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

[Minimalist]

[Anomalocaris]

The dinosaur only needs to feel the need for a snack to redress the issue of who amongst the two of them is the anomaly.

[Godlesspanther]

At one time creationists (look at the creationist writings back from the Scopes-era) denied that there ever were dinosaurs. Now the evidence is too overwhelming. SO they decided that dinosaurs existed recently. They at one time denied that any kind of evolution was possible but when the evidence became too overwhealming so they make an arbitrary distinction between micro and macro evolution.

Now the speed of light and radioactive decay etc. and all the laws of physics have shifted, somehow changed in whatever manner just happens to be convenient for the bullshit peddlers.

[Anomalocaris]

The less said about creationism, the better.

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

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You are viewing a very narrow description of the problem of assessing isotropy of speed of light. It is true we can't directly measure one way speed of light when the light is aimed directly at us without clock synchronization. But we do have overwhelming evidence that one way speed of light is isotopic when the light is shining out from a cosmic event in every direction except pointed directly at us. This comes from observation of type II supernova. In the hundreds of thousands of years before going bang the supernova's progenitor star usually shed substantial amount of its outer layers in a series of minor cataclysms. This results in a Russian doll like layered expanding spherical shells of gas surrounding the progenitor star that we can observe in the form of planetary nebula. When the star does go supernova the massive pulse of light from the supernovae would reach out from the epicenter in all directions at speed of light, and successively hit each shell, heat them, and cause them to glow intensely. We can use just our own clock to see exactly how long after the instant of supernova explosion the outward racing light from the nova hits each point in each shell surrounding the supernova. And you know what, each point on each in the cross section of the spherical shell light up at almost the same time, to within the difference fully accountable by the know minor deviation from perfect sphericality of the gas shells. The different shells light up in succession precisely according to the shell's radius and this distance from the origin of supernova light at its center. You know what, the results show the successive shells become excited by the light from supernova at precisely the times predicted if light from supernova moves out in every direction at exactly the know universal speed of light C.

So this tells us with certainty without any spectacular special pleading assumption that light emanating from cosmic sources travels isotropically at C without requiring any special, tailored synchronization between the clocks at each point on each shell. Only one master clock at the observer is necessary.

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Cool, that's really interesting. Cheers for posting that

I'm not sure exactly how positional time dilation (I can't be arsed to keep typing that so I'll just refer to it as PTD from now on) would apply in this situation off the top of my head, but I think it works against ASC (for reasons that I mentioned briefly earlier).

You can explain the phenomena using ASC quite easily, though I think you can only do it if you abandon the idea of a universe that is < 10,000 years old. This is because in order to invoke PTD, it also has to be factored in for the distance between the phenomena and the point of observation (i.e. Earth). Now this would result in a transit time relative to us that is substantially longer than 10,000 years.

Now like I said, this is just off the top of my head. Statler has mentioned that Lisle has used a "time-zone" analogy to explain some if this. I've been unable to find Lisle's explanation myself, so I'm unable to comment on it. Lisle may well be able to adequately explain away such discrepancies. I suspect that such an explanation would involve a reduced PTD in interstellar space, which would raise problems of it's own, but until I know more I really can't say.

Hopefully Statler can provide me with a bit more info on it (hint hint )

I'd like to move on to discussing other aspects of YEC, but I'm enjoying this topic far too much to cut it short

[orogenicman]

You are viewing a very narrow description of the problem of assessing isotropy of speed of light. It is true we can't directly measure one way speed of light when the light is aimed directly at us without clock synchronization. But we do have overwhelming evidence that one way speed of light is isotopic when the light is shining out from a cosmic event in every direction except pointed directly at us. This comes from observation of type II supernova. In the hundreds of thousands of years before going bang the supernova's progenitor star usually shed substantial amount of its outer layers in a series of minor cataclysms. This results in a Russian doll like layered expanding spherical shells of gas surrounding the progenitor star that we can observe in the form of planetary nebula. When the star does go supernova the massive pulse of light from the supernovae would reach out from the epicenter in all directions at speed of light, and successively hit each shell, heat them, and cause them to glow intensely. We can use just our own clock to see exactly how long after the instant of supernova explosion the outward racing light from the nova hits each point in each shell surrounding the supernova. And you know what, each point on each in the cross section of the spherical shell light up at almost the same time, to within the difference fully accountable by the know minor deviation from perfect sphericality of the gas shells. The different shells light up in succession precisely according to the shell's radius and this distance from the origin of supernova light at its center. You know what, the results show the successive shells become excited by the light from supernova at precisely the times predicted if light from supernova moves out in every direction at exactly the know universal speed of light C.

So this tells us with certainty without any spectacular special pleading assumption that light emanating from cosmic sources travels isotropically at C without requiring any special, tailored synchronization between the clocks at each point on each shell. Only one master clock at the observer is necessary.

Wordork is thus stripped to his disgusting nakedness, his argument reduced to not just special pleading, but special exemptions to special pleading. Yes, light is instantaneous except when we observe its progress from supernova, but its finite isotropy in this case applies except only in just those instances where its isotropy would show the bible to be bulkshit and wordork to be a sack of shit.

All this convolution, and more, just so he can cling to the only reason he ever advanced for believing the bible, because it is "consistent".

Yet anything can be made to seem consistent special if the fool is willing to special plead on the fly to avoid each and every inconsistency. So we must conclude he does not cling to the bible because it is consistent. He clings to the bible because he is diseased, and "bible is most consistent" is just an intro to the special pleading to make himself seem, to himself only, to be less diseased.

Indeed:

[Optimistic Mysanthrope]

Nice vid, presumably that's a type II supernova?

[orogenicman]

Nice vid, presumably that's a type II supernova?

It was a type II supernova, but was not considered a "normal" type II because the progenitor was a blue supergiant star. Supernovae generated from such stars are not as bright because the stars themselves are not as bright, so we don't see as many. So it is not likely to be as rare as was once thought.

[Statler Waldorf]

An embarrassment even to less idiotic of christians. Wordork thinks his shit making machine of an existence can be given meaning by the simple expedient of sticking his finger in his ears, chanting "victory", and sidle off the stage.

I learned a long time ago not to wrestle with pigs-we both get muddy but the pig likes it. Good day sir.

And I find it telling that you'd focus in on the single fraud that made it through the net, rather than the decades of confirmed, demonstrable evidence that has come before and since, in addition to the numerous frauds and inaccuracies repelled by the same peer review process. It's this same "99%= 0% fallacy" that I warned you about in my initial post. But you'd prefer to just "waive off" the ninety nine percent, which is particularly ironic considering that you just chastised me for doing that with one example. How much more in the wrong must you be?

The one single fraud? Have you not been paying attention? I clearly identified three different instances of fraud and that was with very little effort on my behalf. I also never said that all science published in peer-reviewed journals is bad science so please do not misrepresent my position. I simply do not believe it is a litmus test for good science.

Would that be the forty years between the initial period of discovery where we lacked the tools to properly confirm the origins of Piltdown man, and it was displayed in museums as a composite collection of disparate parts and not a whole fossil, between which and its exposure the Piltdown collection spent all its time in storage, whereupon the first time it was brought out and re-examined by modern methods was completely debunked? That forty year period?

Nope, there were skeptics of Piltdown man when it was first published (Miller, Keith, Waterston, and Weidenreich); they were simply ignored because the fossil fit the paradigm so well.

See, I did some research, Stat.

Apparently not.

Here's a video for you: it's not all pertinent, but there's a nice part about the actual deal with Piltdown, and it's also got some good information on the logical fallacies you're committing by tossing out peer review based on three things.

You’re the one committing the straw-man fallacy; I never argued for tossing out all peer-review, I merely reject the notion that it is the gold standard of good science.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myfifz3C0...C&index=13

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A user-created YouTube video? Seriously?

Bullshit: why else would it be taken out of storage by scientists (aka: part of the review system) just to test it further, and why would they publish the findings that it wasn't real if all of science, especially the publishing side, is so against such things that it would be impossible to do so? You're just factually wrong here.

I can find no mention of any such thing happening aside from your little user-created YouTube video (which conveniently does not reference any sources). We do know that a memorial was erected in 1938 at the Piltdown site in order to commemorate such a monumental finding.

More importantly, you're stuck: if you want to continue doing as you have been and working under the idea that peer reviewers work for individual publications and are restricted there, rather than being the scientific community as a whole, then all you've revealed is that the editors of one single publication at one specific time were biased, not the entire scientific community, as you're striving to do. If you're willing to expand your scope and admit that peer review consists of the entire community, then your argument here is invalid simply because scientists were equally the ones who revealed all of these things to be fraudulent.

I am arguing for no such thing. I am arguing for a system similar to what Newton and Darwin operated under where the work was freely published and then it was critiqued in the open forum by the scientific community.

What you can't do, is what you're doing now, which is expanding and contracting your definition of peer review, sentence by sentence, in order to retain your dishonest viewpoint.

You’re the one expanding it; we’ve always been talking about the peer-review journal system.

Oh, also? I find it interesting that, just a page after posting this, you admonished Min using the phrase "how do you know X." How do you know the only reason Piltdown was published was because it "fit the narrative," and not that, at the time, they were unable to test for the requisite inaccuracies?

Simple, it was such an obvious fact that even Wikipedia knows it to be the case…

“The Piltdown man hoax succeeded so well because, at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment believed that the large modern brain preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery provided exactly that evidence.”- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

Which explains why every single attempted evolutionary hoax has received either published retractions or corrections, and all of the doubts about those very hoaxes, expressed at the time they were made, are also on file in publication. Yes. You're clearly right here.

1. There is no way of knowing whether all published hoaxes have been exposed or not.
2. If your peer-review journal system were so great such retractions would be unnecessary.

Actually, it took the three scientists who, as I've said, are part of peer review, taking the Piltdown collection out of storage- where it had been kept off display because of pre-existing doubts as to its authenticity- and testing it with modern scientific means not available at the time of initial publication, and not available to news magazines either. Time published the findings: scientists made them.

I can find no mentioning that it was ever taken off of display for such reasons. It’s a very common practice to keep the original findings off of display and to display replicas. The exposure was not part of the peer-review journal system which is what we are talking about.

Yes, it's called being wrong. Sometimes people do that, whereupon the correct response is to do exactly what all of these scientists did, which is publish corrections. You seem to be sneering at these guys for not having the balls to stick by an incorrect claim the way creationists do, here.

No, I am “sneering” at them for not having the brains to catch such obvious forgeries from the get-go like creationists do.

So then why cast mud at mainstream science because of a few journals?

I am not.

See, this is the problem: you're changing what you're talking about mid-stream. Either continue talking about journalistic peer review, in which case you've discredited individual journal editors at most, or expand your claim to science itself and be proven wrong. Stop retreating behind the smaller definition to avoid having to deal with your errors in using the larger one.

I have never used the larger definition. I have consistently referred to the peer-review journal system that published the hoaxes and caught none of them. You are the one who brought up the larger definition. Such problems do not illustrate a problem in one particular journal or editor because such hoaxes have been published by multiple journals and by multiple editors. Such problems illustrate a fundamental error in the peer-review journal system as a whole.

Not really; since creationists rarely have real scientific degrees given out by accredited educational sources, the credibility of their peer review just has to be reduced accordingly.

This is a mistake made only by those who have never read any creationistic work. Name a few creationists who work for CMI, AIG, or ICR who have “fake” degrees from non-accredited universities? I bet you cannot.

The same thing I'd do if you gave me a scientific source peer reviewed by burger-flippers, since they have the same level of training as creation scientists do.

Burger flippers have PhDs now? You really have no clue what you are talking about.

And your response to an unknown is to assume all are frauds, we already know.

Nope, I am simply wise enough not to assume all are genuine.

Only because I gave you the benefit of the doubt and assumed your initial equivocation was simple lack of education, and not the deliberate lie you've revealed it to be.

I have not equivocated on anything; I have consistently referred to the peer-review journal system in this discussion.

Consider it a tertiary point, adjoining my main one. You're looking to throw out the entire peer review system based on a couple of frauds and the fact that you'd like there to be more but can't prove that; I'm saying the alternative is the same as creation sources: lies piled atop lies, made without fear of being corrected. As to your point about theological journals, they have two choices; they either discard their incorrect theological principles at the door and review the evidence unbiased, in which case they would find themselves agreeing with mainstream science, or they do not, in which case they go the route of creationism and let their presuppositions shape the evidence.

Oh brother, this is nothing short of scientism now. Have faith in a corrupt and fallible system all you want but I know better.

Name a single error that has ever been corrected by a creationist source, and not just swept under the rug.

Not sure what you mean by errors-creation journals do not publish hoaxes (unlike secular journals)-but if you simply mean arguments that they have disregarded due to the discovery of contrary evidence then there are thousands.

To name a few…

-Moon-Dust thickness proves a young moon
-Woolly mammoths were snap frozen during the Flood catastrophe.
-The Castenedolo and Calaveras human remains in ‘old’ strata invalidate the geologic column
-The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall
- Earth’s axis was vertical before the Flood
-Light was created in transit.
-Missing solar neutrinos prove that the sun shines by gravitational collapse, and is proof of a young sun
-Canopy theory

Because I don't see them correcting the definite errors in their publication record, like young earth creationism, intelligent design, irreducible complexity... what I see is the same refuted points trotted out time and again.

Since you were unaware that there were even creationists with advanced degrees it is obvious that your lack of seeing is simply due to a lack of looking.

Science adapts through testing

So you really have no idea how old the Universe is then.

Fishing for excuses to cling to invisible magical sky heros [sic] is not the same self correcting method scientific method is.

YES I FUCKING DO KNOW JACKASS!

No need to yell. How do you know?

50 Years from now we will have even more knowledge of science than we do now and it wont require your myth or any human concocted myth.

How do you know this?

Don't laugh at me moron, your [sic] the one with the fictional sky hero, not me.

…but you are so funny.

New knowledge about early galaxies

Thanks. This seems to be assuming stellar formation and evolution right?

Both, I believe. What I'm getting at, is that if the one way speed of light is infinite, then the reason for transmission delay is positional time dilation (unless I've missed something). But the time dilation should also cause either an expansion/contraction of frequency, respective to the relevant party.

Yes, I believe positional time dilation is the cause (I actually got that from RationalWiki and not from Lisle but I believe it is an accurate representation of the convention). I am not seeing why there would be a change in sound frequency though since the speed of sound is dependent upon the speed of light. I wish I knew exactly how the delay was experienced though.

Also, if the time dilation is caused by a change in position rather velocity, then the time dilation would continue for as long as that position is maintained. So the longer the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, the greater the difference in time would have become.

No because I believe it is caused by a change in position since that changes the coordinate system.

At the risk of showing my ignorance, I thought that the components of velocity were speed and direction. I'd hardly consider myself to be an expert in relativity, however.

You’re right, but the components of speed are (distance/time).

True, but 2300BC is a lot closer to 2500BC than it is to 300BC, so to suggest that the ark would have been closer to ship building techniques used 2000 years later strikes me as special pleading. Also, while the ark may not have have to navigate, it would still have had to survive extreme oceanic conditions for a full year without an opportunity for refit. The prospect of a wooden ship that size surviving those conditions for that long, without the ability to make repairs in drydock, is at best highly implausable. When you factor in events such as tidal waves and rogue waves, the odds of survival shrink to virtually zero - and that's unladen.

Well I never argued that the technology would be closer to that of 200 BC than 2,500 BC, I was merely pointing out that such ships could be built pre-Victorian era. Since man’s technological advances seem to be better fit by an exponential growth curve there would not be a huge difference between 2,300 BC and 200 BC when it came to building wooden ships. Time and material seemed to be the biggest limiting factors and Noah had plenty of both. As for tidal waves, they actually do not affect boats on the Ocean much; most of the devastation is experiences in shallower waters and on the shore.

It's survival would have basically necessitated direct intervention from god and if that's the case, then the ark was basically an unnecessary detail. You might as well have them all floating on a cloud for a year.

It’s a possibility but I do not see it being a necessity. The redemptive history of mankind has taught us that God often will act in a manner that has greater symbolic meaning so I could still see a purpose behind the Ark (most likely a foreshadowing of the coming Messiah).

Hmmm, this seems to be an odd claim. If the instantaneous speed of light is merely an "illusion" caused by time dilations, then the speed isn't in fact instantaneous and therefore not location dependant.

I think that is Lisle’s entire point, the one way speed of light is something man stipulates; so we can either stipulate that it travels isotropically independent of one’s position and dependent of one’s velocity or we can stipulate that it travels an-isotropically relevant to one’s position and independent of one’s velocity. The relevant question is which convention does scripture use when it describes the events of creation week?

So is the light being measured. You are confused as to how the speed of light was determined, probably because of your utter lack of scientific education.

Zzzzz Zzzzzz

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That is the round-trip speed of light, we are discussing the one-way speed of light-but I am sure you already knew that because of your vast scientific education.

You will be shocked to learn that he claims to work in a scientific field. But then he is an American.

Still do chubs. Yes, shame on we Americans for knowing the difference between the experimentally calculated c and the one-way speed of light.

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Professional journals accept the basic tenets of evolutionary theory as they accept the basic tenets of the theory of gravity. At this point in the research into it, it’s a flat-out given that genomes of populations change over time, and that they have done so for millennia. It’s just beyond a doubt. There is no way we will ever discover that this does not- and did not- occur (well, I can think of one way. If a deity or a powerful alien presented itself to everybody, proved its power, and told us it personally diddled around in genomes to make it look as if this was true, and showed us how it did that, I guess we’d have to accept that such an entity had fooled us, and was a total asshole for doing so).

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Zazzy! Welcome back. This will take me awhile to respond to all of this.
You seem to be equivocating a bit on your terms here. Nobody is arguing against Evolution (the changing of genomes over time) which is experimentally verifiable. What is being challenged is the idea that all life arose from a common ancestor 3.5 billion years ago (also a component of the theory of Evolution). This is not something that is experimentally verifiable.

I know you don't like it, but there's too much evidence for evolution. I've spent years studying and observing the behavior of genomes, and short of the above scenario, I can't see anything but smaller quibbles about unresolved issues of change- which is wonderful, since it would be sad never to have another discovery. If you can't accept it, OK. I have come to realize that each person views the world differently. I would love for you to see the beauty and connection to all life that comes from evolutionary study, but you don't, and that's that.

Beware the sound of one hand clapping. “It’s finished, we know the answer, there’s no debate on whether it happened or not”. Again, I feel you are equivocating on your terms and engaging in a bit of a bait and switch. I would love for you to see the beauty and connection to all life that comes from creation study.

And you aren’t rocking or capsizing the boat with YEC, SW. It’s having absolutely no impact at all in the scientific community.

That is exactly my point; when you censor out all opposing viewpoints that is the necessary and in this case desired result.

Sorry. The papers by Tomkins are the only papers that even resemble scientific research papers, and they would never get published in a respectable scientific journal, and not because of bias against YEC.

You would think that you would learn not to make such assertions since it was only a few weeks ago that you were incorrectly asserting that no such papers existed at all, now you are incorrectly asserting that only these papers exist.
The editor of Science openly admitted that such papers are rejected because they support Young Earth Creationism; so there is indeed a bias towards the position.

They’re dishonest, they ignore mountains of conflicting data, and they use appropriate tools in a smoke-and-mirrors way.

So you assert but conveniently never support with any specifics.

You read one paper by Tomkins on chromosome fusion, which is spectacularly dishonest, and ignore the rest.

So you assert again without giving any specifics. The strength of that particular paper is that it points out the horribly unscientific nature of ad hoc ideas such as chromosomal fusion. Tomkins does an amazing job of cranking the knife in that paper and your reluctance to actually address any of the specifics of the paper evidences that fact.

I'm sorry you have chosen that path- the fusion research is absolutely gorgeous, and bounteous.

Using such adjectives in regards to scientific research reeks of straight up scientism.

Oh, Statler Waldorf. I had started to think you were better than this old crocoduck canard.

Assertions without any supporting specifics in 3…2…1….

There is absolutely no way I’m going to waste time on this line of argument.

How convenient.

If you believe this nonsense, more power to you.

Well apparently you are unable to refute any of it, so I will continue to believe it. I have learned a lot from you.

Not necessarily.

Assertion without specifics.

Not necessarily. Interbreeding ability is an open question for nearly all closely related species, and the definition of “species” using that criterion has been abandoned by nearly everyone outside of textbook writers, for several reasons.

I did not use that definition.

Genomics is not a very old science, and not a very precise one, yet, and observing the behavior of organisms in labs and zoos leaves much to be desired in research. There is a rich body of work on this very question.

This hardly sounds like the evidence overwhelmingly supports your position.

The logic you have presented here is one-dimensional and not in line with current thinking.

Assertion without any specifics.

And you may not know this, but Stephen Meyer’s latest book was reviewed by Science a month or two ago. It wasn’t reviewed well, but it will bump his sales, and Science knows it.

Which is a better system; it would be unfortunate if such influential work was never available to the public.

Esquilax is doing just fine is his conversation about peer-review with you, so to keep this conversation to a reasonable length, I'm going to defer to him on this question.

Doing fine by committing the fallacy of equivocation? Why do you hold your fellow atheists to such low standards?

Interesting. So you believe that nothing occurs due except by the direct governance of your God at all times? He doesn’t, say, set up systems that work and leave them to do their thing once in a while? Every atom and every physical process is under direct orders at all times?

That’s correct.

I’m not sure what you mean by “demonstrating” naturalism. Science provides data about the universe we live in, which data we then try to find parsimonious explanations for.

Yes, but that does not directly support the philosophical position of naturalism.

I also see no natural explanation for many other miraculous events in many other old books. Gods turning into swans, raping women, and fathering children is DEFINITELY not a natural occurrence. Neither is riding winged horses (and quite a few old religious texts claim that one). Do you believe Muhammad had a winged horse? Why are your magical stories special? There is no evidence at all (other than all our knowledge of horse and wing anatomy) to suggest that winged horses could not ever have existed, or that Muhammad could not have had one.

Well you seemed to be arguing that all descriptions of supernatural events in the past were simply due to a lack of understanding- I am glad you do not actually believe that. As for Muhammad and his winged horse, I do not know. I would have to learn more about the story before I could come to a conclusion. I do believe however there were supernatural inspirations for such religions so it is a definite possibility.

It's not just YOUR old holy stories that are hard to swallow. It's ALL of them- and all making so many competing claims. Yawn.

I see no reason to assume that all such claims are false (and you apparently finding them boring is not a valid reason)
.

Evidence, dude. Show me the winged horse. Show me the talking donkey. Please do NOT show me the raping swan, unless you have it on a leash.

You only believe in that which you have directly observed? I find that hard to believe.

It would also help if all theists,or even all Christians, could agree on anything about the nature of a creator/deity. There are plenty of your own people who disagree with you vehemently, and plenty of other religions with old holy books that make competing claims that they believe in as strongly as you do yours.

That only proves people are fallible, not that scripture is. It’s the old logical non-sequitur, “42 people have been investigated for the assassination of President Kennedy, they all could not have committed the crime-therefore nobody assassinated President Kennedy.” “There are hundreds of religions in the world, they all cannot be true-therefore none of them are true.”

It would also help if I knew less about the behavior of evolving genomes.

I am not sure how that would make a donkey talk but Evolutionists believe some crazy things.

Frankly, I’m sorry the conversation has come to changing people’s minds, because I think we both know that isn’t going to happen.

I believe in miracles.

My point with germ theory is that I don’t consider people who knew next to nothing about the behavior of bodies to be authorities on any behavior of any body. Ancient medical texts are fun to read, but are pretty whacked on most aspects of human biology.

I believe people in 30 AD knew enough about biology to know that bodies do not naturally rise from the dead three days after dying.

If those miracles occurred today, yeah, that would be great. A resurrection would blow the lid off our understanding of life and death (and it’s worth mentioning that people claim to be resurrected all the time- I think there’s even video footage of some of it). A talking donkey would be awesome and would be inexplicable given what we know about donkey anatomy (that poor donkey could probably never expect to see the outside of a research facility again). Bummer that they don’t happen today so we can see them.

People still experience supernatural events today.

Well, at least we’re conversing politely. That is much more than you can say for many internet discussions of this variety- and I'm too tired and busy recently to have much conversation about anything. You should post a picture of a crying baby to goad me into a stiffer upper lip.

I try to keep things as civil as possible-it is difficult with some of the posters on here though-but they are not the reason I post on here anyways.

And we’re back to being fooled by appearances. We aren't making particularly shocking inferences about the pyramids. know a great deal about early peoples and their ability to create large stone objects. Since there are no contemporary written records for the construction of the pyramids or of Stonehenge, it could be that aliens put them there (or that God did!). But they are clearly things created by people. How do we know? We know a lot about people and their technological progress. We don’t know anything about a creator or its abilities or technical progress. So it’s an uncompelling argument, especially when we know for a fact that people lived in those areas at those times, and we don’t know for sure there is a deity, or if there is, if it created us, or if it did, it still interferes, and so on and so forth.

You did not really answer my question. I asked, if we did not know such things about early people are you saying we could not infer that the pyramids and Stonehenge were a result of creation?

No, we cannot directly study the origin of life, and we may never be able to. I'm comfortable with that. I don't think that's a self-serving attitude. If a mystery remains, so be it.

Then you have a faith adherence to the origin of life being natural.

No, I said it’s wise to look for natural explanations first. If a boy in India WAS resurrected, would you believe it? Would you suspect he was in Jesus’s league? No. First you’d think “fraud.” If all the evidence pointed to a genuine resurrection, you’d look for something different about that body. If there was nothing different about the body, and he wasn’t a fraud (say the whole death and resurrection was taped by medical authorities you trusted), what would you have to conclude? There is special pleading here, but I think it’s yours. Why not accept the resurrection stories that occur all the time? If you know the answer to this question, then you know why I’m dubious about your resurrection story.

I do not know enough about such accounts one way or the other; all I know is that Christ was resurrected.

I like witches. It’s a fun supernatural concept. Plus, the world is full of people who claim to be real witches doing miraculous supernatural things. I met one who claimed she could curse people with death. Do you accept their stories? Why or why not?

Yes, there are people who can do such things; scripture supports that fact.

A known reason for a body to be sick. If you had a terrible medical mystery hurting your body, wouldn’t you expect your doctors to keep trying to find out what it was and if they could fix it? Or would it be OK for the doctor to shrug, call it a miracle, or a witch’s curse, and walk off the job?

I am not advocating for any such thing, but I think it is rather silly to think that there is a natural cause for events that clearly do not have any.

No. I’ve said that science cannot study supernatural processes. If one occurred, it would outside of the purview of science.

Then why would you ask for scientific evidence demonstrating the supernatural exists? You need to get on the same page with yourself it seems.

Well, I’m NOT asking for evidence of miracles. You asked me what it would take to convince me, and I said that evidence would. That’s not asking for anything- it’s answering your question. I already know you can’t provide evidence of the supernatural. That’s why I don’t believe in it. Maybe a ghost will appear to me and change my mind.

You just proved my point; you have arbitrarily created a system that disallows for the supernatural to exist. This is not a metaphysical position accurately depicting reality but rather merely something you have stipulated. This is no different than a Christian saying that no evidence can contradict scripture, they are both faith positions.

*snipped your imaginary conversation*

I liked that conversation.

Science, again, exists to study the studyable.

That’s a meaningless tautology.

Journals are filled with things that can be studies using the scientific method. If something can’t be studies by the scientific method, it doesn’t belong in a science journal.

So common descent does not belong in science journals? You cannot directly observe what happened in the past.

If the ghost of my grandfather appeared and had a conversation with me that only he could have had, and this event was witnessed by someone else so I could know I was not insane, I’d be convinced that ghosts exist. Ta-da!

It could all still be a hallucination.

This is pretty weak, S-W. Events in the distant past are STUDYABLE. Direct observation is a tool of study which many times cannot be employed. We cannot directly observe the order of nucleotides in a DNA strand, either, but you don’t have trouble accepting their existence, I presume.

Empirical science requires direct observation and repeatability, the distant past gives us neither.

Now that I’ve read a few of your papers, I have a better point to make here. Tomkins’s science is legitimate. But. His presentation of the state of research before his research is dishonest. His correct technique is rendered useless by applying it dishonestly: for instance, including the Y chromosome in his chimp/human paper without so much as a mention of the vast amount known about the staggering differences between the Y chromosomes of nearly all closely related species, and why this is a nearly useless metric. He says only that other studies prove his point. They don’t. He’s lying- not merely interpreting the data differently. But it looks good to include it, because it’s so different. So he does, without a word about the reality of Y chromosome research. It's shameful.

Or are you lying? Or does he merely know more about the subject matter than you do? It is troubling how you jump to the conclusion that he is being intentionally dishonest. I have had multiple correspondences with several of the guys at CMI and AIG and have never found them to be anything other than intellectually honest; so color me skeptical.

I don’t have time for another Journal Club anyway. But it’s a fun idea. Perhaps some of you could do it with one of the other papers you’ve been discussing here- make a thread for the sole purpose of picking that particular paper apart bit by bit. It’s a useful exercise- and then you could be President if you start the thread. I'd be quite interested to watch you and Morgan discuss one of the papers you've been discussing from top to bottom, without all the other stuff and other posters in between.

Clueless Morgan? She’s great.

You are the only YEC I have interacted with, but you have definitely been honest about your presuppositions.

Dang! So I am only the smartest creationist you know by default? To think, I even put that on my fridge!

The ID guys are slimy as hell about it- I apologize for tarring you with that brush. Guilt by association is not something I normally truck with. Again, apologies.

I would not say I was even associated with any of them; I have read a lot of their material but that is about it. I like the YEC guys better because they do not care what anyone else thinks about them and tend to be more logically consistent than the ID guys.

Fair enough, although if you're YEC, I'd re-examine your deductions at some point in your life.

I do frequently and have altered a few of my positions accordingly and right now they appear to be sound.

I called the FIRST paper on your list, not the one by Tomkins, unscientific (and I'm sure you know why, if you've read it). Tomkins has the basics of the scientific method down. The reason the paper on fusion is so bad is that it presents evidence of something we already knew, keeps that fact secret from his readers, and completely ignores the truckloads of other data for fusion evidence while whining about one point of telomere degeneration that was both expected and known prior to his study. He throws in a ton of sciency-sounding language unrelated to his central point, which is just completely useless. This paper exists solely to preach to his own choir in language they will probably never understand. It’s a terrible paper.

Has chromosomal fusion ever been directly observed to occur in primates? Can you produce a paper predicting the point of telomere degeneration prior to its discovery? It’s easy to assert that something was expected after the fact (soft tissue in dinosaur fossils comes to mind); but again I am skeptical.

Sorry for all the whining about tiredness. I'm at one of those ridiculous points in life. Wah, wah.

Apology accepted.

One flaw I can think of. Where is the mechanism that suddenly allows light to accelerate to infinite speed after travelling at half c and striking a reflector.

Nothing causes the light to do this, it is how we synchronize the clocks in order to measure simultaneity. Actually reading the paper would be a start.

Also remember that Lisles "theory" only posits that light does this infinite speed when it is approaching Earth, nowhere else.

That’s only because the observer is standing on Earth so that is how he has stipulated the coordinate system. If you moved to another point in the Universe light would move instantaneously towards that point because that would be your new reference coordinate system. Read the paper!

Strange how that happens, as if god doesn't want us to know how old the universe is.

Or God just knows more about relativity than you do.

Ok, let me revise my earlier comment. It's totally batshit crazy.

No, it’s not crazy it is weird, but that’s relativity for you.

One such ramification is that the convention predicts a bounded universe (at least in effect, if nothing else).

Why is that?

I'm convinced that this is where Lisle's ASC is gonna fall flat on it's arse, it's just a case of finding the right place to give it a nudge

I doubt it; Lisle knows his material too well to make a mistake like that. I think you’d be better off reading the reasons why CMI rejects Lisle’s idea. The math works, it is consistent with relativity, they merely disagree that Genesis uses such a convention.

Except that there is no evidence whatsoever that that is the case.

It’s a convention!! You do not look for evidence that supports the metric system over the imperial system.

Except that one could argue from symmetry and make a perfectly reasonable argument that we would expect the one-way speed of light to be the same or nearly the same to the tiniest fraction of a percent as the two-way speed of light. Why? There is no scientific reason to suppose otherwise, no physical property of light that would support it being other than symmetrical and constant. Once again, we are talking tiny fractions of a difference, and no matter how you count up those differences, you can NEVER get a 10,000 year old universe. Ever. So your claim that it isn't an adequate argument against a 10,000 year old universe just doesn't fly.

It’s a convention-it has nothing to do with properties of nature.

Haha! I’ve been doing that for years now-they just don’t listen to what you are actually saying.

Yes it is, because there is only one observer, not two. The experiments for two-way speed of light measures the round trip speed of light between two points, hence the synchronization issue. This experiment eliminates that problem by only using one point of measurement. In other words, the starting and stopping point is at the same location, thus there is no synchronization issue. That they used mirrors to get the light back to the origin is irrelevant to the measurement because light reflecting off of a mirrored surface doesn't change velocity, only vector direction. That the entire apparatus rotates and they get the same results verifies the Michelson-Morley experiment. You should also read the last link.

No, that is still measuring the round-trip speed of light. Under ASC the light would leave the observer at 1/2C and return instantaneously after bouncing off of the reflector.

( a function BTW of velocity, not position)

Demonstrate it is due to a change in velocity and not due to a change in position.

And disproven quite simply by measuring the one way speed of light.

How are you measuring the one-way speed of light?

Even though it won't be accurate, it WILL show a finite velocity.

Only if you assume a finite velocity a priori which of course is begging the question. If you assume an infinite velocity a priori it will show that as well.

The one way test proves the isotropic , it doesn't assume it.

You’re just plain wrong, I am sorry.

“Experiments that attempted to directly probe the one-way speed of light independent of synchronization have been proposed, but none has succeeded in doing so.[3] Those experiments directly establish that synchronization with slow clock-transport is equivalent to Einstein synchronization, which is an important feature of special relativity. Though those experiments don't directly establish the isotropy of the one-way speed of light, because it was shown that slow clock-transport, the laws of motion, and the way inertial reference frames are defined, already involve the assumption of isotropic one-way speeds and thus are conventional as well.[4] In general, it was shown that these experiments are consistent with anisotropic one-way light speed as long as the two-way light speed is isotropic.[1][5”- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

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You are viewing a very narrow description of the problem of assessing isotropy of speed of light. It is true we can't directly measure one way speed of light when the light is aimed directly at us without clock synchronization. But we do have overwhelming evidence that one way speed of light is isotopic when the light is shining out from a cosmic event in every direction except pointed directly at us. This comes from observation of type II supernova. In the hundreds of thousands of years before going bang the supernova's progenitor star usually shed substantial amount of its outer layers in a series of minor cataclysms. This results in a Russian doll like layered expanding spherical shells of gas surrounding the progenitor star that we can observe in the form of planetary nebula. When the star does go supernova the massive pulse of light from the supernovae would reach out from the epicenter in all directions at speed of light, and successively hit each shell, heat them, and cause them to glow intensely. We can use just our own clock to see exactly how long after the instant of supernova explosion the outward racing light from the nova hits each point in each shell surrounding the supernova. And you know what, each point on each in the cross section of the spherical shell light up at almost the same time, to within the difference fully accountable by the know minor deviation from perfect sphericality [sic] of the gas shells. The different shells light up in succession precisely according to the shell's radius and this distance from the origin of supernova light at its center. You know what, the results show the successive shells become excited by the light from supernova at precisely the times predicted if light from supernova moves out in every direction at exactly the know universal speed of light C.

So this tells us with certainty without any spectacular special pleading assumption that light emanating from cosmic sources travels isotropically at C without requiring any special, tailored synchronization between the clocks at each point on each shell. Only one master clock at the observer is necessary.

Wordork is thus stripped to his disgusting nakedness, his argument reduced to not just special pleading, but special exemptions to special pleading. Yes, light is instantaneous except when we observe its progress from supernova, but its finite isotropy in this case applies except only in just those instances where its isotropy would show the bible to be bulkshit and wordork to be a sack of shit.

All this convolution, and more, just so he can cling to the only reason he ever advanced for believing the bible, because it is "consistent".

Yet anything can be made to seem consistent special if the fool is willing to special plead on the fly to avoid each and every inconsistency. So we must conclude he does not cling to the bible because it is consistent. He clings to the bible because he is diseased, and "bible is most consistent" is just an intro to the special pleading to make himself seem, to himself only, to be less diseased.

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[Emphasis added by SW]

It would help if you had actually read the material you are so poorly attempting to refute. Under ASC light moves isotropically when moving orthogonally, tangentially, and away from the observer (given by cθ = c/(1-cos(θ)); so your observations concerning supernovas prove nothing in regards to the validity of ASC.

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Cool, that's really interesting. Cheers for posting that

I'm not sure exactly how positional time dilation (I can't be arsed to keep typing that so I'll just refer to it as PTD from now on) would apply in this situation off the top of my head, but I think it works against ASC (for reasons that I mentioned briefly earlier).

You can explain the phenomena using ASC quite easily, though I think you can only do it if you abandon the idea of a universe that is < 10,000 years old. This is because in order to invoke PTD, it also has to be factored in for the distance between the phenomena and the point of observation (i.e. Earth). Now this would result in a transit time relative to us that is substantially longer than 10,000 years.

Now like I said, this is just off the top of my head. Statler has mentioned that Lisle has used a "time-zone" analogy to explain some if this. I've been unable to find Lisle's explanation myself, so I'm unable to comment on it. Lisle may well be able to adequately explain away such discrepancies. I suspect that such an explanation would involve a reduced PTD in interstellar space, which would raise problems of it's own, but until I know more I really can't say.

Hopefully Statler can provide me with a bit more info on it (hint hint )

I'd like to move on to discussing other aspects of YEC, but I'm enjoying this topic far too much to cut it short

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Chuck admits in his post that he is dealing with light not moving towards the observer so in regards to ASC vs. ESC (which is such a waste of time since they are both conventions as you have also realized) it is irrelevant because the observations are identical under both conventions. You would think he’d actually figure out what he is talking about before jumping in here and personally attacking me…but oh well.

[Anomalocaris]

If you count on the baffoon being sensible enough to retreat from claiming of light move at different speed when moving towards him, when he has no direct evidence of what light speed actually is in the specific case when it is when moving at him, and is confronted by mountains of evidence that the speed of light is always the same in the general case of it moving in every other direction, then you did not account for the fact this is no mere ordinary baffoon, but one so outstandinly yodelish that he adapted himself to "reformed" christianity without, presumably, a lobotomy.