Re: Cobb County

Vernon wrote:

> Before moving on to refute these ideas, permit me to point to some further
> weapons in Satan's armoury: overseeing pyrotechnic displays in the heavens
> (e.g. SN 1987A); manipulating the speed of light and rates of decay of
> radioisotopes; laying false trails in the geologic column and ice-sheets; and so on.
> Such are well within his capabilities - and, with God's approval, must occur.

I've been following these exchanges on and off for the last few days, and I'm
totally astounded that in 2005 people are still making these types of
arguments. At the time of Philip Goss, when he wrote his book "Omphalos" around
1860, such arguments about Satan planting fossils to fool us, or God planting
fossils to test our faith were used. This is of course completely unscientific,
as there is no way of testing or falsifying such an argument even in principle.
 Indeed it is worse than that, it contradicts Rom 1:20, and implies that
there is no such thing as objective truth. When a YEC brings up such arguments as
appearance of age, he has lost such arguments, and fallen away into a fantasy
land of solipsism and illusions.

As it happens, my boss works on supernovae amongst other things, in
particular SN 1987A, and in a much more modest way I have also worked on that star. It
was a real star that had a real explosion about 169,000 years ago, and not
only that, we can understand what happened. Incidentally, there is no evidence
for a change in the speed of light or radioactive decay rates. Last night I
went to a creationist presentation on polonium halos based on Robert Gentry.
The usual creationist arguments were used, including the change in nuclear
decay rates. After the presentation I challenged the speaker on SN 1987A, not
just the light travel time, but the fact that we can see radioactive isotopes
like 56-Ni and 56-Co decay at exactly the same rate as they do on the earth.

With arguments like yours, no wonder Christianity has a negative image
amongst people who have a science education.

Christopher Sharp
Received on Fri Jan 21 20:18:26 2005