Stunning victory of Creation

Someone as smart as you should be able to immediately see the circular nature of your argument here.

We have one sample consisting only of what we have physically measured and verified. </font>[/QUOTE]I guess if we measured every star in the galaxy you would still just call it "one sample!"

Look, we have over 100,000 stars in the sample. They closely follow a particular pattern of how brightness relates to color (surface temperature). This follows theories of how stars actually operate.

Do you have a real objection or do you think that 100,00 stars really are too small of a sample from which to draw conclusions? How big would be big enough for you?</font>[/QUOTE] If the "100,000 stars" were actually in your measured sample... you still wouldn't have a case. A sample must be random and distributed to be valid.

For instance, a poll of your neighborhood, city, or even the whole state of Alabama could never be considered a valid sample for predicting facts about everyone on earth.

If we could randomly select a statistically significant sample out of the 100,000 then go there and take relevant measurements then we could make predictions... about the area containing those 100,000 stars.

The FACT is that we do not have "100,000 stars" in our sample. We have one and only one... and the data collection on our own solar system is incomplete.

I linked you to an article based on NASA collections of evidence no less that proposes that the speed of light may not be constant outside our solar system.

The truth is that we assume that the natural "laws" governing our solar system are universal. They may not be and the cited evidence from our 4 deep space probes indicates that they aren't.

 

You seem to imply that you never do that. We've had an argument between science and scripture before, you know. When Copernicus proposed that the SUN is the center around which all the PLANETS revolve, and that the ROTATION OF THE EARTH is the cause of night and day, rather than the Sun's daily crawling across the sky, he was roundly condemned by Martin Luthor and all the other protestant leaders and by the catholics as well (his book being banned) because it was against the literal interpretation of scripture.

To be consistent, you must deny the rotation of the earth and deny the revolution of the earth in orbit around the sun. Of course, like any educated person of today, you accept the findings of science against the literal interpretation of scripture.

The very thing you condemn me for doing. </font>[/QUOTE]Not at all. You have asserted a false association between opposition to evolution and something totally different. You have established a rule without a valid proof.

First, the sun does rise and set from our perspective. I don't know anyone who doesn't use this figure of speech.

Second, this is a very small phrase versus the specific narrative we have in Genesis.

No one on our side that I know of thinks that the Bible is literal in every place. We acknowledge that figures of speech are used. But a complete narrative is not a figure of speech.

 

"Further, I cited an article earlier from Barry Setterfield's website- his wife used to frequent this board. http://www.setterfield.org/accelanom.htm


Without regard to his explanation, he cites actual data that shows an "anomoly" picked up by all four of our deep space probes after reaching a certain distance from the sun. His conclusion is that the speed of light may not be constant outside of our solar system."

I believe I have read elsewhere (do not remember where at this point to back up my claims though I bet I could hunt them down) that further review of the data has ruled out such an anomaly Ulysses and Galileo. In addition, it was searched for with the Cassini craft and not found.

A number of radical proposals were put forth to explain the anomaly. From dark matter to varying strengths of the force of gravity with distance to the effects of hidden dimensions to the changing speed of light.

In the end, it appears that it is nothing more than the spacecraft being slowed by impacts with dust in the outer solar system. The calculated density of the dust required for the change in velocity is one 50 micron particle per 25000 cubic meters of space.

So the anomaly has a simple explanation that is in line with expectations.

"Anomalous Acceleration of Pioneer 10 and 11: Dust Density in the Kuiper Belt," Paul Marmet, Proceedings of International Scientific Meetings, page 334 to 337, 2003.

As far as Setterfield goes, there are other reasons why his ideas could not be true. A simple examination of his proposal yields predictions about simple observations that could quickly confirm his ideas. They do not. As an example, the measured rotational rates of galaxies should be essentially zero. They are not.

 

"We have discussed this before. Yes- species with created genetic similarities exposed to similar environmental conditions developed a similar response."

Then explain it to me again.

I do not understand how all humans and other apes got a few percent of their genomes to be DNA inserted by viruses. Not only that but exactly the same series of DNA and into the exact same spots into the DNA.

Science says that because of the size of the genome, even one identical sequence at one identical spot is uncertain proof of shared ancestry because of the huge odds agianst the same sequence and the same location being selected multiple times. I posted this for you earlier.

But you say that this is just a response to similar enviromental conditions? Well then I must ask that you explain yourself. How can this be? Give us a mechanism. I gave you one that explain the data well. One where the trail of mutations since the inserts match evolutionary trees from other sources.

Explain how humans all ended up with the same viral inserts. All these viral inserts happened in the ten generations from Adam to our last common ancestor (Noah) and none since? How did this come to be? We still see retroviruses inserting DNA into our genomes today so it is an ongoing process. Yet none of these subsequent insertions have happened to be in a germ line cell and get passed on to the rest of the population. Why?

 

"If the "100,000 stars" were actually in your measured sample... you still wouldn't have a case. A sample must be random and distributed to be valid."

Why are they not?

We have determined with geometric precision the distance to over 100,000 stars. We have measured their light intnesity and their color. These fall on a very specific pattern that agrees with theory when plotted. What specifically do you find wrong with the survey?

"If we could randomly select a statistically significant sample out of the 100,000 then go there and take relevant measurements then we could make predictions... about the area containing those 100,000 stars."

So do you have a mechanism by which these 100,00 stars could be measured to be so bright while all the rest of the stars in the universe, while showing the same type of data, are incredibly dimmer and deviate incrediably from theories of how stars work while the 100,000 (plus our own sun) follow the theory so closely?

"The FACT is that we do not have "100,000 stars" in our sample. We have one and only one... and the data collection on our own solar system is incomplete."

Nope. I'll stick with over 100,000 who have had their distance measured directly by parallax.

"The truth is that we assume that the natural "laws" governing our solar system are universal. They may not be and the cited evidence from our 4 deep space probes indicates that they aren't. "

Nope. The probes seem to have a much simpler explanation.

Are you really proposing the physics may behave differently in different parts of the universe? Any reason why you suspect this?

 

Are you really that educated and haven't taken a class in basic statistics?

No- frankly we haven't. We have not visited these far away places and taken measurements. Changes in light change our perceptions. We are too far away to make assumption about what is or is not between us and these objects.

Did you read Setterfield's summary? Why are there jumps and starts in the red-shift?

Have you ever looked at a sun low on the horizon that looked incredibly large?

I am not proposing that as the mechanism but rather as a simple illustration of how appearances can be changed.

Have at it- but you have entered the arena of faith and left the arena of science when you do so. You have adopted the belief that assumptions made about the vast expanses of space are 100% correct based on nothing that can be experimentally proven.

I am not closing any possibility... like many did in the past when proof contradicted scientific convention.

I am primarily saying that "We don't know." You seem all too quick to reject the fact that we actually know so little but rather prefer the notion that anything popular science adopts that gives a valid possibility and supports the theory of evolution is "factual science."

 

Please tell me the date this occurred. (My request is every bit as valid as yours)

I believe that this characteristic developed either on the day when Adam sinned or shortly thereafter.

I gave you one. You simply didn't like the fact that it assumes a Creator who used similar genetic buildingblocks rather than simply stipulating your assumption of naturalism.

 

"Are you really that educated and haven't taken a class in basic statistics?"

Of course I have taken a basic statics course.

Let me remind you of what you said in your previous post. You said "If we could randomly select a statistically significant sample out of the 100,000 then go there and take relevant measurements then we could make predictions."

And if we were trying to take a random sample, you would be correct. We were not trying to take a random sample. We testing every known star within a distance that we can measure directly. This sample produces a sample of a wide variety of stars. I think you would be hard pressed to find many types of star that are known to cosmology that are not represented in the sample. These uncommon stars would not be much use for distance determination anyhow simply because they are too rare to have their properties accurately predicted from spectral imformation.

"No- frankly we haven't. We have not visited these far away places and taken measurements."

Nope. This is high school level geometry. If you know your baseline distance (in this case the diameter of earth's orbit) and you know the change in angle it is a simple geometric problem to determine distance and to a high degree of accuracy.

"Have you ever looked at a sun low on the horizon that looked incredibly large?"

Optical illusion. It also looks different because the atmosphere has scattered its light leaving a very visible change in its appearance. We as yet to not have any proposal from you on how to change the intensity of light without altering the light in a detectable way.

"Did you read Setterfield's summary? Why are there jumps and starts in the red-shift?"

I have read Setterfield until I am blue in the face. I have debated him and his wife. I have enchanged personel communications with him. I find him to be a very intelligent and friendly man. I view his wife similarly. I also think that he is completely wrong.

As far as the jumps in redshift goes, the people that push that idea are on the far fringes of science. A couple of years ago, they talked some other scientists who were not interested in the answer personally to look at the data. They concluded that there was no periodicity.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0208/0208117.pdf

This study used 67291 galaxies and 10410 quasars. They also went back and re-analyzed some of the other datasets. THey found nothing.

Let me give a more detailed reasoning for my example earlier of effects that would be predicted by Setterfield but that fail to be seen.

We use of doppler effects to measure the rotation by looking at the different relative speeds of each side of the galaxy.

Now, if you assume that the galaxy is not rotating at relativistic speeds and you only consider the velocity vectors directly towards and away from you, the formula for doppler shift reduces to

(velocity of object)/(speed light) = (change in wavelength) / (wavelength)

(Barry has been very clear that it is frequency that changes with c.)

Now if you solve for the change in wavelength, you will see that it is inversely proportional to the speed of light. So if you take a given situation, plug though the change in wavelength with a higher speed of light to get the change in wavelength, then go back through with today's speed of light, you will see that your speed measured will be off by exactly how much the speed of light has changed. The exact same thing will happen if you use frequency instead of wavelength.

Take M31. It is about 2 million light years away so light would have been necessary to have been traveling at least a few thousand time faster when it left than now to get here in 6000 years. This means that the measured speeds of rotation are off by at least three orders of magnitude. And M31 is the nearest large galaxy. The problems get much worse at greater distances.

The rotational speed of M31, the largest nearby large spiral galaxy, has been measured at 275 km/s. ( http://helios.astro.lsa.umich.edu/Course/Labs/tully_fisher/tf_intro.html ) It is about 2 million light years away so let's take as a conservative (and one that makes the math easy) factor that light would have been traveling at 1000 times the current speed of light when it left Andromeda to get here by now. This means that the 275 km/s must also be multiplied by 1000 giving a speed of 275,000 km/s! This is over 90% of the speed of light! Imposssible for a variety of reasons.

Since there is not a sharp dropoff in measured rotational velocity as you look further into space, more distant galaxies would be in the position of having their stars orbiting at speeds greater than the speed of light! As it is, the measured velocites are higher than the visible matter would allow which is one of the reasons that dark matter is proposed to account for the extra mass that is needed.

 

"Please tell me the date this occurred. (My request is every bit as valid as yours)"

Valid in the sense that you are allowed to ask such.

If you are really interested, a literature search could be made to see where the inserts in various species have been traced. By knowing exactly how they are shared and the mutations that have happened in the intervening time, you could work out a pretty good timeline. But, since they are almost all shared, they almost all happened before the last common ancestor of man and the other apes so at least several million years ago.

"I believe that this characteristic developed either on the day when Adam sinned or shortly thereafter."

So at the fall, the genomes of all eukaryotes were filled with a large percentage of retroviral DNA. Humans and apes happened to get the exact same inserts and at the exact same places.

How again is it that you think this happened? By what means? What evidence do you have that it happened this way?

I can point you to retrovirises inserting genes into hosts today if you want to study the process. But you seem to be proposing that something else happened. What?

"I gave you one. You simply didn't like the fact that it assumes a Creator who used similar genetic buildingblocks rather than simply stipulating your assumption of naturalism."

Except that these are only building blocks for viruses! Not humans!

 

Uh - Capernaum was a city in Gallilee. The Polish scientist who first published the idea that the earth goes around the sun was Copernicus.

Their arguments show they didn't believe your theory that it doesn't really mattter because there was only a few verses at all.

Lets look at some of the verses stating the literalness of the sun moving as the cause of day and night:

Josh 10:12-15
12 Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel,

"O sun, stand still at Gibeon,
And O moon in the valley of Aijalon."
13 So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies.

Is it not written in the book of Jashar? And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.

14 There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.

15 Then Joshua and all Israel with him returned to the camp to Gilgal.
NASU

Ps 19:4-6
Their line has gone out through all the earth,
And their utterances to the end of the world.
In them He has placed a tent for the sun,
5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber;
It rejoices as a strong man to run his course.
6 Its rising is from one end of the heavens,
And its circuit to the other end of them;
And there is nothing hidden from its heat.
NASU

Ps 104:19
19 He made the moon for the seasons;
The sun knows the place of its setting.
NASU

Eccl 1:5
5 Also, the sun rises and the sun sets;
And hastening to its place it rises there again.
NASU

These verses seem pretty substantial to me!

???? not sure what you're trying to say here.

Because of the inertia of language, we have continued to use the phrase "set" and "rise" relative to the sun without interruption from the days this was literally believed and taught. That DOES NOT mean that once upon a time it wasn't TRULY LITERALLY BELIEVED AND TAUGHT, including literal phrases from our Bible.

Please don't make up for yourself what I believe. I happen to believe in a literal Adam and Eve and garden of Eden.

Please don't make up things about what I urge people to do as they interpret the Bible.

This is a very important point here. Concerning the revolution of the earth as the cause of Day and Night, I AM VERY PLEASED to depart form the literal form of the text and interpret the literal statements as being symbolic of what we know, scientifically, really happened. I AGREE WITH YOU that this is a legitimate way for a man of faith today to approach the ancient sacred texts...(continued below your next quote)

I merely assert the right to do the SAME THING WE BOTH DO in relation to the day and night thingy with the way God has created life on earth. And by the way, I DO NOT CHARACTERIZE God's sacred first chapter of Genesis as fiction, I simply don't characterize it as literally intended, although the first readers of it had no way of realizing that.

And you do the same with the rotation of the earth, we watch you rationalize away the plain literal teachings of God's word right here in this thread before our very eyes.

What has really happened is that God has so prepared His word so that it is ready for the interpretations of science as well as the ancient beliefs of the pre-scientific age. There is simply no other scripture anywhere that states how, in the Beginning, the first creation of all was - light! Perfectly consistent with modern cosmology! And the creation narrative speaks, in the literal fashion, of days . . . and yet God prepared us to see days as ages in His own word, speaking of a day as being the same as a thousand years! He prepared the text for our modern knowledge, all unknowingly to the people who were writing it down!

 

Naah, I'll call first man Adam, thank you like the Bible suggests.

By the way, do you believe the snake in the garden was literally a snake, like it says there, or do you add to that and assume its our spiritual enemy?

Do you see how God prepared the snake story for later enhancement when men learned more about our spiritual enemy? That's the way God has prepared His bible so it remains valid in all ages.

 

That is absolutely dependent on our ability to accurately perceive the distant body. If this is the method then we are talking about very, very small angles with a very high degree of inaccuracy if our perceptions are off just slightly.

 

"That is absolutely dependent on our ability to accurately perceive the distant body. If this is the method then we are talking about very, very small angles with a very high degree of inaccuracy if our perceptions are off just slightly."

Well let's see.

A back of the envelope type calculation shows that we would measure an angle 0.065 arcsec for an object at an arbitrary 100 light years of distance. The accuaracy of the satellite in measuring angles is 0.002 arcsec. This means that the error should be in the general range of about 3%. And that value is for dim stars. For brighter stars the accuracy was higher, about 0.0008 arcsec.

 

Well let's see.

That is assuming that what is normative for the space that we have actually visited and directly studied is normative for a universe that is incredibly large... and probably just as diverse.

You seem to have taken a very close minded approach to science for someone who is supposedly so hungry to find factual answers. You are definitely operating "inside the box" of evolution's assumptions.

 

Do you have any reason to think that physics varies according to your location in space?

Do you really think that the assumption that the universe operates under one set of physical laws to be a bad assumption?

This is the difference between YE and reality. I point to physical measurments of the stars. Actual data. You ask if the space that we live in is really normal.