i feel that everyone here who believes in God may at least agree on is the idea that the wider universe is inifinite in terms of scale and age.
To be honest i am not sure we can even explain something we cannot also determine the boundries for.
How does one explain infinite other than …im throwing my hands up in the air.
As a young child, and even to some extent today given i much older, i had/have enough describing pure water taste/flavour or that clear glass has colour.
I reconcile the universe dilemma for YEC in one of two ways:
God exists in a different universe or dimension
this one we see (for want of a better word) has a beginning that can only make sense if it was created mature
I assume you meant outbound light traveling at c/2.
YECs may invoke it, but this is just a curiosity question on my own that was raised by Derek Muller’s video - and he is hardly a Young Earth Creationist. I was blown away (even just experientially) by his observation that we may be observing distant stars exactly as they are this very instant. It has completely shaken my own personal experience of just going out and looking at the night sky, or of feeling the heat from the sun and even thinking that any of that could be instantaneous. My entire life I’ve perceived these things as having taken some significant time, and the very thought that it could be otherwise is simply mind-blowing to me.
But reason I posted this here… it also occurred to me that this really does seem to “wave away” (on its own, whether YECs “invoke” it or not) the “problem” of light from distant stars… though as mentioned, this very concept is completely new to me, and I’m not at all sure how this works in terms of whether this would require anisotropic one-way light speeds to be unidirectional in their speed differential, or if they could be defined as per any observer. But the fact that Einstein explained that it was (essentially) an arbitrary, subjective, chosen convention within certain limits (the round trip average must always be c, with the lower limit as c/2 and upper limit being instantaneous) doesn’t seem to require or demand consistent unidirectional speeds from my extremely limited neophyte understanding of this very novel (to me) concept.
If God makes a universe that shows all evidence of being old, but it isn’t, then God is a liar. This is one reason for the appellation “Lying Lisle” – it’s not just that he lies, he turns God into a liar.
Yep – very same reasoning.
Yes – as one of my professors put it, c is not a speed limit, it’s a part of geometry.
Yes – while I was asleep in the sunshine on a rock in the middle of the river.
I woke up and there was the universe!
No, it’s undefined.
Which any university freshman in calculus-based physics would know.
I wonder if that is quite correct. Simultaneity is one of the first concepts to break under special relativity when events are separated in space. There’s time dilation involved.
Yes, but the operative word is choose. Once the convention is defined, the speed of light traveling from the opposite direction is inverse to the average. The designated inertial frame still applies.
Consider two gunslingers facing off at high noon with photon blasters. They draw and fire, and their photon bundles cross at exactly the same point in the middle. Relativity can be strange, but local events at the same point of space time make sense. So what is the speed of light where the photons meet, given that whatever convention is selected? Under special relativity, the answer applies to the inertial frame and a given answer comes out of the direction of travel under the selected convention. Under Lisle, there are two gunslingers, and therefore two origins for the coordinates, and there is no defined speed of light at the crossing point.
This is the slight of hand Lisle plays. It is not that the two way speed of light cannot be different by direction, it is that his origin(s) is/are observers, which can be arbitrarily numerous, and the inertial frame is disregarded. Lisle’s scheme is not relativity.
Every point in the universe is “the one they’re diverging from”. My right thumb tip is the center of the universe, and so is yours.
This is the point at which my older brother would have said, "Look, in a system of n dimensions . . . and my brain would miss a gear.
But as Fr. Jim at St. Mary’s said, “Mass has photons, or you couldn’t see the altar”.
No – you’re stating what Genesis 1 says if you force a modern scientific worldview on it instead of reading it as the ancient literature it is.
And the meaning shifts with context. In the case of the opening of Genesis, that context is two kinds of ancient literature at once – and in neither of them is any detail to be taken literally.
Only to those who don’t understand how literature works.
The qualifier here being that we happen to share that literary type with the Greeks. We don’t share the literary types in Genesis 1 – and why should we expect to? As Paul might ask, did Genesis come only to you? No! It was written for Moses’ audience, and we are privileged to read it, and privileged to learn just how differently some peoples think compared to us. Learning the ANE context is a journey to a very different part of the people of God (and wouldn’t it be boring if they were all just like us?).
Which is exactly what so many, many university students decide every year, following what they were taught by YEC: that if there’s any scientific error, the whole thing is false.
That’s what happens when you take your eyes off of Christ and put them on a dubious proposition of men.
That can be calculated; we did it in Physics 412.
Nothing is a problem for YEC – they just ignore reality and hand-wave some pseudo-explanation into place.
(Pay no attention to the reality behind that curtain.)
As I recall, it’s the same for all observers because the center of the universe is everywhere, so every observer is at the center of the universe and thus will see the same age.
Or to this one: Where in scripture does it assert that the Bible intends to convey scientific facts?
We don’t need the boundaries since we are at the center (and so is every observer everywhere).
Which makes God a liar: He has provided evidence of a very ancient universe when it isn’t. That’s Loki, not Yahweh.
Well, yes, there is that… the frustration of discussions with those who have a foregone conclusion and will make the facts fit their conclusion….
but I was more getting at the fact that - (given my very limited and new understanding of this phenomenon or convention or whatever this is), if consistent with Einstein’s equations that light from distant stars could legitimately be measured as being near-instantaneous to earth, then it simply isn’t a problem at all… not simply that YEC proponents wouldn’t see it as a problem due to their intellectual commitments, it just isn’t a problem period. The same way I’d say that the atomic weight of gold or the existence of skyscrapers in Dubai are not “problems” for YECs. They just objectively aren’t problems to their model period.
If light from distant galaxies can be legitimately measured as taking practically zero time to reach earth, then the “light from distant stars” is objectively a non-issue for the Young Earth model and can’t (or ought not) even be raised as an objection by YEC opponents… opponents of YEC simply can’t say (for example) “but we know that light from the LEDA132905 galaxy takes just over 400 million years to reach earth…”
…because we don’t know that!
We can only say that said light from said galaxy takes just over 400 million years to reach earth if we assume Einstein’s (arbitrary !?) convention of light being c in both directions...! But if we used different arbitrary (?!) but completely legitimate conventions… we could use c/2 for that one-way trip and quite accurately say it would take light over 800 million years to make that journey instead. Or we could use c x 10^99999999 for light’s one way journey and say it takes 7 nanoseconds. And all of physics and Einstein’s equations work just the same regardless.
Just thinking about all this is just blowing my mind. Seriously. Never remotely conceived of this being a consequence of all this Relativity stuff. I am seriously looking at the night sky differently and thinking differently about the sun’s heat hitting my face. The thought that I could conceivably reach my hand up and instantaneously, immediately, and directly feel the sun’s heat just as immediately as I feel heat from a stove just blows my mind.
I’ve forgotten too much physics, but it seems to me that c is involved in constants other than the speed of light (since it isn’t a speed limit, it’s part of the geometry of the universe) such that all sorts of things would go screwy if c wasn’t constant. What comes to mind is the Schwarzschild radius of a black hole; if c isn’t constant then there is no radius – not sure but I think a black hole’s surface would be an ellipsoid.
But you don’t even feel the heat of a stove immediately – it takes time for heat to propagate.
The galaxies in the one direction might take nanoseconds, but what then does YEC do with the light swimming upstream from galaxies in the opposite direction? It is necessary to pick a lane.
You need to select a single origin for a given coordinate system. Lisle is supposing two gunslingers as separate origins in the same inertial frame.
Refutation by contradiction – the point is taking Lisle’s premise and running with it. It’s a thought-experiment and shows that math breaks down if Lisle is right . . . which means “Lying Lisle” is once again a liar.
Ahahahaha..You are dog barking up trees with that kind of tripe, its not a relevant argument when it comes to bible history or theology.
For starters, a philosphical theological approach that studies ancient biblical language cant force modern science on anything…thats parroted nonsense…i dont think you have a clue what you are talking about and that one is a doozy.
Of course it is – indeed it’s essential. If you don’t know what kind of literature you’re reading, you have no clue what it is saying.
But that is exactly what YEC does: it starts with a definition of truth derived from scientific materialism and reads the scriptures through that lens. YEC is a failure to escape from the prevailing human worldview.
Explain how Genesis chapter 1 stating God spoke and it was so is God being a liar? Exactly how is a mature universe a lie biblically? (Id like to see your theological evidence and bible statements supporting that and im willing to put myself out on a limb and state i dont think you can support it. However i can provide evidence from the bible that God did create mature…and its pretty simple to do starting with creation (obviously) and biblical themes.
If you cant support your position from the bible, then YOUR POSITION ISNT BIBLICAL! (so you had better start quoting bible texts amigo)
And, as you & @Mervin_Bitikofer (liked the Xeno paradox!) said, it’s indeterminate, null? I followed high school calculus to the point of proving Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for myself, one of the laws of nature that would be prevenient of God. In eternity I would certainly spend 10,000 hours calculating.
But as for having to believe the incoherent, unwarranted, unjustified, non-truth that c is… indeterminate to be a believer, wow!
What a tangled web we weave when we practice to believe.
And it’s not just amusing, and psychologically interesting, it’s sociologically, politically terrifying. As we’re seeing.
