"Gregory L. Hansen" wrote:

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.

   All the while, he's also quietly ignoring what this change in the
value of c would have on the rest of physics, including our own
existence.

  (Indeed, some feel that the narrow range of physical constants in
which stable matter, stars, planets, and us can exist is tentative proof
of God itself. Radically changing the value of c [such as in E=mc^2,
with the effect that would have on stellar lifetimes, for one] would
mess this up royally.)

 

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

-- 

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