Falsifying a young Universe. (re: Supernova 1987A)

Dollars to donuts he's too young to even understand "dollars to donuts".

No, time has nothing to do with measuring distance. Are you really so abysmally ignorant of parallax?When we were laying out concrete forms and wanted the corner to be square, we would measure 3 feet up one side from the corner, 4 feet up the other side, then hold the end of a steel tape (graduated, in case you have different terminology in the UK) at one mark and adjust the free side of the form until the tape measured 5 feet at the other mark. At that point, the form was square as per the Pythagorean Theorem.Guess what role time played in the math of that process. None whatsoever.Same thing with parallax; it's purely geometric. You have a baseline of known length. You make two angular measurements at opposite points of that baseline. Knowing the angle and the length of the baseline, you can calculate the distance from the baseline to the object. Time plays no role in those calculations.Please learn something about parallax.Please learn something about geometry.Please learn something about trig. Trigonometry is really quite simple and straight-forward. I had taught it to myself quite easily before I took the course officially solely for the sake of my transcript. The only requirement is that you actually want to learn.Please learn something.I keep getting the feeling that you are the typical creationist. You read something that, however stupid it was, had inspired you nonetheless. So you come charging into the fray armed only with these half-ass misconceptions ... and the worst thing possible happens to you. We try to discuss your claims with you. You don't even understand your own claims, so how can you possibly discuss them with anybody else? Especially with people who do understand the subject matter that your claim is based on.In the foreword of his book, The Age of the Earth, G. Brent Dalrymple describes a visit in the early 1970's from Drs. Duane Gish and Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), the premiere creationist organization of the time which quite literally invented "creation science" and Flood Geology, and produced the books and "public school edition" mis-educational materials for creationism. IOW, they are quite literally "what wrote the book!". They made some presentations about "creation science" to the US Geological Survey. The subsequent conversations primarily involved the USGS scientists trying to explain to Gish and Morris where they went wrong with their thermodynamics claims and what thermodynamics really was. What did Gish and Morris learn from that? To never again talk to actual scientists, because actual scientists can see through their bullshit immediately.Over so many years in so many forums I have seen so many creationists try the same thing that you are trying. You learn a few creationist claims and you think you know it all, that you can beard the lion in its den. So you sally forth to do righteous battle and you immediately get cut off at the ankles. Here is what Scott Rauch, a former young-earth creationist, said about that:

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"I still hold some anger because I believe the evangelical Christian community did not properly prepare me for the creation/evolution debate. They gave me a gun loaded with blanks, and sent me out. I was creamed.

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Are we suffering from a cultural divide here? Shaw's "We're divided by a common language."? Do you know what "I was creamed" means? It means that you were reduced to chunky salsa, only with very much smaller chunks. Very much smaller.The vast majority of creationists I have encountered fall into this category, though it took me a while to understand what was actually happening. They would make a claim and I would take it seriously at face value and try to discuss it with them. They would immediately become evasive and defensive and belligerent. It took me a while to realize that they didn't understand their own claim nor any of the science it was supposed to be based on. Their script only involved delivering that claim that the moment you tried to discuss it with them you had gone off-script and they had absolutely no idea what to do. So they became increasingly evasive, then increasingly belligerent all in an attempt to drive me away.I see you doing the same thing. You claim you could blow us out of the water (eg, Message 452: "I could dash your arguments to smithereens with one hand tied behind my back, without much effort in an arena where there was fair moderation."). So why don't you? Why do you have nothing but an empty bluff? You're so brilliant and right, so why don't you just show us? Because you can't.BTW, " ... in an arena where there was fair moderation". This forum offers the most fair moderation I have ever seen. The moderators here will accommodate far too much outrageous creationist misbehavior just to keep them here. Creationist-run forums are dictatorships. Many members here have been on creationist-run forums. There is no fair moderation there. A creationist can post whatever nonsense he wants to. But any inkling of a sign of questioning one of those claims, let alone try to challenge that creationist's claim, and you are immediately suspended or expelled for all eternity. No, the moderation on this forum is the fairest that I have seen yet.OK, so what is your bottom line? Please spare us all the bullshit and just deliver your bottom line.Here's what I think it is:I require you to know absolutely everything with absolute certainty.Ha! You can't do it, can you? Well, that means that my own position, the only other possible one, must be absolutely and completely true!Eg:
Young earth
Global Flood
Literal truth of the Bible, especially Genesis
All the theological assertions of my own particular cretinous religious sect.To which the only possible answer is: BOLLOCKS!!!!You want to prove those things? Well then PROVE THEM!!!The only way you can prove those things is to actually prove them. Don't create a strawman to attack, but rather actually prove what you want to prove.

We have an academic expression here: If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with your bullshit.We're still waiting to be dazzled.Still waiting.Still waiting.

So when are you going to stop trying to baffle us with your bullshit (which seems to be baffling only you) and start dazzling us with your brilliance? You have already received several requests, so what's holding you back?So come on already! Dazzle us with your brilliance!We're still waiting to be dazzled.Still waiting.Still waiting.Still waiting.*** YAWN ***Still waiting. We've had a lot of experience with creationists, virtually all of it extremely unpleasant. The creationists we've encountered have almost invariably been very dishonest as they rely on false claims and work to prevent any kind of constructive discussion from happening. They provide an extremely powerful witness to how morally and intellectually bankrupt Christianity is and that it is truly a false religion (reference the Matthew 7:20 Test).So far, you are doing nothing to differentiate yourself from those creationists and everything to demonstrate that you are yet another sorry example. It would really help immensely if you were to demonstrate that you are different, that you can indeed be honest and be able to engage in meaningful discussion.It's all up to you. I'm not going to hold my breath. So propose a topic and present your list of scientific evidence for a young earth. Your problem with that is that we are very familiar with all your young-earth arguments. They have all been tested and proven to be false. So then you will need to explain why you have to rely on proven false claims.

And if you were to accomplish that (please note use of the subjunctive here, or is that yet another subject you are ignorant of?), then what would that say about your own position and your own arguments?Aren't you trying to apply the Two Model Approach here? You create a false dichotomy between the "creation model" which you never present and the "evolution model" which contains everything else (including most of the world's religions, ancient and modern, according to Dr. Henry Morris of the ICR). So you take a few pot shots at your "evolution model" and then claim that since you "have disproven the evolution model", then the "creation model" must be true. Please note that you are trying to prove the "creation model" without ever providing any evidence for it, discussing it, supporting or defending it, nor even ever presenting it.Well, it turns out that in order to accomplish that, you would need to disprove each and every idea contained within the "evolution model", including actual evolution itself, which creationist attacks never dare address. Your goal is made impossible by the fact that the vast majority of those ideas contained within the "evolution model" are actually the creation myths of the vast majority of the religions that have ever existed. That makes those elements supernaturalistic, which makes them impossible to test and hence impossible to disprove.It would be vastly simpler and much more effective for you to simply present your evidence for creation. But you can't do that, can you? Because you have no evidence, do you?So that leaves you using the Two Model Approach, a known deception, and using every dishonest trick you can think of.Or you could mend your evil ways and try to be honest. We've also seen honest creationists. They usually don't last long, some of them ending up opposing young-earth creationism. Several of your opponents here used to be young-earth creationists before they opened their eyes to the truth.

Typical creationist troll. You read something that really convinced you because you don't know anything about it, so you go out and repeat the words without understanding. Since you are incapable of discussing your own claim, you resort to bluff and bluster in order to avoid discussion.You are being given ample opportunity to discuss and to support your claim, yet you refuse to. That speaks loudly about your claim; ie, that it is bollocks.

I read some of his Nevins stuff. Like "this formation is this many feet thick and was supposed to have formed over this many years, so geologists believe that it formed at a uniformly constant rate of a hundredth of an inch per year." An outright lie since any geology student after the first year would know better and here he was a graduate student already. He knew better, so he was lying deliberately. Typical creationist.Since then, he knows what conditions will cause problems for radiometric dating, so those are the samples that he seeks out. Again, lying deliberately. Typical creationist.

This strikes me as an instance of "God of the Gaps" theology. Far too often, we have witnessed creationists resorting to the "God of the Gaps" argument that, since we don't know something ergo GOD! Frankly, the "God of the Gaps" has been at the heart of "creation science" for decades: "Do you know exactly and completely how this happened?" (Usually "impossible questions" like exactly how life began with complete proof, or the complete history of evolution from "bacteria to the blue whale") "No, not exactly. But the evidenced points to ... " "Enough! You don't know, therefore GOD!!!!!!" Even supposedly "scientific" ID resorts immediately to that "God of the Gaps".Of course, the problem with that puny "God of the Gaps" is that it must forever hide in the shadows which are the gaps in our knowledge. Hide from what? From the Light of Knowledge, from our knowledge of how the universe does actually work.So what is the future for that "God of the Gaps"? Eternal terror as the growth of human knowledge inexorably closes those gaps in human knowledge which are that puny god's only abode.The other unpleasant aspect of creationists' "God of the Gaps" is its true title: The God of Ignorance. This god has to hide in the gaps. What are those gaps? Our ignorance. Why must that god hide, what is it hiding from? It is hiding from knowledge. So as creationists worship their "God of the Gaps", their God of Ignorance, they embrace ignorance and disdain knowledge, reality.An alternative is offered by physicist Dr. Allan H. Harvey (AKA "Steam Doc", since he specialized in the physics of water), a practicing mainstream Christian active in his church and its religious education activities. The list of his essays are at http://steamdoc.itgo.com/writings.htm. In his essay, Science and Christian Apologetics (one of two or three in which he addresses the false "God of the Gaps" theology), he presents the alternative of thinking of God as "Sovereign Over Nature":

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Maybe my most important message today is that this "God of the Gaps" theology is wrong. The reason it's wrong is that God is sovereign over nature. (Take-home point #2) The Bible tells us that everything that exists is upheld by God's power. God isn't just in the gaps, he's the creator and sustainer of the whole fabric of creation, including the things we call "natural." So what does God's sovereignty over nature mean for our apologetics? It means that science isn't any threat to Christianity. Scientific results don't count as points against God, they're just uncovering how God did things. It means that if somebody has the idea that some scientific explanation (evolution or whatever) has eliminated God, the wrong thing to do is to argue against the science — that's defending the God of the Gaps and it's a losing strategy (unfortunately, it's the strategy of a lot of Christians). The right thing to do is to remember that God is sovereign over nature, that the atheist argument that natural explanations mean God is absent isn't science, it's completely unjustified philosophy. We can tell people that natural explanations may eliminate the God of the Gaps, but they don't eliminate the Christian God.

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So then creation's grave and fatal mistake is the same of sadly too many other creationists: they have chosen to believe in the wrong god, in their "God of the Gaps" instead of in the Sovereign over Nature.

A proper creation-believer position. And then you swerve off the road to puke all over your own shoes in the weeds.Try to follow this:
God created everything that is.
Science studies everything that is.
Therefore, science studies what God created.Now creationists show up with their highly fallible Man-made theology declaring that if the universe is not completely in accord with their contrary-to-fact claims, then God does not exist. Well, if you insist on making contrary-to-fact claims, then of course God's Creation will disagree with you! Duh???

That is the reason for my "Cheer" (a kind of feature that I normally avoid).For far too many "believers", God always agrees with their own prejudices. If they hate certain people, then so does God. It also ties in to "cheap grace", the down-side of Christian doctrine that whenever you "stumble" (Born-again Bumper Sticker: "I'm not perfect, just saved.") all you need to do is ask your invisible friend, Jesus, for forgiveness, which he always gives unless you have very serious mental health issues, then you are forgiven for everything without ever having to make things right with the person you had transgressed against.God must never be an excuse for our worst impulses. Rather, God must be an ideal for us to strive towards. Why do so few "believers" understand that?