in a young-earth universe.
Such a model would need, among other things, a defined spacetime geometry and metric, physically coherent initial and boundary conditions, and a reason for the needed clock-rate differential. It would need to remain consistent with local physics and with the observed universe, and to account for redshifts, galaxy structure, stellar phenomena, light curves, gravitational effects, and other relevant evidence. And it would need clear limits on where miraculous creative action is being invoked and what is being claimed as ordinary physical history.
That is a substantial burden.
But it is not the burden required merely to refute the claim that distant starlight makes a young Earth logically impossible.
For that narrower purpose, the relevant question is simpler:
Is there any coherent reason to deny that real temporal history could have occurred in remote regions while ordinary terrestrial days passed on Earth?
Relativity gives a principled reason not to assume uniform proper time. Quantum cosmology gives a further reason not to elevate the intuitive idea of a universal external clock into an unquestioned metaphysical axiom. Scripture gives no explicit teaching that all regions of the cosmos must have accumulated identical elapsed time during the creation week.
Therefore, a differential-time proposal may not be a completed cosmology, but it is not irrelevant. It blocks the simplest formulation of the distant-starlight objection.
The argument, stated formally
The threads above condense into a single argument, worth stating plainly. Ordinary days can contain extraordinary divine acts. Scripture records divine acts that alter ordinary process rates and temporal markers. Scripture records mature physical states without their ordinary antecedent histories. Genesis presents creation itself as extraordinary divine action. And Scripture does not state that all cosmic regions accumulated identical proper time during creation.
From those five premises, one conclusion follows: an ordinary-day reading of Genesis does not entail ordinary process rates or globally uniform proper-time accumulation during creation.
Notice what that conclusion does not say. It does not prove a six-thousand-year chronology. It does not solve distant starlight. It does not establish ICR’s cosmology. It does not establish that God manipulated spacetime during creation.
It establishes the narrower proposition this response to Duff actually needs. Duff cannot move from “extraordinary temporal or process behavior occurred during Day 4” to “therefore Day 4 was not an ordinary terrestrial day” without supplying a further premise, and Scripture does not supply that premise for him.
The question behind the question
Duff asks what happens if the “ordinary” days of creation were not ordinary.
The more precise question is:
What are we expecting to be ordinary: the terrestrial days, or the creation occurring within them?
If Genesis describes ordinary terrestrial days, then the extraordinary character of what God accomplishes during those days creates no contradiction.
Joshua’s extraordinary day remained a day.
Cana’s extraordinary wine remained wine.
The healed man remained a man.
The multiplied bread remained bread.
Adam remained human.
And an ordinary creation day remains a day even when the Creator accomplishes within it what ordinary providential processes could never accomplish in twenty-four hours.
The regularities observed in the commissioned creation tell us much about how God ordinarily sustains it now. They do not, by themselves, specify how God commissioned it.
Genesis begins precisely where ordinary extrapolation reaches its limit:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, ESV).
The days may be ordinary terrestrial days.
Creation, by anyone’s reckoning, is not.
Sources
[1] What if the Ordinary Days of Creation Weren’t Ordinary? – Naturalis Historia
[2] Seeing Distant Starlight in a Young Universe – ICR
[3] Beyond Distant Starlight: Next Steps For Creationist Cosmology – Answers Research Journal
[5] Quantum Gravity – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[6] Problem of Time in Quantum Gravity – Inspire HEP
[7] Finding Time for Wheeler-DeWitt Cosmology – PhilSci Archive
[8] Time in Quantum Cosmology – HAL
Source note: [4] is the primary source for the Wheeler–DeWitt equation. Its full text sits behind an APS paywall; the equation and its description above have been checked against the published abstract and cross-checked against the secondary treatments at [5]–[8], which are cited for interpretation rather than as primary authority. [1]–[3] are primary sources for Duff’s argument and for the ICR and ARJ proposals respectively.