Creationists Questioning Speed of Light to Refute 'Cosmos'

[celtics23]

[rurallib]

1. I wish God would have written his bible more clearly

I think it is time for a revision, with some of these physics law breaking formulae included. That would make me a believer.

[rhett o rick]

14. Which version? nm

[phil89]

2. They need to give it up. It's just becoming sad.

If they are so big on faith, why do they even care what science has to say about anything?

[weissmam]

3. thats almost too silly to be believed

That number has been proven so many times as to be a universal constant at least at the particle and wave level

[longship]

5. It's written into the universe's fabric.

C = sqrt(1/mu-nought * epsilon-nought)

Where mu-nought and epsilon-nought are physical properties of the magnetic and electric fields. If C can change, both mu and epsilon must also change. That would be very bad, since they determine the strength of the magnetic and electric fields. A faster speed of light in the past would mean that my and epsilon were smaller in the past. But since we can observe things back to the early eras of the universe we know it just ain't true.

C is pretty much constant to a very high degree of accuracy.

That won't stop those idiots from continuing to make the claim that it isn't.

[LongTomH]

4. Creationists have been ringing changes on this theme for years!

Back in the 90s, I had a "creation scientist" (cough) try to tell me that there was "evidence that the speed of light had changed over time." As 'evidence' he said that measurements of the speed of light over the last two hundred years had varied! .Recognize the flaw? We haven't used the same methods of measuring the speed of light over two centuries; our newer methods are much better. They never give up!

The same guy offered to let me read a paper prepared by "the guy who takes care of the atomic clocks for the National Bureau of Standards." He never said whether the guy was a technician working on the clocks or if he just dusted them.

[GeorgeGist]

6. The creationist themselves are the best argument against God ...

and Evolution.

[ChazInAz]

7. How can they have faith in this god?

Their god is a deceptive, lying thug.
If they're going to challenge the speed of light, they need to show us their research and experimental methodology, published in something besides a Jack Chick comic.

[zebonaut]

8. Radio from Moon astronauts took 1.3 light seconds to travel in either direction

[Half-Century Man]

9. Just like we can accurately calculate the speed of light, we can gauge the weight of stupid

it is soul crushing. It bends societies into warped shape.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

10. Keep in mind that all of this is based on the mass of stupidity,...

Which is often based of the distance of your relatives from one another.

[Roland99]

11. Faith = intellectual bankruptcy

Creationism = pure, unadulterated lunacy

[zebonaut]

12. A Real Scientist talks about the Real Universe:

[Thor_MN]

13. If you are going to challenge the concepts

Why not just claim that gawd created a trail of photons streaming from the distant stars as well as the stars? If a being could create a star, tossing some photons around would be child's play. Why get all complicated and in way over their heads challenging the speed of light?

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

15. That claim has been made by creationists

It's called the Omphalos hypothesis -- omphalos is the Greek for "navel", and it dates back to 1857.

There are two basic problems with it: The first is that the universe might have been created 15 minutes ago, or last Thursday or whenever, with false memories implanted in us to make us believe it is older. There is no way to tell.

The second problem is strictly on creationist terms. Creationists claim that Genesis is an accurate description of the birth of the universe because God would not lie to us. To them, God not only always tells the truth, but God is truth itself. However, saying "God created the photons already on the way to earth" is to say, "God is lying to us." They can't have it both ways.

There is a creationist in Australia, Barry Setterfield, who argued that the speed of light has decreased since "creation week" not more than ten thousand years ago. He takes measurements of the speed of light since 1675, and plots a graph showing decreases in the measurements. He wrote a book in 1983, The Velocity of Light and the Age of the Universe. There are major flaws in it.

First, there were no clocks with anything even approaching the necessary accuracy until very late in the 19th century, and it was only with the invention of the atomic clock after World War II that we finally had an accurate enough clock.

Second, I am very leery of a graph drawn with the first data point (which even Setterfield admits is quite inaccurate) coming in the last 5% of the curve. A data point from the ancient Greeks would be very handy, but, alas, there is no measurement that old.

Third, Setterfield draws a curve over the data points, but is honest enough to give the confidence bars (i.e., the margin of error in the measurements). A straight line, parallel to the X-axis, would miss exactly two of the confidence bars, both in the 19th century, and misses them by not very much.

Fourth, he does what is called "blinding with science". He has a mass of mathematics which purports to support his curve. Unfortunately, while it looks impressive as heck, it is bullshit. He manipulates his data to make it fit, claims that approximations to formulae are acceptable, and so on. I have a degree in mathematics, and I was able to take his figures, work with them properly and guess what? I came up with creation happening 3 billion years ago, according to Setterfield.