Posted on 09/01/2012 7:28:34 PM PDT by lasereye
I am glad to stand shoulder to shoulder with you to battle the forces of subjectivism.
Do you assume that the speed of light has always been constant back into infinity?
If so, how do you prove infinity?
If not, didn’t light have to get “up to speed,” and/or “down to its current speed,” at some time?
These are just simple questions that occur to me.
Interesting - your own statement indicates that (if only on a subconscious level) you do not believe in the Absolute Truth of probability theory:
"...will produce War and Peace or some other recognizable piece of literature."
What is this "or some other recognizable piece..." nonsense? As I understand it, probability theory (I am here taking your word for it) would of necessity DEMAND that the monkeys eventually not only type out a PRECISE copy of War and Peace, but (given enough time, of course) EVERY OTHER great book of Western, or Eastern, or whatever literature. This will, it is understood, require quite a lot of time.
But of course I can't imagine that anyone has ever bothered to demonstrate through empirical investigation whether or not monkeys can put together more than a few letters?
Forget about the monkeys. Just use a random letter generator computer program. Much more efficient and less smelly. And we don't have to start with War and Peace - let's see if a random letter computer program can compose something much simpler, such as a chapter out of a Nancy Drew mystery (any one will do) or even a paragraph or two out of a Berenstein Bears story?
Now you know well and good in your heart that such things cannot be randomly generated, even by a super computer working at warp speed to approximate millions and even billions of years. But are you honest enough to put aside your absolute faith in fallible and (let's face it) ever-changing scientific theory and the "experts" (scholars, textbooks, teachers - as a former professor I know all about it...) to admit it? I hope so!
I don’t assume anything, that is what you are doing. Infinity is a number larger than any number you can imagine. In fact it is a number with no specific value. Hence it has no identity therefore it does not exist. I don’t believe in an infinite regression. I’ll ask you to answer the same question. What evidence is there to believe the speed of light is variable?
LOL. You're saying a computer program designed to generate random characters, cheats? Or begins thinking for itself and then stubbornly refuses to generate random characters?
You know, there is a way to test if your program has become "self-aware" in this way. Have it generate one billion random letters. Then check the frequency distribution of the letters it has generated. That will show if your program has begun "cheating" on you.
are you sure you want to go down this path?
Yes, I'm quite sure. Everything I've said here can be backed up by the math. These are mathematical principles created by God himself. Mathematics is *the* language of the universe.
A star is a object that produces lightThen you conclude:
If created there was a time before it started producing light
After being created, it began producing light and the light takes time to traverse distance
If we see the light and the distance away from the star in light years is any greater than the number of years supposed to have elapsed since the moment of creation, then creation did not occur that many years ago.The problem, though, is that you have too narrowly defined star (same is true for galaxy, since it is a conglomeration of stars). A star not only produces light, the light it produces is ontologically or intrinsically as much a part of that star as anything could be. If it were not, then the composition of the star could not be determined spectrographically. There is a being that is called "a star" that consists of elements, the processes in which those elements are involved, and the products of those processes. Thus, a star is not a thing way over there that produces something we detect way over here. What we are detecting is as much the star as the processes and materials that produce one of the consequences or conditions of its existence. An account that says God created the stars and other celestial bodies to be sources of light and for the markings of seasons on Earth is not at all saying God started something way out there that eventually, after a number of years consistent with the speed of light and the distance from Earth, would appear in the night sky. They appeared there at the time he created them and have continued to be visible because they were created as fully functioning entities that extend throughout space in all directions.
Here's an excellent test for probability: have your computer generate a trillion characters and see how many best-sellers we can cull from it.
You do well to affirm a central understanding of Christians: that of God as Creator. Of course, as finite creatures we can have a very limited understanding of such things, but we can know that which has been revealed in Holy Scripture.
In sharp contrast to Mormons - who believe in an infinite regression of and eternally evolving Godhood - orthodox Theists, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe that God is eternal and uncreated: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Thus, God did not "come from" anything: He has always existed.
As a Ph.D in Theology and former professor, I have often pondered these kinds of questions, trying to imagine what it could be like to be God - eternally existing and never having had a beginning. But it is something that is simply beyond our comprehension - at least this side of Heaven.
You do well to affirm a central understanding of Christians: that of God as Creator. Of course, as finite creatures we can have a very limited understanding of such things, but we can know that which has been revealed in Holy Scripture.
In sharp contrast to Mormons - who believe in an infinite regression of and eternally evolving Godhood - orthodox Theists, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam believe that God is eternal and uncreated: omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Thus, God did not "come from" anything: He has always existed.
As a Ph.D in Theology and former professor, I have often pondered these kinds of questions, trying to imagine what it could be like to be God - eternally existing and never having had a beginning. But it is something that is simply beyond our comprehension - at least this side of Heaven.
Sirius was red back in BC.
It is now white.
Word.
I've done no such thing. All I've done is ask you a couple of simple, reasonable questions. I assume nothing.
Infinity is a number larger than any number you can imagine. In fact it is a number with no specific value. Hence it has no identity therefore it does not exist. I don’t believe in an infinite regression.
So, you don't believe in infinity. You've answered one of my questions. Which leads me to ask the other question again: Didn't it have to get up to speed at some point in time? Did it for some period of time get up to a higher speed before it slowed down again to its steady current rate? How do you know?
I’ll ask you to answer the same question. What evidence is there to believe the speed of light is variable?
And I'll repeat the answer I already gave you. I don't know. I wasn't around since the beginning to observe how fast light was traveling.
That is a very interesting way of looking at stars. I never thought of it that way. The fact remains though that you are coming up with an arbitrary explanation to back up an arbitrary claim. There is no reason to believe this happened other than an unfalsifiable claim in a book. There is no reason to claim that the evidence we have so far is invalid and the bible account of the creation is true.
http://phys.org/news195999802.html
So much for the claim that scientists have never witnessed a star being born. And being only 800 light years away it is only 800 years old.
That is exactly what the theory states. And yes, for a precise copy of just *one* piece of literature to be produced, would take an amount of time much closer to infinity than to any number our minds can even begin to comprehend.
Now you know well and good in your heart that such things cannot be randomly generated
That is incorrect.
even by a super computer working at warp speed to approximate millions and even billions of years.
This is correct. We don't have nearly the computing power yet. The numbers are HUGE. Take a very simple case:
Just to randomly generate a four-letter word like "LOVE". The number of four-letter permutations using our 26-letter alphabet is already huge:
26 possibilities for the first letter, 26 for the second, 26 for the third and 26 for the fourth. Or 26 x 26 x 26 x 26, giving 456,976 permutations, only one of which is "LOVE."
Simple enough for our computers today. But extrapolating that out to even a short children's book would make the number of permutations astronomical.
The whole point of the "monkey-literature" example isn't to say, as apparently some people hear are thinking, that something like this is likely to happen in our lifetime.
It is simply a curious fact, and a mathematical certainty, that given enough time (and yes, this means something approaching infinity) all possible permutations of a given set will occur.
Keep in mind, my whole point was that the "monkey" thing did not come from evolutionary theory, but rather from probability theory. Speaking of which, let me throw another one on:
If it were possible to sit 456,976 monkeys down in front their own keyboards, consisting of just 26 keys representing our English alphabet, and have each monkey type out four purely random letters, it is highly probable that one of them would just by chance type "LOVE".
Well, my first pass seems to have generated a novel about The Fonz .... it spit out “AYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY” .... I must have a bug :p.
In all seriousness, it is impossible to create a true random number generator on a computer. One can create psuedorandom generators, but there will always be an underlying pattern to the numbers generated. Some generators I’ve used have also sampled the outside world via temperature and optical sensors .... still, its not “truly” random. LFSRs are among the worst generators, but are commonly used in applications where randomness isnt exactly critical as they are simple and cheap in either software or hardware designs :).
Someone will do it someday, when we have the processing power. But one trillion characters wouldn't even come close to being a sufficient sample. For example, the probability of randomly generating *just* the 26 letters of the alphabet, in order, would be:
26 x 25 x 24 x 23 x 22 etc., which would be:
1 / 4 times 10 to the 26th power.
“So, you don’t believe in infinity. You’ve answered one of my questions. Which leads me to ask the other question again: Didn’t it have to get up to speed at some point in time? Did it for some period of time get up to a higher speed before it slowed down again to its steady current rate? How do you know?”
The reason I know is that light has never been observed to go faster than C. There is no reason to believe that light was faster for some time before it slowed down to its steady current speed. And light would have to be traveling several orders of magnitude faster to cross 13.7 billion light years in 6,000 years. Some force would have to act on it to slow it down and it would have to do it uniformly across the whole universe. If you say that God created the light instantaneously on the way here at a point where it would arrive at the moment of creation 6000 years ago that is an arbitrary claim. There is no reason to even consider it.
I’m sorry you are having so much difficulty reconciling faith and reason for yourself.
I had this in the back of my mind when I mentioned "intelligence." But my real objection is the idea that randomness leads to chaos, not order.
Still LOL about the Fonz!
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