6,000 year-old cosmos . . .
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Maybe this has been discussed here before, I'm likely behind the curve. But, I've been wondering lately -- if Creationists believe the heavens and Earth are only 6,000 years old, how do they account for light-year distances in a dopler shifted expanding universe? Do they believe that every star and galaxy in the universe is no greater distance apart than 6K light years? In such a universe, every star we see in the night sky could be no further from Earth than that -- i.e., the entire visible/infrared/x-ray spectrum universe surrounding our planet must be that close because if it were further away, we could not see its light. And if stars that have been observed for millenia were located at the 6K light year limit from Earth, observors even five hundred years ago should not have been able to see them, because their light would not have reached the Earh yet. Seems like it would be pretty hard to pack the entire known universe into a 6K light-year-radius ball with Earth at its center. Wouldn't there be lots of collisions? Wonder how they explain this -- and by inference, how much of an onslaught of evidence-to-the-contrary, coming from every corner of science, their belief system can withstand before even they must see it as absurd?
roseweed
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I can't speak for the so-called "leaders" and "experts" of the creationist movement nor am I certain what their explanations might be.
BUT, I have encountered creationists on the street that flat out tell me science has an atheist, communist, humanist, secular agenda (yes, they actually string all those words together and tell me that) and science can not be trusted.
These sort of people reject any and all scientific evidence as a clever invention and conspiracy on the part of Atheists to destroy their religion.
I had a co-worker tell me they wrote a letter of complaint to the History Channel because of shows like, The Naked Archaeologist, where scientists try their best to destroy Christianity with clever propaganda. (Their words)
Since I am an out in the open Atheist where I live, the most often rebuttals I hear for scientific evidence generally are :
" You have to have faith that there is a Universe out there"
" Why do you put all of your blind faith in Atheist scientists that are not going to be there when you die ?"
and even this one :
" Are you going to ask for scientists to speak on your behalf when you stand before god your judge?"
I mean, these are the people that said the devil put dinosaur bones into the sand to trick us. I am probably expecting too much to think they are willing to listen to science.
“It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
― Giordano Bruno
They do not know about the dople shift towards red
The most common response I hear is either the speed of light hasn't always been the same, in a convenient, bending physics only when it suits them and keeping it when it doesn't *cough cough* the creationist misinterpretation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics *cough cough* kind of a way. Another one that the idiots try and use is that their god created the light that seemed further back in time then the "young" universe supposedly is was created already on it's way, effectively showing his true colors as Loki, Coyote, or some other trickster deity.
Some of the bullshit sites that try to rationalize the impossible nature of their religious claims and further peddle it's lies are:
http://christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c005.html
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ16.html
http://www.conservapedia.com/Young_Earth_Creationism
http://www.icr.org/article/creation-cosmologies-solve-spacecraft-mystery/
http://www.creationism.org/ackerman/AckermanYoungWorldChap08.htm
All these kooks are desperately grasping for straws and obviously have no actual evidence for their claims, but somehow people accept them. And this kind of 'it's science because I say so' bullshit is supposed to be the truth? I really don't get it, but that's probably because I'm obviously a part of the atheist/materialistic/commie/pagan/evil baby eating cabal which is actively and consciously suppressing the TRUTH(TM)* because we hate god/trying to rebel/are the devil talking through mortal mouths/wants to live a life god hates/just confused and stupid dummy heads who ask too many questions!
I am curious how I lived to this age, since my family are atheists too! A "miracle" I made it past diapers without landing on the BBQ!
*Whichever religion the current kook is passive-aggressively, or aggressive-aggressively, threatening us with.
"This may shock you, but not everything in the bible is true." The only true statement ever to be uttered by Jean Chauvinism, sociopathic emotional terrorist.
"A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished." Mikhail Bakunin
"The means in which you take,
dictate the ends in which you find yourself."
"Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme leadership derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
No Gods, No Masters!
If the speed of light was variable, you wouldn't be able to read this on your computer.
Simple as that.
I learned something about ICR I didnt know. My original comment was true (100 percent true) back in '88.
Look not used to bothering to bring up any point they would like ( nor a 'defense').
On that same page, Number 11 states: "The speed of light has decreased over time". One of the arguments they are no longer to use, I guess.
:
@OP: God made it that way.
Seriously. Same with fossils, unless they deny radioactive decay.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Not trying to be too funny, but not trying to hard to avoid it, but you do realize asking how they account for things, is a non sequitur, right?
Again, not trying to be funny, but, I've given up trying to reconcile how or why an adult doesn't exceed a pre schooler's default position of honest and unbiased inquiry, and earnest effort to understand something which it currently cannot do on it's own, but instead, default's to an infant's level of mere combativeness.
I think the best theory, is that they're simply intellectually lazy, don't want their head to hurt trying to wrap their brain over something more intellectually taxing than watching American Idol, and don't want their 'Happy Place' bubble to be burst, cause it would ruin their day/life.
I lean heavily in the direction of this theory.
I keep asking myself " Are they just playin' stupid, or are they just plain stupid?..."
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy" : David Brooks
" Only on the subject of God can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence even as they plow them under." : Sam Harris
redneF has so much confidence in human race, I have to agree though. It is mostly laziness. I see this brain 'shutdown' when faced with questions they cannot answer. When I ask someone why they would believe a psychic or homeopathy(most westerners don't even know that it's based on the water memory idiocy theory, and probably wouldn't care anyways) they always just sort of give up. You see a light turned on by questions being raised behind their eyes, and then there's a limit that when reached, the light goes out. It's sad really, but when you get the same illogical answer three times in a row, or the "I don't know, but neither do you!", ( apparently the gypsy at the corner street does ), I just sort of give up on them.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
Well, actually, the YEC crowd had tried to explain away the evidence with a number of ideas such as god changing the speed of light or burying the dinosaur fossils in an attempt to deceive us.
Let me cover the speed of light issue briefly.
OK, that is a good guess as far as it goes but it is not quite right.
I have read the original “work” on that idea. It is a paper written by one “Barry Setterfield Scientist”. As near as I can tell, he uses the word Scientist as his last name to sound a bit more important. Let me cover that on in a bit of detail as it is relevant.
If you know how to hack, he has his CV buried in his web site. It is not publicly linked but it can be found. His claim of being a scientist has nothing to do with physics or cosmology in any way. He had taken geology 101 before dropping any pretense of scientific inquiry to become a YEC minister.
That digression being out of the way, what he actually did was a statistical trick.
Basically, he took as many different experiments to measure the speed of light as he could find. As the older ones reflect a time when we did not have all of the details down, they tend to have larger margin of error. Then he constructed a curve for a changing speed of light and simply dropped all of the measures that did not have wide enough error bars for him to claim that his curve is consistent with the data sets that he used.
Of course, as we gained additional insights, the error bars became tighter and thus he concluded that the speed of light settled down to the currently accepted value about a century ago. Thus, it is not possible to repeat the work and falsify it.
This brings us to another problem with all such work. Anyone who tries to adjust physical constants has to deal with the basic fact that our understanding of the universe is tightly bound to the speed of light, the attraction of gravity and so on. Doing that is really not any better than saying that god made the universe with the light from distant stars already in route so that we would have more stuff to look at.
Pretty much, what they may have done would to posit that the universe was made “already old”. The problem here is that in so doing, the universe becomes indistinguishable from a really old universe in the first place. Again, the idea is simply not subject to inquiry that would reveal the facts. If the universe is made in such a way, then there is no point in not assuming the ancient nature as that is where the evidence leads.
Well, there is one other problem. Once you start fiddling with the constants of physics, you have to confront the idea that they all have to fit together in certain ways or the universe simply cannot work the way that we think it to do. Basically, you would have to fiddle them all in a weird and changing way in order to not destroy the universe in the process and that there would be evidence for.
Take the fossil uranium deposits in western Africa. A couple of billion years ago, they seem to have had enough U235 to form natural running nuclear reactors. Well, either that or that is what they were doing about 900 years ago when the speed of light was much larger. Since E=mc^2, that would basically turn the whole earth into a gigantic bomb. The fact that we have a planet proves that that must not have happened.
=
See Albert Einstein! From our perspective the universe is 15 billion years old. Time is relative! That is a fact! From another perspective it could be young.
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Romans 1:20
LMAO wow, that is the most bastardized version of the theory of relativity that I've ever read. Einstein's brain is turning in it's vat right about now.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
He is pretty close to the most sophisticated claim, though. The best one I heard so far was that since we all know space is expanding, light would have been fired 6K years ago, but seems to have travelled for longer than that because space stretches. (Of course they ignore that the very science that says space stretches also says the universe is here for 14 billion years).
Whatever the actual facts are, Lee clearly does not understand them. Lol.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I love it when a cat tries to tell a dog they're barking wrong...
I keep asking myself " Are they just playin' stupid, or are they just plain stupid?..."
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy" : David Brooks
" Only on the subject of God can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence even as they plow them under." : Sam Harris
Bastardized? I guess you have no idea what the law of relativity is?
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Romans 1:20
I'm just going to shut my brain down and give your own laws of physics. Your own facts based on your opinions. Your own truth, your own theory of relativity, whatever you need. The fact still stands that OUR perspective is that the universe is ~14 billion years old. Why does it matter if from some almost massless particle traveling very near some massive black hole's event horizon the universe appears younger? How is that even remotely relevant to a young earth theory? Do you have any pseudo science to elaborate?
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
You know, I have to admit, that could "almost" "kind of" make sense if you assumed that God existed. Suppose that God and humans were in different inertial reference frames, traveling at extremely close to the speed of light relative to each other for an extended period of time. Then, our velocity changed to match God's reference frame. So, from our perspective, we've been here for billions of years, but from God's perspective our time only elapsed 6,000 years.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I'll give you that, but they're not arguing that it's god's 'perspective' that makes the earth 6000 years old. They're arguing that the earth IS 6000 years old. Even if your scenario is proven 100% true, the universe is still ~14 B years old relative to us. The fact that it is 6000 years old relative to the pink unicorn is completely irrelevant.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
Wouldn't that be conceding God has a material vantage, to even have a reference frame?
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Wouldn't it sound an awful lot like an ignorant passive aggressive snotty little kid goin' "My Daddy can do anything!!"
Doesn't that remind you of....
Never mind.
That would be rhetorical....
I keep asking myself " Are they just playin' stupid, or are they just plain stupid?..."
"To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy" : David Brooks
" Only on the subject of God can smart people still imagine that they reap the fruits of human intelligence even as they plow them under." : Sam Harris