There are plenty of things God “might have done,” But this sort of thing is neither scientific nor scriptural.
Everybody knows that the speed of light used to be way higher but then spacefaring civilizations brought down the local speed to prevent surprise attacks.The current c is what it is because of millennia of space war
Maybe in God Days, time is bigger. Like a God Day is the same as a Mortal Century.
That's crazy talk. Obviously the light from distant stars was created in transit to fool heathen astronomers, just like the fossils of prehistoric creatures were implanted on Earth, to fool paleontologists.
No no no, fossils come from the great flood, from the Bible. At least, that's what creationists use as an argument in debates....
As for star light: yes, that's right.
Is there even anything in Genesis to suggest that the 'days' were 24h long? I could see it being meant metaphorically...
Genesis 1 also presumes the earth is flat. I’m a Christian and I really like Genesis 1 but it’s not a good guide for an objective scientific understanding of the world
Genesis is full of absolute nonsense
The bible is just early fantasy fiction
No mention of an eighth day in that story - we're still in the "god rested" day!
I grew up catholic and was sent to catholic school and this is what we were taught. That the creation story is metaphor, the catholic church believes God used the big bang and evolution to create the world and people, ect.
Wanna know a secret... God didn't even write that part. God's version has him at a kmart in Toledo, Iowa buying the entire universe on a Saturday in 1997, at which point he installed it, but it did take several days because it was football season, but it was less than a week no matter what anyone else says.
There is “old earth creationism” which works along those lines. But creationists are “literalists,” which actually means they believe a specific interpretation of the text taught to them by their pastor.
Really, you’d think that most anyone reading the texts would realize that Genesis 1 and 2 were mutually contradicting…
This is the thing that gets me. Literally the first book of the old testament immediately contradicts itself yet they claim to take it literally. The reality is that very few read the Bible at all other than the passages cherry picked by the preacher to read during the sermon.
It’s so weird to me. When I was in second grade, I started trying to read the Bible from cover to cover (made it until Numbers, then I had to start skipping around for my own sanity).
We keep hearing about how this is the most important book to this group of people. They demand it be taught in schools, they demand that we follow its precepts, but they can’t be arsed to read it themselves?
So I grew up around creationists. When I presented this idea, the only attempt at a justification I heard was something like "in the original Hebrew the word for a literal day was used, that's how we know creation happened in literal 6 days"
Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.
Original Hebrew? Anything in Hebrew that is supposedly from the "original" is a translation.
Well duh, if they meant metaphorical day, they should have used the hebrew word for metaphorical days.
/s
As a kid growing up in Texas, my Methodist church basically just squared the creation myth as metaphor. "What is the length of a day to god?" Essentially equating the scientific explanations, as simply the way god did it. So there wasn't really any controversy about learning about evolution and the age of the universe.
I was a closet atheist, but never realized there was much controversy about evolution until I was in high school and terminally online.
I grew up the same, mostly because allowing so much as not literal means and easier time for a pastor that also does car upholstery part time to sell any concept. Literalism is pretty demanding a a position.
The literalist interpretation was seen as extreme until maybe 20 years ago. I was shocked to learn about how many denominations are going in for it now. But maybe that's just the internet showing me parts of the world I hadn't seen before.
I was being fed biblical literalism over 30 years ago in the few years I was forced to go to church age 10-14. Pretty large congregation for a town of 20k with plenty of other churches.
One of the few things they got right was that small children shouldn't be baptized, that a person should decide for themselves after age 13. I decided. I decided hell no.
Yeah, sadly that same chill Methodist church I grew up in has since slipped down into that literalist BS. When the United Methodist Church changed its stance to allow LGBTQ+ membership, clergy, and marriages in 2024, they decided to split off and just be an independent Methodist church.
Yea, Catholics and Mainline Protestants like Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians etc are like this. Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest, was one of the figures responsible for the big bang theory
Methodists are pretty chill from what I've seen.
It's the same logic as God burying dinosaur bones 6000 years ago to test our faith.
One of my shining moments as an atheist was leading a coworker to realize that the above reasoning was bullshit.
She was already part way there just by asking me about it, I just answered her questions until she arrived at the right conclusion.
That claim always pissed me off. Like, what kind of god would actively attempt to trick people and be worth worshipping.
I’ve always heard it was satan who did it to trick them
Which is circular because god is omnipotent, therefore anything satan does, god has allowed.
Which is especially odd considering Satan is typically regarded as being unable to "create" things
The story of Job is a great showcase of God being a cunt.
"He devil, you want to see how much I can ruin this guy's life before he hates me?"
I was homeschooled for most of K-12, and all my peers were crazy fundies. I have so many stories.
If you're home schooled, wouldn't those peers be your siblings?
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but I'm an only child.
I was involved in quite a few organizations for homeschoolers, and the "peers" I refer to were kids I knew from those sorts of things:
- I attended a weekly "co-op" ran by homeschoolers' parents where they'd teach various subjects. The one parent who was fluent in Spanish would teach Spanish. The one who was really passionate about history taught a history class. They'd also purchase frogs to dissect and have 20 kids or whatever dissect frogs (because it's a) not so easy to get formaldehyde-preserved frogs in quantites much less than that and b) a lot of the parents just wouldn't want to have to deal with that because it's icky and were happy to have someone else's parents have to deal with that while still ensuring their kids had the experience and learned what there was to learn from that exercise). Things like that.
- I took a few classes at a local private (Christian -- very Christian) school that allowed homeschoolers to attend just one class here and one class there if they and their parents wanted. (The founder of that school had an affair with a secretary. The two of them kindof disappeared and got married, leaving the school without leadership, after which folks started to realize he was kindof a pathological liar and grifter from the start. Heh.)
- I was in a symphony for homeschoolers for a while. (Played violin.)
- There was also a homeschool chess club that I attended for a while.
There were a few other things that I didn't attend but one or two times. Not enough to really get to know anyone there. And I'm probably forgetting one or two things. But you get the idea.
Guys... Youre trying to apply physics/logic to a supposedly all power deity. Just say the world was just created as is last Thursday or something in its current state. Like if your going to make shit up you don't have to make it so complicated. It's all BS anyway...
There’s a whole field of philosophy that’s about how we can’t actually prove anything but the present exists
I'm sure it's more complicated than that but on the face of it that sounds silly. "Proving" something implies causality, which implies some kind of temporal ordering...
i think i became a little stupider after reading that
I mean that or just pre-calculate it and place the light at the same time you place the stars
Analysis of the light from SN1987A suggests this has not happened. By observing light traversing two paths to reach earth, we can work out how far away the supernova is without relying on a particular value of c, and then work out what c must be out there.
This still makes some assumptions on the speed of light, but it would have to vary in a very specific way to give this same effect.
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