HopkinsReb:
People like this prey on people who don’t understand the science behind it but are impressed by credentials and big words
I really doubt he’s trying to knowingly mislead those of us who don’t understand science.
In the case of people like Dr. Lisle, I’m not nearly so charitable. That he’s earned an astrophysics degree tells me he knows well enough how the speed of light relates to other physical properties like the fine structure constant. I’m going to be blunt; either he has some sort of mental illness (at the very least a very severe form of compartmentalization) or he’s knowingly misrepresenting and rejecting over a century of research.
You can’t just alter c without altering pretty much everything in modern physics. Classical physics from Maxwell and Lorentz forward has to be tossed out, and pretty much all of Quantum Mechanics, including the Standard Model, gets the heave ho too. So let me ask, what’s more reasonable, that Dr. Lisle is talking a load of nonsense, or pretty much all of physics from the late 19th century onward is invalid?
And let’s keep in mind that these theories; SR, GR and QM are among the most successful scientific theories ever developed, and explain a wide range of phenomenon. To basically kick them out the door simply to prop up Young Earth Creationism seems utterly absurd, perhaps even insane. I think it well and truly is time for YECs to get over themselves, and besides, Sola Scriptura is most definitely not a Catholic doctrine, and by and large was the product of some Protestant groups wanting to get rid of what they viewed as the taint of Catholicism by “going back to the Book”.
Here’s the facts. The universe is somewhere around 13.8 billion years old. The speed of light has been constant for almost all (if not all) of that time. We know that General Relativity specifically predicted an expanding universe that had a starting point (we know it because even Einstein tried to get rid of the singularity and preserve the Steady State model). We know that the amount of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the observable universe cannot be explained by solar nucleosynthesis (and furthermore, the initial hydrogen and helium that formed the first stars had to pre-exist the first generation of stars). We know that the CMBR’s high degree of homogeneity means the Early Universe passed from a phase of opacity and at some point the photons were “liberated” as the Universe cooled. We know space is expanding, and furthermore, we know that expansion is in fact speeding up.
Your “expert” is wrong, and I suspect he knows he’s wrong. But he’s made quite a career out of working for ICR and loaning his credentials to give weight to what is a pack of distortions, nonsense and out and out lies.
Here’s my advice. If your faith only survives because of a literal interpretation of Genesis, then that’s a problem with your faith. The science has been well established since the 1960s, when the CMBR was discovered. The universe, or at least the observable universe as we know it, started over 13 billion years ago.
answersingenesis.org
