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This statement contains not just scientific fallacies, but theological fallacies as well (at least from a standpoint of orthodox doctrine).

That is, if God created stars or other light-emitting objects that are billions of light years away, but did so only a few thousand years ago, then he had to also create light beams coming from those objects that were several billions of light years long.

Not true.
If time is or was moving at a different rate for the stars, they could be billions of years old - and their could have had been billions of years for their light to reach us - yet our time frame is only 6/7,000 years old.

The only currently known explanation I know of is white hole cosmology, which does have a working model - at least working mathematically - that happens to explain much of the same phenomena as big bang cosmology.

However, AFAIK there are no litmus test to say "If white hole cosmology is true, then we would see this which big bang can't explain" - so from a scientific point of view, there is no reason to accept white hole cosmology over big bang. There also AFAIK is no reason to reject it. But it is a model that works mathematically that does in fact explain how the stars could be billions of years, with their light taking billions of years to reach us, and created in the same six days that we were created 7,000 years ago in our time frame.

However, it isn't needed imho - there is no reason I can see to require that earth as we know it was created at the same time as the rest of the universe.

Last edited by resedit (2005-09-25 12:20 pm)

Age of the earth...for a primer see:

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html

Note that the age is calculated from Earth, moon, and meteorite samples that date the Earth/Moon system and the overall Solar System quite closely to a minimum age of ~4.5 billion years.

And, this comes not from one dating method, but many.

So, rocks from different origins dated in many different ways all come up with similar answers.

And those answers are in the range of 10xe9 years, not 10xe3 years.  A gap of 6 orders of magnitude is hard to rationalize away.

resedit wrote:

As an example - my radio station does these science blurbs called "Earth and Sky". They are really neat. Just this morning though:

"Cod off of Canadas shores have been overfished, resulting in a depletion of the population. However, since fisherman go after the large cod, the population has evolved and the average size of the adult cod has shrinken considerably. Evolution doesn't always take thousands of years, sometimes it can happen in as few as 50. If we stopped fishing the cod, there's a good chance rapid evolution to a larger size would happen again"

That's not evolution. That is natural selection. Cod with the genes for a smaller size had an advantage over cod with the genes for a larger size. As such, the population had a shift in which genes were more common. If we didn't fish them, the smaller size gene would not give a distinct advantage and thus the genes that make bigger cod quite likely would become more common again.

It is bull smurf like that that needs to stop. That kind of smurf indoctrinates kids and adults alike.
They aren't being told the truth, and "Earth and Sky" as a science program needs to fire their producer for letting that kind of indoctrination go out on the air.

The transcript

And the paper they based their script on.

Given that the paper was titled "Maturation trends indicative of rapid evolution preceded the collapse of northern cod," it probably wasn't much of a stretch to talk of cod evolution.

Creationism & Evolution slug it out in court

"Intelligent design isn't science. It's old theology," said Eric Rothschild, lawyer for 11 parents who sued the Dover school district of central Pennsylvania over including intelligent design in its ninth-grade biology curriculum.

"It's a clever tactical repackaging of creationism," he said, telling a packed courtroom that the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed teaching creationism in public schools in 1987.

Pat Gillen, a lawyer for the Dover school district, said intelligent design is anchored in science and is not creationism in disguise. He also rejected the accusation that it was unconstitutional to teach the theory to students.

"They (the Dover students) are merely made aware of the existence of another theory," Gillen said, add that teaching intelligent design "helps students grasp the controversy that surrounds science."

"Dover's modest curriculum change embodies the spirit of liberal education," he said.

At least 31 states are taking steps to teach alternatives to evolution. A CBS poll last November found 65 percent of Americans favor teaching creationism as well as evolution while 37 percent want creationism taught instead of evolution.

Fifty-five percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form, the poll found.

Sounds like the evolution folks are buckin' a rising tide ...

Hey SS, how was the vacation?  Good to see you are back

::stifles joke::

you seem bitchy.

Last edited by more or less (2005-09-26 6:20 pm)

For an explanation, start at page one and work your wary forward.

Have fun.

mo' ron wrote:

ShnickyShnack wrote:

For an explanation, start at page one and work your wary forward.

Have fun.

I've read this thread from page 1, and I still don't exactly know what ID really is. If I had to explain to someone what IDist want to teach, exactly, I couldn't do it.

What's to understand? God created the planet around 6,000 years ago, buried a bunch of skeletons in the ground, dinosaurs and humans lived together, life forms haven't changed, there was a flood in there at one point, and something about entropy.

mo' ron wrote:

ShnickyShnack wrote:

For an explanation, start at page one and work your wary forward.

Have fun.

I've read this thread from page 1, and I still don't exactly know what ID really is. If I had to explain to someone what IDist want to teach, exactly, I couldn't do it.

I'd say there are two forms of ID, a strong form and a weak form, if you will:

Strong - there is a (C)reator out there, and we can prove his/her existence with science.  And, by the way, current scientific thought is completely out of line and must be revised in terms of this (C)reator

Weak - there is a (C)reator out there who is resonsible, and sustains, what we see.  However, since he/she is beyond the "natural", we cannot use naturalistic methods to discover or reveal said (C)reator.  The current scientific paradigm, while likely not 100% true (as has been the case with any paradigm), is very close to the truth.  As a believer, you may see evidence of the (C)reator via science viewed through your faith.  But, this is not a substitute for science, in terms of discovering how the world works.  Thus, it is not acceptable for a science class, either.

Most of the weak camp would say that the attempt of the strong camp to "put God in a test tube" (as I've heard at least one prominent ID-er say) is, in fact, harmful to one's faith...in a Christian sense, it borders on Gnosticism.  That is, the desire for "special knowledge" beyond that provide by faith, and beyond that provided to the "common" believer.

Intelligent Design is just a blatantly obvious attempt to slip Creationism into the classroom by taking God out of it.

Intelligent Designers pretty much wrote:

The quarks and molecules and protons of the DNA molecule orbit in such a way as to defy not only Newtonian Physics but the Law of Relativity, the Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics and, indeed, Quantum Physics as well.

but the parallels are certainly suggestive.

Yeah, no smurf.

mo' ron wrote:

How do hurricanes form? It would seem to be that the nice, neat, spiraly mass of air that is a hurricane is too complex to come about by natural processes, isn't it? By the laws of entropy, should that increase in order be impossible?

By the laws of entropy, they go away after landfall.

Last edited by Duke Stratosphere (2005-09-29 12:17 am)