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Author Topic:   Apparent Age
Coragyps
Member (Idle past 1055 days)
Posts: 5553
From: Snyder, Texas, USA
Joined: 11-12-2002


Message 28 of 37 (92397)
03-14-2004 10:45 AM
Reply to: Message 11 by Navy10E
03-14-2004 12:56 AM


So why can't God, create something beautiful, not to mention lanced with incredible power (super-novas), and then share it with us?
I'm sure that an omnipotent being could do that, but let's put them into the apparent age discussion that's supposed to be here.
There are supernovae observed every week that are, by any of a dozen or so astronomical yardsticks, millions or billions of light-years distant from us. The simplest of these yardsticks include that these supernovae, intrinsically very bright, look pretty faint from Earth, and that the galaxies that they occur in look both faint and small in angular size. Fancier yardsticks include a measurement based only on simple geometry to a galaxy called Messier 106 - it's 25 million +/- 1 million light years away, and the the tag end of a supernova explosion has been observed in it.
So - let's take as an example a supernova in a galaxy 50,000,000 light years away from us. The star that exploded to give us this show had to have done so 50,000,000 years ago. You can't fudge the speed of light here, because we can observe the precise shape of the "light curve" - the change of brightness with time - of this supernova, and it matches up exactly with the light curves of more distant or nearer SNs, or with the curve calculated by laboratory measurements of how fast nickel-56 decays to iron-56. (That's the power source for most of the light from one class of supernova, and we've seen its specific spectral signature in the SN radiation.) Had the speed of light changed, the rate of decay of 56Ni would have changed, too.
Okay: the Genesis myth has all the stars created on some "fourth day" a few thousand years ago. Observation, occasionally even naked-eye, of stars shows occasional explosions that happened much longer ago than that. So stars are blowing up before they were created.
Sure, a God could do that. Sure, a God might have some mysterious reason to do that. But if he did, he's deceiving us. I think it's a little more reasonable, if you feel the need to include YHWH as the god in your worldview, to assume that he told the ancient Hebrews a tale that they could understand, not one that was literal in every detail.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by Navy10E, posted 03-14-2004 12:56 AM Navy10E has not replied

  
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