Light From the First Days of Creation

Institute for Creation Research ^ | February 2003 | Russell Humphreys, Ph.D.

[BubbaBasher]

I was just reading that for thousands of years, Euclidean Geometry was absolute. Now there are other geometries in which Euclid's laws don't work.

[f.Christian]

... and then this mixture // 'batter' ...

protruded hills -- buttes -- ISLANDS (( cambrian layers // plates // ocean floors --- sediments --- residues on their tops --- peaks )) ---

through the plate cracks and holes (( soft spots )) from below (( ocean floor -- plates )) !


Island chains too !

[Interesting Times]

You raise a question difficult for Biblical literalists to answer -- how long was a 'day' before a rotating Earth was available to measure by? I agree that the 'days' described in Genesis are what we would call ages or epochs.

The Milky Way galaxy is believed to take about 220 million years to rotate. But since the days (ages) of Genesis don't break neatly into 220 million year chunks, I'd question whether galactic rotation can be used as the timepiece. Other than that, we're on the same page.

My own opinion on the endless creationism / evolution war is that if God wishes to use evolution as one of His mechanisms of creation -- and it appears that He does -- who am I to object?

FRegards,
I.T.

[Dataman]

Who created the creator?

Not a very reasonable question.

If the Creator created the universe, He was outside the universe. Time was created with space. The Creator created both.

Now why would a reasnoble mind expect the Creator to be subject to the laws of the universe which He created?

[jlogajan]

Now why would a reasnoble mind expect the Creator to be subject to the laws of the universe which He created?

As I understand the argument, they can't understand how complexity could arise out of nothingness, therefore there must be a creator. However, a creator must be more complex than his creation. So the question remains unanswered. You are left postulating increasingly complex layers of creators, similar to the turtles of old who stood on the backs of turtle beneath them to hold up the world, turtles all the way down.

Whether God could be outside the laws of the universe or not is just a feint, since the rational is complexity arising out of nothing. Once you admit that God is complex and therefore must himself have arisen from nothing, you've lost the game.

[PatrickHenry]

Once you admit that God is complex and therefore must himself have arisen from nothing, you've lost the game.

Also, the reasoning that gets you to the conclusion of God as creator depends upon the principle that things don't happen by themselves, they must have a cause. Without that principle, there is no need to conclude that there must be a God-creator. So how can that principle be abandoned? If it somehow doesn't apply to God, then you admit there are things that don't need a creator, thus you are admitting that the argument for a God-creator is based on a faulty premise.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Okay, a 10% bit (rather then 12.5% as in the phrase "two bits".) {Maybe I can make my postings look like line noise, too.}

[Doctor Stochastic]

You only know three? What are they and what are their estimates?

[Just mythoughts]

I have heard that in planning the asend and desent through
earth's atmosphere that NASA scientist used scripture, where the sun stood still and when sun was moved back to be able to configure accurate time.

[js1138]

Now why would a reasnoble mind expect the Creator to be subject to the laws of the universe which He created?

No on asks the creator to adhere to the lasw of the universe, just the laws of logic. Else what's a mind for?

[Auntie Dem]

The problem you, and all of us, face is trying to comprehend the infinite with finite minds. If God is eternal, and he is, then he has always existed. Under eternal reasoning, there could be an infinite number of Gods who were created by an infinite number of other Gods, all of whom simultaneously have always existed. Such reasoning sends my poor finite mind into infinte logic loops, so I will have to be content with waiting for our band of time to run its predetermined and known (to God)course.

As to the variability of time, Einstein's theory allowed for the possibility that mass can bend or slow time, so if God happened to live (and he does live) on a planet or sphere of great mass, his time would pass much more slowly than ours would on a not so nearly massive earth. The Biblical postulation of 1 day to 1,000 years is likely more figurative than literal, and means only there is a great difference in God's reckoning of time compared to ours.

[gomaaa]

Yup, here's a website that goes into a tad bit more detail for adventurous souls.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=387

[gomaaa]

Not sure when the change came, but I think the reason for it has to do with the fact that they now think of these fundamental oscillating ... THINGS ... as multi-dimensional membranes instead of one-dimensional strings. Strings are a part of the overall theory, but they are a special, one-dimensional case.

REALLY wierd stuff though. Neat isn't it!?!

[gomaaa]

There's a pretty good book about string theory (M-theory now) by Brian Greene called "The Elegant Universe". It's pretty accesible and talks some about these extra dimensions. It's important to bear in mind, though, that as Greene himself points out, M-theory has barely been tested at all, and isn't likely to be properly testable for some time. That doesn't mean it's not a useful or interesting theory, it just means you need to take it with a grain of salt. I think he mentions at some point that with current particle accelerator technology, we would have to build and accelerator with a radius of the Earth's orbit to reach the energy levels necessary to thoroughly study it!

In any case, I think that if the universe were exactly as it appeared, that would be kind of boring. The bizzarities are what make it an interesting thing to study!

[longshadow]

Thanks for the link!

[RightWhale]

The quaternion tool, more Rodrigues's version than Hamilton's is making a comeback. There was some confusion about vectors for about 100 years, but depending on the problem, superstrings or 3-D computer graphics or electron rotation, quaternions have the power to make one regret his misspent youth trying to solve problems using vector analysis. Just a thought for those who wish to dig a little deeper into cosmology.

[gomaaa]

It all depends on the postulates you take to be fundamental. (Mathematicians on the list, please feel free to correct here. I may be out of my league!) There's been a major effort in the last century or so to question the very basic ideas of math, asking questions like "what are numbers?" and basic things like that. You'd think they'd be intuitively obvious, but to a mathematician, they are vital and challenging questions.

Euclid's geometrical theorems worked fine in the space he chose to set them in, one that was very intuitive and obvious to us. There are other "spaces" (called metrics) that can be defined with dimensions other than 3. Many of Euclid's propositions can be carried over, thought they are often harder to visualize. Some don't. This doesn't mean that Euclid's work wasn't valid or self-consistent, it only means that there are other problems that can posed about geometry, of which Euclid (and others of that era) studied only a small subset.

[null and void]

You speak as someone who has never looked at real rock outcrops.

He's almost never answered a straight question either...

[null and void]

Dr, S. The odds of having ALL the Age of the Universe measurements agree are about much less than 1 to the 720th power.

D-man: There are only 3 primary age of the universe measurements and none of them agree. They overlap and still that gives a plus or minus age of billions. All three have unproven assumptions, sometimes called presuppositions.

Psst! Dataman: 1⁷²⁰ = 1

[f.Christian]

In evolution (( leaps // morphs )) there are no straight questions or answers ...

all lies (( assertions )) // denials (( delusions )) --- conjecture !