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

[Statler Waldorf]

http://creation.com/speed-of-light-slowi...-after-all\

Well over a decade ago, CMI’s Creation magazine published very supportive articles concerning a theory by South Australian creationist Barry Setterfield, that the speed of light (‘c’) had slowed down or ‘decayed’ progressively since creation.

Did you read the entire article you quoted? CMI does not officially support the C-Decay hypothesis (they support the Humphreys’ model), they were merely explaining how the recent findings by Davies relate to the theory. If you were arguing that creationists had used this argument in the past I would not have objected, however that is not what was being argued. It was being argued that this is still the argument creationists use today to solve the “distant starlight problem”- which it is not.

“One common solution that has been presented, and continues to appear, is that the speed of light was enormously faster around Creation Week and has slowed down since (c-decay1). A good example of this may be found in a book by Burgess,2 which has recently been reviewed. The review describes a rapid aging process for stars and a faster speed of light. The universe was accelerated like fast-forwarding a videotape, and after all the light information reached the Earth the rates were reduced to what we now measure. The problem with this model is that the stars would disappear from view as the light slowed down, subsequently taking millions and billions of years to get to Earth. Also, such light arriving at the Earth would show enormous observable blueshifts.3 It doesn’t. A more ingenious mechanism is needed to overcome such obvious objections.” - http://creation.com/a-new-cosmology-solu...me-problem

To solve the starlight problem, some creationists have proposed a change in the speed of light; this proposition became known as C-decay. The idea was first systematically advanced by creationist Barry Setterfield in his 1981 book The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe. Setterfield claimed that, at the date of creation, light traveled millions of times faster than it does today and has been decaying exponentially ever since.

RationalWiki? Lol. All this proves is that creationists have argued for C-Decay in the past, which I never claimed otherwise. The point is that none of the major creation organizations support the theory today.

http://christianity.stackexchange.com/qu...-the-speed

My father, at that time, was convinced that the speed of light has been slowing down since the creation of the universe.

What someone’s father was convinced of is in the past irrelevant to the discussion.

But some people have proposed that light was much quicker in the past. If so, light could traverse the universe in only a fraction of the time it would take today. Some creation scientists believe that this is the answer to the problem of distant starlight in a young universe.

Disingenuous. I’ll quote the entire passage and bold the parts you conveniently left out for everyone to see. AIG supports Lisle’s model, not the C-Decay model.

“But some people have proposed that light was much quicker in the past. If so, light could traverse the universe in only a fraction of the time it would take today. Some creation scientists believe that this is the answer to the problem of distant starlight in a young universe.

However, the speed of light is not an “arbitrary” parameter. In other words, changing the speed of light would cause other things to change as well, such as the ratio of energy to mass in any system.3 Some people have argued that the speed of light can never have been much different than it is today because it is so connected to other constants of nature. In other words, life may not be possible if the speed of light were any different.

This is a legitimate concern. The way in which the universal constants are connected is only partially understood. So, the impact of a changing speed of light on the universe and life on earth is not fully known.”

You may admit that you are wrong now.

You have demonstrated two things…

1. My initial statement that creationists do not support C-decay anymore was accurate because none of the creation organizations you quoted support using the model.
2. You are disingenuous concerning the manner in which you quote your sources.

No goalpost shifts. You claimed that there was a double standard in play, whereby scientists could claim that there is an illusion of design, but creationists cannot claim that natural selection is the illusion, and that we may all be looking at this ass-backwards. All things being equal in the primary scholarly research arena, this claim would have merit. So it boils down to evidence. Scientists publish hundreds of peer-reviewed experimental papers every year that show that genomic change occurs (and for the most part, we can prove exactly how those changes occur) in organisms, and that selective factors dependent on environment shift allele frequencies, and hence biological structures, in populations. It is so well understood that we can mimic these in the lab and study the mechanisms.

Not so fast! That is not the claim I was refuting, I was refuting your claim that creationists do not do any of their own research (which is completely false). Secondly, the number of peer-reviewed articles supporting a position is ultimately irrelevant; one peer-reviewed article can and often has discredited hundreds of articles that came before it.

So it would seem that you, if you'd like to establish that all things ARE equal, should show me at least ten (a very small number, and a number that can give a basic overview of the field) of the best primary scholarly experimental research papers by creationists detailing a.)that something aside from natural selection changes the genotypes and phenotypes of organisms, and b.) an exact mechanism for that other mode of change. These papers should (in order to establish that all things are, in fact, equal- to give your "double standard"argument merit):

I cannot figure out how you got so off topic. Creationists accept natural selection as a valid mechanism- I was never arguing that they did not. I was merely pointing out that Dawkins argues for the use of illusion in science, which means that if someone argues for the appearance of age in the Universe being illusion they are not necessarily being unscientific. Somehow you got off thinking that I was arguing that creationists believe that natural selection is an illusion. Natural selection can be a real mechanism and life can still have the valid appearance of design anyways- they are not mutually exclusive.

2.) be peer-reviewed by scientists knowledgeable in the field

Reviewers are always anonymous so I am not sure how you are going to ever meet this criterion.

3.) use currently accepted experimental techniques

Does research that does not meet currently accepted research techniques generally get published in peer-reviewed journals?

Those criteria are what I would expect from anybody making any scientific claim.

Wait, are you really going to take the position that only good science is peer-reviewed and all peer-reviewed science is good science?

Then we get down to the fun part: putting contradictory experimental data side by side and letting the best data- and the most sensible explanation of that data- take the field. It's [sic] how scientists do it.

I wish it really were that simple but I am afraid it is not.

I am quite certain that it is.

After all, when God got mad that humanity was not behaving according to his demands, what did he do? He used natural disasters to destroy them.

Such a petty god, certainly unworthy of worship.

I was clearly referring to the belief that God uses natural disasters to control the Earth’s population, not as a form of judgment. Why do you object to God destroying His own creation?

If SW has a nice broad field of primary research by creationists, (I didn't even specify YEC to allow him latitude), then by all means, let's see a good cross-section of it, and see if it's up to the standards set by even a middling scientific journal. If he can put up, he doesn't need to shut up.

I do not understand why you are mischaracterizing my position like this. You explicitly made the claim that creationists do not do any of their own research. I explicitly objected to that claim. Now you are referring to cross references and asking for numerous articles published this year. Why?

Person A: No African American has won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Person B: That’s actually false.
Person A: Oh really? Well then name ten of them for all to see or else you need to shut up.
Person B: Why would I have to name ten? You simply said not a single one has won the award. Shouldn’t I only need to name one?
Person A: Well dozens of people have won that award, surely you can name ten.
Person B: What just happened?

For those who weren't around at the time, Statler offered up anisotropic light propagation as a way of explaining why the universe looks old when it is only young.

Incorrect. I never said anything about the appearance of age- I simply said it is a way to get distant starlight to Earth instantaneously, which it is.

This(what we will laughingly refer to as a) theory was originally spewed forth by one Jason Lisle, a YEC astronomer working for ICR as I recall.

Also incorrect. Anisotropic Synchrony Conventions were known of and used during Einstein’s time. Secondly, Lisle works for AIG, not ICR (you’re not batting a very good average so far).

The "theory" goes like this.

It’s not a theory, it’s a convention.

Since it impossible to accurately measure the one way speed of light because of relativistic effects, the only way to to [sic] do it is to bounce light off a reflector and divide the result by two.

Well there are other experiments but they all involve either moving the clocks or presupposing a synchrony convention a prirori so in principle what you are getting at is correct.

Lisle uses this to claim that light travelling away from Earth travels at half c while lightspeed travelling towards Earth is at infinite velocity.

Very roughly stated.

Thereby using the loophole that you can't "know" for certain that light is travelling at the same speed to and from the reflector.

This is true, it’s merely a stipulation.

The theory overlooks one minor(glaring) problem however.

I doubt it.

It used to be thought that lightspeed was infinite, because of course we had no way of determining otherwise.

So?

But in 1726 Ole Romer, a Danish astronomer discovered that light did indeed have a finite velocity when he found discrepancies in the transit times of Io behind Jupiter.

Yup.

Light coming towards Earth.

Yup, but this cannot be used to refute Lisle’s position because in his model the observational difference is not due to an actual lightspeed delay from Jupiter to Earth changing as the distance between them changes, but rather because time itself runs differently depending on the differing distance from Earth to Jupiter. It’s a position dependent system rather than a velocity dependent system. We’d observe the exact same phenomena using either convention.

Now, if Lisle was a real scientist, he would have known about this. But professional liars for Jesus have never let minor details like facts get in the way of their bullshit and deceptions.

Not only did Lisle already know about your objection, he’s addressed it numerous times before. It’s hilarious that you actually thought you knew more about the subject than someone with a PhD in Astrophysics; such hubris.

CMBR, redshift, extrapolation using 'standard candles' and light speed, chemical composition and star populations. How's that to get you started?

You just tossed out a bunch of stuff; you’re going to have to be more specific as to how any of that supports your position.

And yes, before you say it, I know full well that creationists try to account for these things. However, the science is questionable at best and they made the mistake of started with a conclusion and try to shoe-horn the evidence into it.

That’s actually called the scientific method, you must first formulate a hypothesis.

Again, the evidence supports it.

So you assert. Am I allowed to merely assert that the evidence actually supports the creationists’ position? Assertion for assertion.

Really? I thought the comment in question was regarding the earth being more than 10,000 years old.

It is, but radiocarbon dating is not used to date the Earth.

Um....every dating method we have? Such as:
[*]U-Pb dating
[*]Ar-ar dating
[*]C14 dating
[*]Geological record
[*]Genetic divergence
[/list]

Are you saying that these methods are always in agreement and can be empirically verified?

Well all I could find was some ridiculous notion that the geomagnetic reversals recorded in the oceanic crust happened in a matter of days.

Why is that ridiculous?

Or possibly that I didn't think they deserved a response.

Whether you arbitrarily think something deserves a response or not is irrelevant.

Oh, I can. I shouldn't have to.

So you cannot?

Well, there's the matrilineal and patrilineal most recent ancestors, for starters.

How do you know this?

Really? try here

CWM is not a very prominent creation organization. I am sure you can find other creationists who still argue for C-Decay (just like you can still find secular astrophysicists who argue for a steady state Universe rather than the currently accepted Big Bang cosmology), but the point is that the theory has greatly fallen out of favor with creationists so by arguing against it you are arguing against a position that even most creationists do not agree with (and thus wasting all of our time).

....
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Face


Palm.

If that’s not the case then why do you all insist on bringing up the same half dozen reasons? Are the other reasons just too awesome to share?

No, you didn't factor in "Goddidit."

No, he actually didn’t factor in relativity.

And your evidence for this position is.....?

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.

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.

And that's without factoring in the energy released by billions of tons of continental plate travelling at thousands of miles an hour that would've boiled off the oceans and turned the planet into a smouldering ember that still would not have cooled down.

I am sorry but this is also incorrect. The amount of heat generated by the deforming of a solid material is directly proportional to that material’s strength. During the runaway process, the strength of the object is reduced by up to eight to ten orders of magnitude. This would mean that heat levels due to the plate movements would remain reasonable.

There is also the issue of the reversal of the earths poles being recorded in bands in the ocean floor which helps to date them.

http://istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/earthmag/reversal.htm

No, that’s not really an issue, there’s lines of evidence that support rapid polar reversals.