The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old

[Doubting Thomas]

Well, his claim to me was that the changing speed of light is an argument which was proposed by creationists but no longer used. I guess the memo didn't get out to all creationists. True, Answers in Genesis does have the speed of light change in their list of arguments that creationists shouldn't use [emphasis added by SW]

Check mate.

That's not checkmate. Why would AiG add it on their list of arguments creationists shouldn't use if no creationists use it any more? If all creationists were in agreement then there would be no reason to tell them to not use a long list of long-debunked arguments which makes them look bad. That's what's different between creationism and actual science: Creationists continue using the same tired old ad hoc arguments while science either discards ridiculous hypotheses or rejects them to begin with.

But if you're going to claim no creationists still use c-decay as an argument:

http://genesismission.4t.com/sldp/c-decay.html

This model has fallen out of favor among creationists, but there are still strong adherents that are still trying to test it.

Checkmate. You were wrong. Some creationists do still claim the speed of light changed 6,000 years ago.

[Minimalist]

Hey, creatards claim ancient man rode around on dinosaurs like Fred Flintstone. Hard to embarrass anyone that stupid.

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

Yes, all of the current oceanic crust (which ranges from about 250 million years to the present) post-dates nearly all of the continental Paleozoic sedimentary record, BY DEFINITION.

Yup, tell Optimistic Mysanthrope this, he is the one who seemed to knot know this.

What? How did you figure that?

The round trip is only defined as from emission to detection if the beam of light changes direction. Me shooting a beam of light to you standing on the Moon is not a round trip, it would merely be the one way speed of light which is impossible to measure. Now if you reflect the light back at me then we have a round trip, and using either convention we’d measure the speed of light as being c.

Fair enough. I have a couple of questions though.

1) How does the anisotropic synchrony convention account for redshift?

2) How come communication with the apollo mission, ISS, etc suffers from delay? Surely each transmission would arrive instantly in that convention?

Oh, and I found a couple of articles regarding experiments to prove the one way speed of light:

http://http://arxiv.org/ftp/...df
http://http://mysite.verizon...df

Me either, cosmology gets unbearably complex in a very short period of time.

Yeah, about 10-35 if memory serves

One method of verifying it involves comparison with dendrochronolgy. IIRC, bristlecone pines give an unbroken record dating back 9000 years or so.

Sure, the idea behind this makes since but did you know that many trees, including bristlecone pines can generate multiple “annual” rings per year?

Yes, I also know that it's possible for no rings to form in a year. That's the advantage of cross referencing the data from multiple sources. In order for that objection to be valid, a large proportion of the samples would have had to produce multiple rings in the same year. Multiple rings are the exception rather than the norm, which is what would have to be the case for a young earth.

I believe there was research done in Korea that demonstrated that a vessel the size of the ark would have been remarkably stable. Secondly, pitch comes from living trees not from fossils.

Have you got a link for that research? I'm sure it would float, that part's easy. It might even be stable, right up until the point where it had to move in open water. If I remember rightly, the practical limit for the length of a wooden ship is about 300ft; even then, taking on water is a constant problem. With the dimensions given for the ark, the stresses put on the hull would have literally torn it to pieces. And that's before you even put the animals on board.

Oh, and my mistake, I was only aware of pitch being made from coal tar.

You have done nothing to demonstrate my objection falls into this category (whatever “lucy” means); so to me it appears you are merely avoiding my objection.

I consider it to be equally ridiculous and hence not worth the effort.

Thanks! Finally something to work with. I do not see anything in this article that seems to contradict the creation timeline, did I miss it?

The article was merely to illustrate how matrilineal ancestry was determined.

According to this creation model the magnetic reversals took place during the year of the flood; so I am not seeing any issue here.

Again, that's my point. It would require all antideluvian oceanic crust to be subducted and replaced within a year.

There are multiple lines of evidence. We have large canyons carved out by receding flood waters, sedimentary rocks laid down all over the world, millions of tons of coal and gallons of oil resulting from decaying biomaterial deposited by the flood, deluge legends in hundreds of world cultures, and even the Biblical text says that the mountains rose up and pushed the waters back to the sea. Is that what you were asking?

Evidence? Not for flood legends and the bible, obviously.

Quoting from the cover of course. I have read the God Delusion and the Greatest Show on Earth though.

You read more than one book by dawkins???? Why would you do that to yourself? The god delusion stretched my tolerance to the limit, there's no way I'd go through that again.

[orogenicman]

The plot thickens.

I got curious so I put the exact name of the paper in quotes into Google and it came up in

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFM.V32C1045B

which is the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.

However, I couldn't help but notice that the rest of the postings were for one creationist asshole site after another so I checked SAO/NASA further and found......(not to my surprise!)

The Astrophysics Data System (usually referred to as ADS), developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is an online database of over eight million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources.

So this is nothing but more creatard hogwash which, I learned with a smile, waldork has previously tried to slip into the discussions on this very board - that came up in my search, too - with little success.

What is even more interesting is that I can only find the abstract, not the actual paper, which was apparently presented at the 2003 AGU fall meeting. I can find no evidence that it was ever actually published. What I did find was a long article about some of his other work that has been severely criticized by the scientific community, particularly his work with Helium diffusion "dates":

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/helium/appendixc.html

To begin with, the "dating" equations in Humphreys et al. (2003a) are based on many blatantly false assumptions (isotropic diffusion, constant temperatures over time, etc.) that cannot be dismissed with any claims of "generosity" to the "uniformitarians." Also, the vast majority of Dr. Humphreys' critical a, b, and Q/Q0values that are used in these "dating" equations are either missing, poorly defined, improperly measured or inaccurate. For example, he should stop picking and choosing from the obviously questionable data in Gentry et al. (1982a) and instead take several months to redo the analyses. Dr. Humphreys must further realize that the uranium and thorium data in Gentry et al. (1982b) indicate that his Q0 is far too low and that his Q/Q0values are probably inflated by at least an order of magnitude, which by themselves invalidate his YEC agenda. Rather than ignoring the problems or relying on invalid assumptions about the concentrations of 3He, 4He, uranium and thorium in his zircons, Dr. Humphreys actually needs to perform some detailed analyses similar to those in Gentry et al. (1982b). Extraordinary claims demand extensive and high quality data, which Dr. Humphreys currently doesn't have.

Contrary to claims in Humphreys (2006) that my November update is "rehashing" and has a lack of "substance", anyone can review the diagrams, tables and text in my update and realize that I have raised many new issues and properly reemphasized countless other critical problems in Dr. Humphreys' work, which he continues to unjustifiably belittle and ignore. Just as he did in Humphreys (2005), Dr. Humphreys in Humphreys (2006) believes that he can just read brief snippets of my detailed evaluations of his work, throw out some insults, try to trivialize his serious mistakes, repeat false claims, misrepresent critical details in the literature, invoke several irrelevant analogies, ignore the details, and then hope that his readers will just accept whatever he says and go away. Now, some individuals might accept this type of arm waving, the invoking of "God did it!", and the brushing off of serious criticisms, but real scientists and editors of scientific journals would not. Dr. Humphreys needs to overcome his denial and answer the questions, defend the details of his claims, and fully admit and correct his mistakes. To illustrate the long list of serious flaws in Dr. Humphreys' work, I have summarized some of the problems in my Appendix D.

Dr. Humphreys' work is a prime example of fallacious reasoning that YECs (e.g., Woodmorappe, 1999) falsely accuse geochronologists of using. Because his bogus calculations and inaccurate data just happened to spit out a meaningless number that he likes (6,000), Dr. Humphreys is more than willing to ignore and inappropriately dismiss any data or criticisms that expose the fraudulent nature of his "creation date."

If Dr. Humphreys really wants respect from scientists, he must actually publish something in an AUTHENTIC PEER-REVIEWED science journal and not just Sunday School materials (e.g., Humphreys, 2003) and YEC tabloids (e.g., Creation Research Society Quarterly [CRSQ]), where other RATE members and YEC officials will readily rubber stamp anything he says and suppress criticisms of his work (for example, not publishing or referencing the actual statements from an anonymous critic of Dr. Humphreys' work, which are referred to in Humphreys et al., 2004).

Furthermore, as for the original "paper" Humphreys is alleged to have published in the AGU, I'll note the impact of that paper by the utter lack of anyone in the scientific community talking about it ot referencing it.

Case closed.

I might also add that Humhpreys believes the universe is 60,000 years old (+ or - 400,000 years!!!), well out of proportion with what our dear Statler subscribes to, never mind that his error is 2 order of magnitudes out of whack from what any scientist would accept.

[Thor]

Well it’s important to note that not all creationists accept this model, many accept a slant-wise vertical tectonic model. However, the mechanism appears to work fairly well from a scientific perspective. A negatively buoyant ocean lithosphere would create a runaway subduction mechanism into the Earth’s mantle.

So I repeat... Your evidence for this assertion is....?

And why would a global flood cause runaway continental drift? Tectonic plates are many miles below the Earth's surface! You're going to say that a flood caused South America and Africa to become separated by thousands of miles in a few months?

You have that backwards; the plate tectonic action caused the flood by pushing oceanic waters onto the continents and then caused the flood to recede due to continental upheaval back to the oceans towards the end of the flood year.

Sounds pretty ad hoc to me. Evidence?

[orogenicman]

Well it’s important to note that not all creationists accept this model, many accept a slant-wise vertical tectonic model. However, the mechanism appears to work fairly well from a scientific perspective. A negatively buoyant ocean lithosphere would create a runaway subduction mechanism into the Earth’s mantle.

So I repeat... Your evidence for this assertion is....?

And why would a global flood cause runaway continental drift? Tectonic plates are many miles below the Earth's surface! You're going to say that a flood caused South America and Africa to become separated by thousands of miles in a few months?

You have that backwards; the plate tectonic action caused the flood by pushing oceanic waters onto the continents and then caused the flood to recede due to continental upheaval back to the oceans towards the end of the flood year.

Sounds pretty ad hoc to me. Evidence?

As I said before, once you suspend the laws of physics, ANYTHING is possible. How stupid is that?

[Minimalist]

How stupid is that?

Creatard-class stupid!

[Doubting Thomas]

How stupid is that?

Creatard-class stupid!

Not only that, but Young Earth Creatard-class stupid.

[Thor]

As I said before, once you suspend the laws of physics, ANYTHING is possible. How stupid is that?

Yes, it does make the case of Creatards more plausible when you ignore science.

[Doubting Thomas]

As I said before, the more you have to invoke magic in order to explain something, the more likely that something is totally false.