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Author Topic:   Apparent Age
Chiroptera
Inactive Member


Message 5 of 37 (92277)
03-13-2004 5:42 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Navy10E
03-13-2004 4:17 PM


This is called the "Omphalos Argument" - that God created the universe with the appearance of age for some reason.
Sure, some things make sense - rivers need to flow in river beds, so river beds needed to be created already "cut" into the ground.
But why radiometric dating? Why create rocks where the relative abundances of isotopes give consistent ages for rocks and strata? Why do lower strata have older radiometric ages than higher strata?
Simple thermodynamic considerations can produce models of how a star evolves with age over billions of years, and sure enough, we can see the very types of stars predicted. Why not create just one type of star?
Why do we need to see stars so far away? Surely the stars that are only a few dozen light years away were sufficient for whatever purpose the creator had in mind. In fact, if we could only see stars 6000 light years away, and if new stars could be seen as enough time passed since creation for the light to arrive, this would be dramatic proof of a young, instantly created universe.
The problem with the Omphalos Argument is that most of the signs of age make no sense unless you want to either give your creator secret, unknown purposes, or you assume the God is deliberately trying to trick us into believing something not true.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Navy10E, posted 03-13-2004 4:17 PM Navy10E has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by Melchior, posted 03-13-2004 6:08 PM Chiroptera has not replied
 Message 8 by Navy10E, posted 03-14-2004 12:28 AM Chiroptera has not replied

  
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