It doesn’t take faith in the unknown to measure the distance to other galaxies and stars. It also does not take faith to measure the redshift in their spectra, the brightness of type Ia supernovae, or the speed of light. With these data points in hand, one can only conclude that the universe is billions of years old and has been expanding during that time.
If the rate of expansion between two points is greater than the speed of light then you will simply not see those distant points. That is part of de Sitter’s work as well. Therefore, inflation doesn’t solve the problems that YECs run into in the field of astronomy. If there was rapid expansion 6,000 years ago, then we would only be able to see stars that were 6,000 light years away at the point where that rapid expansion stopped. That doesn’t even cover most of the stars in our own galaxy, much less the billions of galaxies we see in our telescopes.
Inflation has nothing to do with the appearance of age. So you know the universe went from much smaller than a proton to about 4 inches… 4 inches! It also does nothing for the known size of the universe. We’re talking about a 4 inch growth which yes, was super huge from where it was at the beginning of inflation but it is an understandable mistake to imagine that inflation is a magical event that accounts for the size of the universe. At the end of inflation, the universe was 4 inches big and approximately 10^27 K hot. There is a nice correlation between the size of the universe and the temperature of the universe which is T~1/r (where r is the radius of the universe). We can measure the redshift of galaxies back quite far and date them to be quite old, affirming that it is 13.8 billion years of a fairly constant redshift that brings the universe from 4 inches to its current size. Here is a graph of some current redshift measurements:
The x-axis goes from z=0.01 (or an object 140 million light years away) to z=1 (or an object 7 billion light years away). This shows us the history of our universes expansion with the error bars getting larger further away indicating that our universe is also now slightly accelerating.
This is not true at all. Here is an article written by an actual Cosmologist describing these articles on Scientific American: Is Inflationary Cosmology Science? – Sean Carroll. Believe it or not, despite him being convinced that Big Bang Cosmology is affirmed beyond all reasonable doubt, he isn’t completely sold on inflation. The Big Bang does not need cosmic inflation to account for all of its other smashing predictions:
The Cosmic Microwave Background
Redshift of galaxies
Amazing predictions and measurements of Hydrogen, Helium, Deuterium and even Lithium
When adding inflation the story gets even sweeter which even looking at what is called E-mode polarization from the CMB signal affirming an actual inflation event to odds greater than 900,000,000 to 1.
Here are two quotes from former Christians related to these topics:
I was so incredibly @#$^&* off when I got to college and realized how much I had been lied to about science by my church. I sometimes think that if I hadn’t been a biblical literalist before, I might not be an atheist now. They were kind of working against themselves in the end.
contrary to what churchgoers claim, church is not a good place for learning - especially when it comes to science
Aren’t all of these statements that frame YEC as “laughable” based on the presupposition that we understand dark matter, dark energy, gravity and even something so basic as mass? Of the known particles (12 now 13), how many do we understand? One more was found in the last 30 days. Please give the name of anyone on earth that understands even 10% of the known universe and how it actually has operated in the last 6,000 years. 1 million dollar prize for the winner.
We don’t need to understand dark matter or dark energy in order to measure the brightness of type Ia supernovae or the redshift of starlight spectra. Just from these two sources of data we can measure the distance to galaxies and the rate of expansion.
We can also observe that stars and galaxies out in space observe the same laws that matter and gravity obeys here on Earth.
Measuring is not the understanding of time and space and what it’s behavior was 6,000 years ago. If you measure how long it takes to make wine from water the answer is never. My presupposition is that God did what he said and is capable of doing exactly what He said. Is prayer something we can measure?
Yeah! I drink wine and I don’t need a double-blind to tell!
@jammycakes As to the Wedding at Cana, the proof is in the taste if we pay attention to Archeology and Wine.
“New wine” in ancient times was freshly pressed grape juice. It only takes hours for the juice to start fermenting. re: A number of Wine articles in Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR).
The parable “…put not new wine into old wine-skins” is true because fermentation would break the already stretched goatskin bags. New wine was always put into a new goatskin to ferment before being decanted to drink.
Ancient people drank wine rather than water (most of the time) because it was not tainted with animal and human waste in field runoff (manure on fields).They most often mixed wine and water to purify the water. Bothe because wine was expensive, and water hauled from a well was hard work! Wine! an all-purpose tool that is fun to drink
New wine was usually only drank around the time of harvest, as any grape juice was long fermented at any other time of the year ( you should have heard the explanations of one of my Sunday School teachers explaining that Jesus only drank grape juice! – so much for the effect of Prohibition on the conservative American churches!)… The Wedding of Cana, notwithstanding the time of the year would NOT have used grape juice as the purpose was to enjoy the buzz in celebration.
Any Israelite kid could tell the difference between grape juice and wine, and poor wine from good wine. Certainly the Steward new the difference and would have said so.
So I take his observation of the quality of the wine to be "expert testimony.
Now back to our regularly scheduled debate on tilting at windmills…
Whatever it was before “The Big Bang” requires faith in the unknown.
From the moment just after the Big Bang, physicists have an impressive mastery over the inflation of the Universe … and know how to run the equations backwards.
“Rapid Inflation” is quite lawful. But still mysterious to laymen, as is making a good chianti or bourbon.
To me, God and the Big Bang are synonymous - - and worth our attention.
@Bill_II It appears ancients did keep wine for considerable time. I can’t find the BAR article at this time, but I remember reading about sealed wine amphora found in a shipwreck that still had traces of liquid wine in it. This is an article about a similar wreck found in 2008. 2,000 Year Old Salad Dressing Found in Roman Shipwreck
So if the wine was stored properly, it would have aged much like modern day wine,though probably less due to lack of quality control (modern sense). Though it appears that their usage was more in the current mediterranean style (think grapo or chianti) which means they drank it because it was to drink, not escrow as a snobbish investment. (ahh, my dear, come see my amphora cellar!)
Any theory of origins, in any framework, requires a certain faith. Judging by her behavior, my 11-month-old granddaughter does not yet have faith in gravity. She tests it several times a day by releasing objects from her hand–typically food!
However, only one of the two you are comparing requires that the believer deny many centuries of observational science.
By definition, miracles such as the transformation of water to wine are beyond the domain of science. Also, they are extraordinary-- by definition.
Now let’s consider the data from astronomy, chemistry, physics and geology. What do they tell us about the age of the sun, earth, and universe? The overwhelming weight of overwhelming amounts of evidence indicates an age of billions of years.
The issue isn’t whether God can do miracles in order to bring liberation, redemption, joy and healing. Biblical miracles exhibit God’s purpose, character, and love. Making all the scientific evidence point in a highly misleading direction, on the other hand, seems completely out of character with the Biblical miracles.
My Wife and I were at a birthday for Paul Portteus (vintner) and we were the only people not in the wine business. Someone had brought a bottle of very old wine that was supposed to be very good. When it was opened, all the experts said it had gone bad. Me, my favorite wines are Thunderbird and kosher concord grape.
Not laughable, not by any means. I’m sorry that you feel that way. The position however is not based upon any evidence despite what the zen-masters at AiG, ICR, CMI insist. It is based solely upon a single interpretation of a 2,500 year old text while ignoring all other data.
These aren’t imaginary things. There is a real physical effect that these two mysterious things have on the universe. There is no physical evidence of a 6,000 year old creation. Huge difference.
What do you mean by understand 10% of the known universe? You mean someone who is an expert in all possible fields of knowledge to where he fully understands all that we know exists? Unless you mean of our universe with dark matter, dark energy etc. In a fun word play, anyone who knows all that we currently know about dark energy (or what is ‘known’ about our universe) would automatically know more than 70% of what we know about the universe. Your question is silly though I understand where you are coming from. The YEC plan for all science is a) cast doubt upon it, b) pick at any gaps in understanding, c) claim that YEC is therefore automatically true. I’m sorry you’ve been mislead by the ‘defenders of the truth’ who have spearheaded this movement since 1961.
Yep, even the best wine can go bad, and I presume ancient wine more than any modern wine. Yet ancient wine could last a long time. (Thunderbird? Wow, takes me back to H.S.
While I appreciate your lengthy reply, I cannot get past your opening paragraphs because they completely baffle me. To give you a specific, I cannot tell whether you are stating the following two sentences as what you believe or as what you think I believe.
Maybe if I figure out what you’re saying here, I can understand some of what you say as you go on. Please advise.
Thanks for the question. The sentence in question is my take on the assumptions underlying your thought process. I could have prefaced that sentence with: “It seems that you think that…”
Yep, my thoughts about your thoughts about God’s thoughts.
Okay, thanks for getting me over that hump. That removes one source of bafflement. Now to the next. Recall that you began your extended comment like this:
You chide me for “excluding the middle” yet, though I didn’t use your terms (“a very dualistic way of thinking about things,” “very sharp dichotomy,” “the fallacy of the excluded middle,” “all choices must be binary,” “unnecessary either/or conflicts”), this was the very point I was making to you when explaining my resistance to Walton’s thesis. Recall that I wrote:
I was the one arguing that it should be possible for a reference to be functional, material, or a mixture of both. How then am I the one guilty of “a very dualistic way of thinking about things,” “very sharp dichotomy,” “the fallacy of the excluded middle,” “all choices must be binary,” and “unnecessary either/or conflicts”?
If you can get me over this hump, you’ll be two for two.
“…there is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that ‘remembered’ a wholly unreal past”.
“Human beings”, posited in being five minutes ago with built-in “memory” traces, would not be human beings. The suggestion is logically incoherent."
