The Creation
A while ago the Creationists started downplaying their old designation and gave themselves a more authoritative-sounding label, and now they're purveyors of "Intelligent Design" instead. But doesn't the very fact that they felt obliged to change their name a sign of their recognition, even if unconscious, that their beliefs essentially hold about as much water as a torn fishing net?
Meanwhile in all the years since Darwin and his host sea captain had their differences, not much has been achieved by Captain FitzRoy's people of a lasting nature in what one would think would be religion's main purpose -- to improve the human species. Instead, as often as not, religion, especially in the area of warfare, has brought misery to large numbers of people. But those on Darwin's side, the scientists, have come up with innumerable achievements that for a long time have had profound effects on the lives of nearly everyone living, even if how much of it is all for the good is still an open question -- except of course for the medical miracles. . ..
But the Creationists are not deterred, and now, under the cloak of "Intelligent Design," we find them trying to turn those scientific advances back on the scientists, and one of the ways they try to do this is to say that what scientists have devised, found, and calculated merely proves the rightness of the Biblical story of creation.
In a website called Talk Reason, where you can find all that you might want to know about these tactics, there's a highly interesting critique of books in which a man named G. L. Schroeder attempts to use nothing less than Einstein's Theory of Relativity to show that the universe really was created in only six days, by God.
As best I can understand, this man concedes that the universe was created 15 billion years ago, as calculated by scientists. However, he argues, the first eight billion years were merely the first day, not in the frame of reference of mere mortals but in God's frame of reference, which is quite different.
As things slowed down from the initial explosion of everything out of what appears to have been an incredibly compressed ball of energy no bigger than an orange or maybe a fire engine, according to this Creationist the next four billion years were the second day, etc, adding up to 15 billion years on a post-Adam, human frame of reference, or, neatly, six days on God's frame, before God decided to scoop up some mud to make Adam.
For, as that energy shot outward, it changed into mass as per Einstein's equation, and that steadily increasing mass brought about gravity, and all that gravity did something or other to time, so that, if there had been clocks able to gauge all this, they would, in our idea of 15 billion years, only have shown the passage of six days.
Of course I'm not any sort of a scientist or a theologian, yet this notion strikes me as being so far off the wall that I figured I could throw in a couple of reservations here that just might have as much validity as all the impressive-sounding thinking involved in this "equation," and that includes, I'm extremely sorry to say, the Theory of Relativity itself. Einstein otherwise was an extremely cool guy, but his theory, it seems to me, is far too unnecessarily difficult to understand, and consequently not many people really understand it, though multitudes might try to tell you otherwise. You shouldn't have scientific theories that few understand. It opens the way to too much suspicion of a snow job. Newton did a much better job with his Laws of Motion.
I didn't read anyone saying exactly whether God had anything to do with the sudden expanding of that tiny ball of energy, and if so, why God chose that particular moment 15 billion years -- pardon me, six days -- ago. And where was God before that happened, because it's easier to think of God as being in the universe with us, instead of hovering out beyond it in a great and very cold nothingness, where presumably nothing could or would want to exist, including God, and no self-respecting member of the faithful, or infidels for that matter, would want to consign God to such an event horizon anyway..
The Creationists must be really desperate, to come up with such an unbelievably far-fetched argument. It gives new meaning to the term "reaching." It's not even a leap of logic. It's just pure, unadulterated nonsense -- yet this is just the kind of thinking that the Regressives feed upon and try to regurgitate on everyone else as manna from Heaven.
What about the people who wrote the stuff that was eventually scraped up together to make the Bible, after the emperor Constantine ordered everybody onto Christianity? And what about the countless millions who have so lovingly and reverently clasped the Bible to their chests in the hundreds of years since then? When the Bble was written telescopes were still thousands of years from being invented, no one had any idea that there was so much universe, and the Albert Einsteins of the day were just getting around to sensing the implications of bath water.
The Bible, for all its invocations of Heaven, is a down to earth book, and to its authors and all the subsequent editors, not to mention all the readers and students of the Bible up to the present day, a day was just that, a day -- the period from one sunrise to the next -- and if instead they had had 15 billion years in mind, they would long since have written and said so.
Surely devotees of the Bible must believe implicitly in what was in the minds of its creators, and I'm amazed that the Creationists let people see them trying to plant concepts in those ancient minds that couldn't possibly have been there.
Meanwhile in all the years since Darwin and his host sea captain had their differences, not much has been achieved by Captain FitzRoy's people of a lasting nature in what one would think would be religion's main purpose -- to improve the human species. Instead, as often as not, religion, especially in the area of warfare, has brought misery to large numbers of people. But those on Darwin's side, the scientists, have come up with innumerable achievements that for a long time have had profound effects on the lives of nearly everyone living, even if how much of it is all for the good is still an open question -- except of course for the medical miracles. . ..
But the Creationists are not deterred, and now, under the cloak of "Intelligent Design," we find them trying to turn those scientific advances back on the scientists, and one of the ways they try to do this is to say that what scientists have devised, found, and calculated merely proves the rightness of the Biblical story of creation.
In a website called Talk Reason, where you can find all that you might want to know about these tactics, there's a highly interesting critique of books in which a man named G. L. Schroeder attempts to use nothing less than Einstein's Theory of Relativity to show that the universe really was created in only six days, by God.
As best I can understand, this man concedes that the universe was created 15 billion years ago, as calculated by scientists. However, he argues, the first eight billion years were merely the first day, not in the frame of reference of mere mortals but in God's frame of reference, which is quite different.
As things slowed down from the initial explosion of everything out of what appears to have been an incredibly compressed ball of energy no bigger than an orange or maybe a fire engine, according to this Creationist the next four billion years were the second day, etc, adding up to 15 billion years on a post-Adam, human frame of reference, or, neatly, six days on God's frame, before God decided to scoop up some mud to make Adam.
For, as that energy shot outward, it changed into mass as per Einstein's equation, and that steadily increasing mass brought about gravity, and all that gravity did something or other to time, so that, if there had been clocks able to gauge all this, they would, in our idea of 15 billion years, only have shown the passage of six days.
Of course I'm not any sort of a scientist or a theologian, yet this notion strikes me as being so far off the wall that I figured I could throw in a couple of reservations here that just might have as much validity as all the impressive-sounding thinking involved in this "equation," and that includes, I'm extremely sorry to say, the Theory of Relativity itself. Einstein otherwise was an extremely cool guy, but his theory, it seems to me, is far too unnecessarily difficult to understand, and consequently not many people really understand it, though multitudes might try to tell you otherwise. You shouldn't have scientific theories that few understand. It opens the way to too much suspicion of a snow job. Newton did a much better job with his Laws of Motion.
I didn't read anyone saying exactly whether God had anything to do with the sudden expanding of that tiny ball of energy, and if so, why God chose that particular moment 15 billion years -- pardon me, six days -- ago. And where was God before that happened, because it's easier to think of God as being in the universe with us, instead of hovering out beyond it in a great and very cold nothingness, where presumably nothing could or would want to exist, including God, and no self-respecting member of the faithful, or infidels for that matter, would want to consign God to such an event horizon anyway..
The Creationists must be really desperate, to come up with such an unbelievably far-fetched argument. It gives new meaning to the term "reaching." It's not even a leap of logic. It's just pure, unadulterated nonsense -- yet this is just the kind of thinking that the Regressives feed upon and try to regurgitate on everyone else as manna from Heaven.
What about the people who wrote the stuff that was eventually scraped up together to make the Bible, after the emperor Constantine ordered everybody onto Christianity? And what about the countless millions who have so lovingly and reverently clasped the Bible to their chests in the hundreds of years since then? When the Bble was written telescopes were still thousands of years from being invented, no one had any idea that there was so much universe, and the Albert Einsteins of the day were just getting around to sensing the implications of bath water.
The Bible, for all its invocations of Heaven, is a down to earth book, and to its authors and all the subsequent editors, not to mention all the readers and students of the Bible up to the present day, a day was just that, a day -- the period from one sunrise to the next -- and if instead they had had 15 billion years in mind, they would long since have written and said so.
Surely devotees of the Bible must believe implicitly in what was in the minds of its creators, and I'm amazed that the Creationists let people see them trying to plant concepts in those ancient minds that couldn't possibly have been there.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 11:36 AM
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