Doubting Didymus

Look up spectroscopy.

That doesn't make sense. If I've reached an incorrect conclusion because of something god deliberately put there, then I have been deceived by god, not by myself. I do not choose to beleive in an old universe, I am forced by the evidence to do so.

For example, if I dig a great bloody hole and cover it with a cloth and leaves, and you stumble into it, is it reasonable to say that you chose to deceive yourself, by trusting the evidence of your eyes instead of faith? Of course not. You were BOUND to be deceived. It's not a test, its a trap.

And all you have is a book. Ever eaten a lobster?

Asha'man

Have you never heard of a spectrograph? Absorption and emission lines? This is very basic astronomy, you might want to look into it. It’s fascinating how much information we can get just by observing something at a distance.

The ultra-simplified summary: We look at the star, and at the color of the light that it produces. Each element produces different lines in the spectrum. Be examining which lines are present and absent, we can tell what elements are within the star.

Actually, God didn’t say anything at all about 6 days. You read that in a book. That book was written by man.

Why do you keep abusing the word proof? You can never prove anything in the real world, period. Absolute proof only exists in imaginary worlds created by mathematicians. In the real world, we have successively more accurate models, and a statement about the confidence we have in that model. That is what science is all about, refining the accuracy of our understanding. It has nothing to do with proof. How can you criticize what you don't even understand? :banghead:

As it turns out, we have a pretty accurate model of the age of the universe, and our confidence is pretty high. I think the current numbers are 13.7 Billion years old, plus or minus 500 Million. We can’t prove it to the nearest millisecond, but asking for that type of accuracy is literally insane. However, to anyone who has done any real observing, there is no doubt at all about an old universe. Even to a casual astronomer, it is Billions of years old.

trillian

"The notion is built into much of the mathematical language of modern physics. But according to the VSL theory, light must have moved faster, by at least a factor of 1032, in the earliest sliver of the first second, when the universe was an inferno. Then, as the infant cosmos cooled and expanded within that first second, the speed of light would have dropped close to the value observed today."

Taken from here: http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i23/23a01401.htm
This guy based his theory on another guy named Moffat.

So.....even if the theory which is highly debated(as are all new ideas in science until they are proved out) turns out to have merit, this in no way allows for a 10000 yr universe. No way. No how. Not this theory anyway. Faster than light for a "sliver" of a second doesn't seem to account for the missing 14.99999 Billion years.

But why need it at all? Just say its a miracle and be done with it! Why try to be half science and half "God's supernatural hand"? Just say the whole thing is created and that's the end of the argument.

Asha'man

Universe 13.7 Billion Years Old

trillian

Anyone remember Galileo? Christians have been using the same self-preserving arguments for a long long time.....

"The first important attack on Galileo began in 1610, when he announced that his telescope had revealed the moons of the planet Jupiter. The enemy saw that this took the Copernican theory out of the realm of hypothesis, and they gave battle immediately. They denounced both his method and its results as absurd and impious. As to his method, professors bred in the ``safe science'' favoured by the Church argued that the divinely appointed way of arriving at the truth in astronomy was by theological reasoning on texts of Scripture; and, as to his results, they insisted, first, that Aristotle knew nothing of these new revelations; and, next, that the Bible showed by all applicable types that there could be only seven planets; that this was proved by the seven golden candlesticks of the Apocalypse, by the seven-branched candlestick of the tabernacle, and by the seven churches of Asia; that from Galileo's doctrine consequences must logically result destructive to Christian truth. Bishops and priests therefore warned their flocks, and multitudes of the faithful besought the Inquisition to deal speedily and sharply with the heretic.

In vain did Galileo try to prove the existence of satellites by showing them to the doubters through his telescope: they either declared it impious to look, or denounced the satellites as illusions from the devil. Good Father Clavius declared that ``to see satellites of Jupiter, men had to make an instrument which would create them.'' In vain did Galileo try to save the great truths he had discovered by his letters .. in which he argued that literal biblical interpretation should not be applied to science; it was answered that such an argument only made his heresy more detestable...

The war on the Copernican theory, which up to that time had been carried on quietly, now flamed forth. It was declared that the doctrine was proved false by the standing still of the sun for Joshua, by the declarations that ``the foundations of the earth are fixed so firm that they can not be moved,'' and that the sun ``runneth about from one end of the heavens to the other.''

But the little telescope of Galileo still swept the heavens, and another revelation was announced - the mountains and valleys in the moon. This brought on another attack. It was declared that this, and the statement that the moon shines by light reflected from the sun, directly contradict the statement in Genesis that the moon is ``a great light.''

Still another struggle was aroused when the hated telescope revealed spots upon the sun, and their motion indicating the sun's rotation......."

Ahhhh how history does love to repeat itself!!!!
Sorry about going slightly OT but I couldn't resist the illusions of the devil.


Whole paper located here: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Whi...onomy/war.html

Butters

tgamble, thanks for all the help. I was not kidding when I posted at Theology web that my head was hurting and I was on the brink of hyperventelating. I have never seen such nonsense in my life! When someone disagrees with me, I try to put myself in their place. I try to see how they came to a different conclusion than me. Doing this over there almost damaged my brain. How can someone so totally believe that an ancient religious book is absolutly the TRUTH? An eyewitnees account of the beginning of the universe? Says who? But this should be expected to be seen as reasonable, and concluding wether the writers of this book were right or not, based on what evidence we SEE, is somehow irrational! WTF? Evolution is only a theory. You can't prove evolution. But take my word for it, the Bible is the true story, it is a FACT, written buy God. The fact that they can't even see how Mad this is, is whats really hurting my brain. Anyway, thanks again for the help.

happyboy

i think it's funny, in a sad, pathetic kind of way, that whenever science and the bible go head to head, the bible always loses, and yet, christians never seem to pick up on that.....

happyboy

RufusAtticus

Actually most of them have, thus they restrict their theology to addressing spiritual matters. However, some people aren't as developed. . . .

Emma Peel

Guys, guys! Remember, whenever you see a number that starts with "10" and is a few digits long, sitting inside a cut & pasted quotation from an article that deals with mathematics, physics, chemistry, or probability, it's probably an exponential number.

IOW, the "1069" in the cut & pasted article above (and originally cut & pasted here) in all likelihood was supposed to mean "10^69". The ^& tags got lost in the original cut & paste job. So the creationists are claiming that the speed of light was originally 10^69 times faster than today, and this gives us enough compression between apparent time since the Big Bang (14 bya) & the "real" time (6kya).

Of course, this just compounds the problem Asha'man mentioned: At an enormously higher speed of light, many other fundamental forces would conspire to vaporize the Earth, among other things. IIRC, Barry Setterfield, who came up with the idea (called "C-decay" or CDK), has had to add on more & more adjustments to the theory by saying that more & more fundamental ratios & constants have been changing along with C to compensate.

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Creation/Evolutoin: The Eternal Debate

beausoleil

Somebody else already made that point, n'est-ce pas?. But he brought the numbers...