One of the most frequent questions encountered by those of us who believe in the literal Genesis record of creation is: "How can the universe be young if the stars are old? If a star is, say, a million light-years from Earth, wouldn't it take a million years for its light to reach us?"

Judging from the number of published books and articles on the subject, there is a lot going on in the field of evolutionary cosmogony as astronomers and cosmological physicists are trying to learn how the universe originated and its various components evolved, including all the millions of galaxies, stars, planets, and other objects in the vast cosmos.

Astronomers have guessed that there are possibly as many as ten thousand billion trillion stars out there in the observable universe, of which perhaps five thousand can be seen without a telescope. If the universe is expanding, as many astronomers believe, there is an outer limit to this vast population of stars, as defined by the distance thus far attained by the expansion.