YEC "evidence" posted in Christianity 301

[Roy]

Sure. I was exaggerating the implications of your earlier response.

The idea would be to be able to have a topic like Speed-of-Light and then a subtopic like Variation of Speed theory which then could have a subtopic like Setterfield theory. Then there could be 'issues' such as: data-selection,...

Such as how Barry Setterfield blatantly cherry-picked his data, not just ignoring a very early speed-of-light measurement that didn't match his desired conclusion, but also going so far as to use the results of Michelson & Morley's first three experiments, but not their fourth? Or how he used error bars for the more recent measurements, but not for the older, much less accurate ones?

...theory-discussion...

Such as how Setterfield decided to use a multiple-variable exponential function for curve-fitting, and didn't even try a linear fit? Or how he claimed a correlation coefficient of "1 to nine significant figures" despite it being obvious from his graphs that this wasn't the case?

... SN1987A.

Such as how a variable speed of light wouldn't make any difference to the calculation of how far away it is, but might not be consistent with the observed radioactive decay?

Under those, there might be normal threads (like in tweb) but maybe supplemented with a pro or con designation.

Other subtopics for Speed-of-Light could be: experimental-methods,

Such as how Setterfield didn't use any? Or maybe how his theory conveniently has the curve changing to a line now that we can accurately measure the speed of light, thus making his theory both arbitrary and untestable?

... speed-in-water, ...

Would this include how the speed of light in water is routinely measured by schoolchildren?

... physics-constants, etc.

An excellent place to point out that the speed of light in a vacuum is called a constant because it doesn't change.

Once again, I look forward to joining.

[rogue06]

Let's not forget how basic trigonometry can be used to determine the distance to 1987A

[oxmixmudd]

So you saw (and rejected) the design I had laid out on paper for this possible website? Tell me which part of my design didn't look right.

I wasn't intending this website design to focus a single topic. It would cover many topics but arrange them for better conveyance of discussion details that in forum threads such as in tweb (possibly via a tree structure).

Mike,

Why do you choose to believe sources with such obvious errors in both their data and their conclusions?

Jim

[TheLurch]

I hadn't heard of Setterfield before. How delightfully bonkers, though there's obviously the stench of desperation around people taking him seriously.

Looking into it, he seems to be proposing that the speed of light was several orders of magnitude faster in the past. Which does some really interesting things when you plug it into e = mc^2, where those orders of magnitude get squared. Given that stars are in a delicate balance of energy offsetting gravity, that radical change in energy is almost certainly enough to blow a star to pieces the second fusion starts.

So, Tip to Mike Whitney: theories should be consistent with available evidence. Don't use the term to refer to this nonsense.

[shunyadragon]

I hadn't heard of Setterfield before. How delightfully bonkers, though there's obviously the stench of desperation around people taking him seriously.

Looking into it, he seems to be proposing that the speed of light was several orders of magnitude faster in the past. Which does some really interesting things when you plug it into e = mc^2, where those orders of magnitude get squared. Given that stars are in a delicate balance of energy offsetting gravity, that radical change in energy is almost certainly enough to blow a star to pieces the second fusion starts.

So, Tip to Mike Whitney: theories should be consistent with available evidence. Don't use the term to refer to this nonsense.

The Newtonian universe as the Christians believe in would be vaporized.

[rogue06]

The Newtonian universe as the Christians believe in would be vaporized.

Your anti-Christian biases are showing again.

[shunyadragon]

Your anti-Christian biases are showing again.

Your lack of a sense of humor, and a little sarcasm shows. Note: I probably should have said, 'fundamentalist Christians.'

[oxmixmudd]

The Newtonian universe as the Christians believe in would be vaporized.

So would the relativistic one. Most Christians, even fundamentalists, would tend to accept relativity. So while you might think you are not showing an anti-Christian bias here, you really are.

Jim

[mikewhitney]

I hadn't heard of Setterfield before. How delightfully bonkers, though there's obviously the stench of desperation around people taking him seriously.

Looking into it, he seems to be proposing that the speed of light was several orders of magnitude faster in the past. Which does some really interesting things when you plug it into e = mc^2, where those orders of magnitude get squared. Given that stars are in a delicate balance of energy offsetting gravity, that radical change in energy is almost certainly enough to blow a star to pieces the second fusion starts.

So, Tip to Mike Whitney: theories should be consistent with available evidence. Don't use the term to refer to this nonsense.

It seems that you haven't done much evaluation of his theory. Why was it that people stopped investigating the speed of light changes after 1941?

I will remain curious about it unless there appears to be a decisive argument against the theory.

[oxmixmudd]

It seems that you haven't done much evaluation of his theory. Why was it that people stopped investigating the speed of light changes after 1941?

I will remain curious about it unless there appears to be a decisive argument against the theory.

there are many arguments against it. one has already been mentioned. the amount of energy in matter depends on the speed of light. that means if the speed of light was higher in the past, then fusion reactions produced more energy unless the increase in the speed of light as accompanied by an inverse square reduction in mass. That would mean that a star today would have blown itself apart in the past. E.g. our sun could not have existed when the speed of light was even 4x what it is today, let alone the massive values required to deliver us images of galaxies billions of light years away in <10,000 years.

A second rather simple reason is that we have watched light propagate at great distances from here (which means in the distant past) and light is moving at the same rate there it is here.

A third rather simple reason is that radioactive decay rates are also tied to the speed of light. A faster speed of light means more energetic and faster radioactive decay. But we can watch radioactive elements created in supernova decay, and they decay at the same rate in distant supernova they decay here. And such large changes as Setterfield proposes would have made the Earth's core so much hotter that the crust would be molten and we would not exist.

There are many, many reasons. Measured Neutron star spin down is completely inconsistent with massive changes in the speed of light. And so on. There are so many reasons the idea is ludicrous it would be hard to list them all in a single post.

And all you'd need to do to understand this would be to look for, read, and understand critiques of Setterfield's conjecture. Have you read any of them? Do you have sufficient background in physics to understand them?


Jim

[mikewhitney]

there are many arguments against it. one has already been mentioned. the amount of energy in matter depends on the speed of light. that means if the speed of light was higher in the past, then fusion reactions produced more energy unless the increase in the speed of light as accompanied by an inverse square reduction in mass. That would mean that a star today would have blown itself apart in the past. E.g. our sun could not have existed when the speed of light was even 4x what it is today, let alone the massive values required to deliver us images of galaxies billions of light years away in <10,000 years.

A second rather simple reason is that we have watched light propagate at great distances from here (which means in the distant past) and light is moving at the same rate there it is here.

A third rather simple reason is that radioactive decay rates are also tied to the speed of light. A faster speed of light means more energetic and faster radioactive decay. But we can watch radioactive elements created in supernova decay, and they decay at the same rate in distant supernova they decay here. And such large changes as Setterfield proposes would have made the Earth's core so much hotter that the crust would be molten and we would not exist.

There are many, many reasons. Measured Neutron star spin down is completely inconsistent with massive changes in the speed of light. And so on. There are so many reasons the idea is ludicrous it would be hard to list them all in a single post.

And all you'd need to do to understand this would be to look for, read, and understand critiques of Setterfield's conjecture. Have you read any of them? Do you have sufficient background in physics to understand them?


Jim

I'm not really intending to be in the debate now. If I do the website, as described earlier, I may facilitate an organized set of pros and cons and responses. Setterfield does provide responses to critics. I'll probably be looking at the site once in awhile. A link on the neutron stars is here: http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy..._Problems.html

I have 3 semesters of college Physics. So I can follow aspects of the discussion. The Astronomy terms and discussions are not so familiar to me. I've read some of the critics, as represented on the aforementioned link and some other scattered articles on the site.

[shunyadragon]

It seems that you haven't done much evaluation of his theory. Why was it that people stopped investigating the speed of light changes after 1941?

I will remain curious about it unless there appears to be a decisive argument against the theory.

As Jim noted they have not stopped.

[oxmixmudd]

I'm not really intending to be in the debate now. If I do the website, as described earlier, I may facilitate an organized set of pros and cons and responses. Setterfield does provide responses to critics. I'll probably be looking at the site once in awhile. A link on the neutron stars is here: http://www.setterfield.org/Astronomy..._Problems.html

I have 3 semesters of college Physics. So I can follow aspects of the discussion. The Astronomy terms and discussions are not so familiar to me. I've read some of the critics, as represented on the aforementioned link and some other scattered articles on the site.

A) Pulsar pulses are not perfectly regular, they are slowing down, just like their rotation would be, a strong indicator the pulses are tied to rotation in some way.

B) it doesn't matter how the pulses are generated, if the physical mechanism is the same for all or most pulsars, their arrival times would show a distance to change in rate correlation because the distance between the pulses would be much greater in the past than in the present. So if the speed of light was slowing very quickly 2000 years ago, as Setterfield proposes, then pulses from a neutron star far enough away in Setterfield's world for the signal to be 2000 years old would show an apparent slowing in its rotation rate over time consistent with the rate of change in the speed of light at that time. Likewise, pulsars far enough away for their light to be 4000 years old would show an apparent slowing in their rates consistent with the rate of slowing for THAT period as well. Further, since the distance between pulses is always greater for a given pulse rate the greater the distance*, This means that there would be both a distance to rotation rate change correlation and a distance to pulse rate correlation, with all very distant pulsars tending to show much slower pulse rates than closer pulsars. And there is no such correlation.

Although I have not taken Setterfield's theoretical rate of change graph and applied it to the known pulsar distances, my guess is that the results would be absurd both in what the original pulse rate would need to have been at the time generated and in what would be required of their characteristics over distance to avoid generating a distance rate correlation.

Jim

*for light from a pulsar 20,000 light years hence, for the light to get to us in < 10000 years, the speed of light must have averaged at least 2x the present speed of light. Likewise for 40,000, at least 4x. But these are averages and at the initial stages in setterfields theory light is millions of times faster and slowing rapidly to get light from 10 billion light years hence here in a few thousand years. This would make pulse rates of the most distant pulsars massively different from those of the closest pulsars.

E.g a millisecond pulsar whose signal seen today was generated at a distance and a time that the speed of light was 1000 times what it is now would show a pulse rate of 1 time per second in our radio telescopes today.

ETA: always fact check these guys. The mentioned pulsars do not exceed the theoretical maximum spin rate of around 1500 rotations per second. Pulsar SAX J1808.4-3658 spins at 401 times per second, and PSR J1748-224ad spins at around 716 times per second.

[rogue06]

What those who wish to posit that the speed of light has decayed and use that uncorroborated notion to support the idea that the universe is a few thousand years old rather than roughly 13.7 Billion years old seem to overlook is that the speed of light had to be several hundreds of thousands time faster then than it does now. Evidence for such a decrease would be awfully hard to miss.

There are so many issues with this fanciful whimsy that many YECs have abandoned it years ago.

Before Answers in Genesis (AiG) took down their "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" page due to the embarrassment that constantly resulted from it they listed it as #13 of the "Arguments that should be avoided" section.

Creation Ministries International (CMI) still has it in their list of "What arguments are doubtful, hence inadvisable to use" preferring to promote Russell Humphreys' "White Hole" nonsense (which possibly has even more problems than speed of light decaying).

Creationwiki also advises against claiming that the speed of light has slowed down simply stating "There are still too many problems with this theory." That is a bit of an understatement.

And the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) was urging caution concerning Setterfield's ideas right from the very start (mid-late 1980s) but TBH I'm not certain what their position is today but since the aforementioned Russell Humphreys is associated with them I doubt they accept it.

These are the groups that nearly all other YEC groups get their information from (Creationwiki to a much lesser extent) so it is telling that this idea is not being pushed by them.

[mikewhitney]

What those who wish to posit that the speed of light has decayed and use that uncorroborated notion to support the idea that the universe is a few thousand years old rather than roughly 13.7 Billion years old seem to overlook is that the speed of light had to be several hundreds of thousands time faster then than it does now. Evidence for such a decrease would be awfully hard to miss.

There are so many issues with this fanciful whimsy that many YECs have abandoned it years ago.

Before Answers in Genesis (AiG) took down their "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" page due to the embarrassment that constantly resulted from it they listed it as #13 of the "Arguments that should be avoided" section.

Creation Ministries International (CMI) still has it in their list of "What arguments are doubtful, hence inadvisable to use" preferring to promote Russell Humphreys' "White Hole" nonsense (which possibly has even more problems than speed of light decaying).

Creationwiki also advises against claiming that the speed of light has slowed down simply stating "There are still too many problems with this theory." That is a bit of an understatement.

And the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) was urging caution concerning Setterfield's ideas right from the very start (mid-late 1980s) but TBH I'm not certain what their position is today but since the aforementioned Russell Humphreys is associated with them I doubt they accept it.

These are the groups that nearly all other YEC groups get their information from (Creationwiki to a much lesser extent) so it is telling that this idea is not being pushed by them.

Welcome to the world of science and politics and apologetics. Those involved in apologetics have to choose what arguments they think they can use effectively (or with social acceptance).

Setterfield has responded to such criticisms on his website. Theories aren't 'proven' just because of the approval of a multitude (or any specific person). Theories are proven because of the fit to the data -- and not to have any sufficient obstacles.

Your reference to other creationist groups and sites seems superfluous to a serious discussion. I wouldn't have thought you would use an argument from authority.

My interest would primarily be on the theory and the responses by Setterfield -- to evaluate whether the criticisms have been addressed and if Setterfield's responses are adequate to preserve the theory. The issues raised thus far have been responded to by Setterfield.