The speed of light, stars, and YEC?

[Darwinning]

The idea that every trait _must_ have some sort of survival advantage is patently false. As long as the trait does not pose (too great) a disadvantage to the survival rate of the species it can arise and persist.

Sorry, I think you are the one who is misguided on this one. This may be the case for very small and insignificant traits, but if the trait is anything significant the organism would have to devote time and energy into developing and preserving it which would be a huge disadvantage. So the religious belief in God had to provide an evolutionary advantage or else it would have not been selected for.

First you say I am misguided and then you repeat my point. Awesome.

You are assuming both that "developing and preserving" religious tendencies provides a huge disadvantage to an organism and that the trait from which these tendencies result does not off-set those disadvantages. I do not think that this is necessarily the case and therefore do not agree with your conclusion.

In this view, theists are simply suffering from the some of the side-effects of the evolution of our species. How ironic.

In my view atheists are less developed according to the very theory they champion, which is also ironic.

You believe God did not create humans believing in Him, so they had to evolve this trait?

I think I agree with that. Nothing wrong with pretending light particles move a different speeds for different observers; even if it seems a bit silly to me.

No more silly than pretending it moves at different speeds dependent on the observer's velocity like Einstein proposed. A lot of this stuff is not intuitive.

I may be an idiot about this stuff, but I'm pretty sure that is not what Einstein proposed.

This may be the case for the ASC convention, but certainly not for the ASC model. Occam's razor should apply to the model and its predictions.

It's not a model though, it's a convention. The trick is figuring out which convention of time measurement Genesis uses.

Did you miss this part?

The anisotropic synchrony convention is just that—a convention. It is not a scientific model; it does not make testable predictions. It is a convention of measurement and cannot be falsified any more than the metric system can be falsified. However, I have made an argument in this paper that the Bible uses the ASC system. This claim is in principle falsifiable, though of course I have argued that it is true. Furthermore, given the information in Genesis and the inference that the Bible does use ASC, we can construct a cosmology that does make testable predictions. I will refer to this as the "ASC model".

I frankly couldn't care less about what system of measurement your book uses. Perhaps you also want to argue that where it says "God" they actually meant it as an abbreviation of "Godzilla"?

But this "testable predictions" bit sounds interesting.

Spontaneous star formation vs. spontaneous supreme being formation (a being which subsequently creates the universe). I think Occam's razor serves us well here; the former requires far fewer assumptions than the latter.

I think the latter actually requires fewer assumptions.

I think "God exists" is a Pretty Big Assumption. To explain the unexplained, you call into being something all-powerful and all-knowing that is likewise unexplained.

Like solving your debt problems by maxing out your creditcards to pay off debt. It doesn't work.

So, if I assume God exists and no model for the formation of blue stars is ever found, I will have "a strong confirmation of the ASC model". Not the kind of evidence I was looking for, really. Lack of evidence or theory for the formation of blue stars does not equate to proof of creation. That's just silly. Again, Occam is our friend.

Did you mist the whole part where he was pointing out that the numbers and locations of blue stars we do observe are consistent with ASC?

No, I did not. I'll quote a bit more of that piece to help you.

If blue stars do not form, then their presence in any region of space suggests that that region was created in the recent past. Blue stars are ubiquitous in our galaxy, and are apparently in the most distant spiral galaxies as well. This is a strong confirmation of the ASC model. The fact that numerous blue stars exist at all distances is consistent with a universe that is thousands of years old at all distances as we now see it.

If [unexplained event cannot be explained] then [God].