Asha'man

More support for a universe that is older than 10k years: the time it takes for energy to move from the core of the sun to the surface is thousands of years. If the sun was only 10k years old, we wouldn't get any heat or light from it at all!

The Long Climb from the Sun's Core

However, I have found an article at Scientific American that suggests that the speed of light may have been higher in the past:

Was Light Faster in the Past?

I shoud point out that this book uses a speed of light change as a replacement for the Rapid Inflation phase of the universe, which was more or less over in the first hundred million years, as I recall. It does nothing for the claim of a young universe.

Tenpudo

I love it when Christians resort to "test of faith arguments."
How about...
Well, he could have done it to test people's reason, and to the vast majority of thinking people, he didn't decieve us at all. He said he created the Universe in 6 days, and didn't bother cleaning up all the aspects of the Universe that show otherwise. Humans chose to deceive themselves by relying on unsupported fables instead of evidence. We will NEVER be able to prove the age of the universe with certainty. All we will ever have is multiple independent sources of corroborating evidence which fit the predictions of the strongest model.

Emma Peel

LOL! Now there's an interpretation I've never heard before. I'll be using that someday...

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Creation/Evolution: The Eternal Debate

Tenpudo

Thanks! I think I first started using a version of that in high school, pointing out the moral atrocities in the Bible and challenging my fundie classmates with the concept that it was deliberately made to see if humans would act ethically in spite of the "word of god". It never changed any minds, obviously, but it was an entertaining intellectual exercise...

SULPHUR

Infinite mass produces infinite energy, infinite speed of light which slows as the conversion from energy to matter occurs. In terms of time,picoseconds?

Tenpudo

My understanding is incomplete, but I think rather than there having been "infinite mass", it would be more accurate to say "infinite mass density" (or possibly just "a mass density approaching infinity"). That is to say, a finite amout of mass which occupied an infintesimal volume, although that might not be the best way to put it in reference to a situation where "volumes" (aka "spatial dimensions") are just beginnning to exist. If it started with infinite mass, unless there was some violation of mass-energy conservation, we'd still have infinite mass around today (or infinite energy, but either way would 'violate the warranty' of the universe, if you get my drift).
As for the second part, are you saying that an infinite amount of mass/energy would cause the speed of light to be infinite, or that the value of the speed of light was also infinite, and decayed in the same fasion as (but independent of) the amount of mass in the universe?

And now for something completely different; a man with three-- er, I mean, another thing that always nagged at me regarding the idea of god creating the universe 6,000 years ago, while making it "look" billions of years old just so that we could see stars and everything else, is that it seems needlessly convoluted. Why didn't he just put the stars less than 6,000 light years away, and make them dimmer so that the sky would look just the same as it does now? By god's logic, ad companies should build billboards several miles away from the freeway in the middle of nowhere, and then set up gigantic magnifying glasses in between so you can actually see what's on them! :banghead:

SULPHUR

IT is april the first isn't it

Tenpudo

Of course not! You've forgotten, this is Daylight Savings Week. It's actually April 8th-- "Spring Forward," and all that...
We apologize for the content of this post. The writer of this post has been sacked, and the remainder of this thread will be continued in a completely different style at great expense at the last minute.

SULPHUR

but I enjoyed getting a bite

Tenpudo

You know, between the fact that I haven't seen any of your other posts to have a general idea of your background, and the fact that there's many many people in the world who are much more confused about the Big Bang, that was just so unfair!
That's it! I'm logging off until tomorrow! [/curmudgeon]