In article <cff14f12.0410140553.384ec67e@posting.google.com>,
Murf <rob_murfin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello everybody,

Last week I was wandering the shops during my office lunch break when
I was harassed by a religeous zealot selling magazines and CDS.

Feeling argumentative I asked him whether he was (1) a creationalist
and (2) a "Young Universe" creationalist - i.e. one who believes that
dinosaurs etc didnt exist and that the universe is about 4,500 years
old...

When he replied that, yes, he didnt believe in evolution, dinosaurs
(and women's rights I assume) I suggested that he was a little
misguided.

In evidence I said "how come you can see all of the stars at night
then? After all, many of them are clearly more than 4,500 light years
away?"

He told me that "astronomy is a souless science - they lie to you".

Hmmph. He was obviously a twat, but is my line of arguemnt sound -
i.e. that you can see (or even detect) stars more than say 10,000
lightyears away a robust argument against a "young" view of
creation/existance?

Cheers!

Rob
Sheffield

God creates all the fossils and geological features in place, giving the 
appearance of an old Earth.  God created the light from the stars in 
transit, so you see them today.

Both those arguments circulated in published literature.  It's bound to 
happen when an argument involves an omniscient and omnipotent Being who 
can do anything He wants at any time for any reason.

Another angle I've seen is that the speed of light is changing.  One 
fellow, I believe I saw this in an Institute for Creation Research 
publication, fitted a variety of curves to speed of light measurements 
versus time, and discovered they best fitted a logarithmic cosine, 
demonstrating that he knew how to select "Fit Function" in his stat 
software but knew nothing about error bars.  Generate a finite set of data 
with error bars that decrease in time, but whose values are essentially 
random within the error bars, and you'll find a logarithmic cosine that 
fits it.

I was even told by a bright-eyed believer that The Flood was such a 
violent event that it changed the decay rates of atoms.  The eV of 
chemical bonds versus MeV of nuclear bonds is enough to say that argument 
falls short by at least six orders of magnitude, but such people aren't 
likely to appreciate arguments of energy scales.

-- 
"When the fool walks through the street, in his lack of understanding he 
calls everything foolish." -- Ecclesiastes 10:3, New American Bible