Your comparison is legitimate, and essentially espouses the Omphalos hypothesis. Both apparent galactic histories and apparent biological history can be conceived in terms of Philip Gosse’s much maligned Omphalos hypothesis, quite literally referring to Adam and Eve’s belly button. Although his solution of apparent age was nearly universally rejected, by skeptics as unnecessary and believers as soiling the integrity of God, the premise of his argument was valid, that apparent history is essential to any observed stage in nature, and will display effects which never had causes.
Project Gutenberg - Omphalos. Bold mine:
It is evident that there is no one point in the history of any single creature, which is a legitimate beginning of existence. And this is not the law of some particular species, but of all: it pervades all classes of animals, all classes of plants, from the queenly palm down to the protococcus, from the monad up to man: the life of every organic being is whirling in a ceaseless circle, to which one knows not how to assign any commencement,—I will not say any certain or even probable, but any possible, commencement. The cow is as inevitable a sequence of the embryo, as the embryo is of the cow.[Pg 123] Looking only at nature, or looking at it only with the lights of experience and reason, I see not how it is possible to avoid one of these two theories, the development of all organic existence out of gaseous elements, or the eternity of matter in its present forms.
Creation, however, solves the dilemma. I have, in my postulates, begged the fact of creation, and I shall not, therefore, attempt to prove it. Creation, the sovereign fiat of Almighty Power, gives us the commencing point, which we in vain seek in nature. But what is creation? It is the sudden bursting into a circle. Since there is no one stage in the course of existence, which, more than any other affords a natural commencing point, whatever stage is selected by the arbitrary will of God, must be an unnatural, or rather a preter-natural, commencing point.
The life-history of every organism commenced at some point or other of its circular course. It was created, called into being, in some definite stage. Possibly, various creatures differed in this respect; perhaps some began existence in one stage of development, some in another; but every separate organism had a distinct point at which it began to live. Before that point there was nothing; this particular organism had till then no existence; its history presents an absolute blank; it was not.
But the whole organisation of the creature thus newly called into existence, looks back to the course of an endless circle in the past. Its whole structure displays a series of developments, which as distinctly witness to former conditions as do those which are presented in the cow, the butterfly, and the fern, of the present day. But what former conditions? The conditions thus witnessed unto, as being necessarily implied in the present organisation, were non-existent; the history was a perfect blank till the moment of creation. The past conditions or stages of existence in question, can indeed be as triumphantly inferred by legitimate deduction from the present, as can those of our cow or butterfly; they rest on the very same evidences; they are identically the same in every respect, except in this one, that they were unreal. They exist only in their results; they are effects which never had causes.
As a navel is to Adam, so are the path of galaxies which display interactions which cannot in any way or by any means be distinguished from real history. Apparent history equals real history in every detail - there is no chink or anomaly that tells, wink wink, this is neither authentic or belongs to our cause and effect universe. It is justified to reject both “apparent age” as theologically conflicted and “mature creation” as self inconsistent, and allow that the processes of nature are as connected with time as they appear.
