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  #1  
Old 12-06-2005, 10:58 PM
ThinkQuick ThinkQuick is offline
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Default Is the Universe 6 days old?

Have you heard of theories of relativistic creationism like this? How strong do you feel that this argument would be / what scientific arguments are there against it?

It seems to me that the one real issue is that he is using an expansion factor of the universe from some ad hoc point that 'coincidentally' produces an age of the universe corresponding roughly to the currently estimated age.

Thoughts please..

In the works of Gerald Schroeder, his contention (I believe) is that the six days of creation (if directed by the Creator at the point of the big bang and at the time that light began) can be seen as equivalent to the current estimate for the age of the universe when viewed from a modern approach considering the expansion of the universe (redshift/blueshift) etc. (+/- a few billion years).

The following is an excerpt from his website: http://www.geraldschroeder.com/age.html

--

Today, we look at time going backward. We see 15 billion years. Looking forward from when the universe is very small - billions of times smaller - the Torah says six days. In truth, they both may be correct. What's exciting about the last few years in cosmology is we now have quantified the data to know the relationship of the "view of time" from the beginning, relative to the "view of time" today. It's not science fiction any longer. Any one of a dozen physics text books all bring the same number. The general relationship between time near the beginning and time today is a million million. That's a 1 with 12 zeros after it. So when a view from the beginning looking forward says "I'm sending you a pulse every second," would we see it every second? No. We'd see it every million million seconds. Because that's the stretching effect of the expansion of the universe.

The Torah doesn't say every second, does it? It says Six Days. How would we see those six days? If the Torah says we're sending information for six days, would we receive that information as six days? No. We would receive that information as six million million days. Because the Torah's perspective is from the beginning looking forward. Six million million days is a very interesting number. What would that be in years? Divide by 365 and it comes out to be 16 billion years. Essentially the estimate of the age of the universe. Not a bad guess for 3000 years ago.

The way these two figures match up is extraordinary. I'm not speaking as a theologian; I'm making a scientific claim. I didn't pull these numbers out of hat. That's why I led up to the explanation very slowly, so you can follow it step-by-step. Now we can go one step further. Let's look at the development of time, day-by-day, based on the expansion factor. Every time the universe doubles, the perception of time is cut in half. Now when the universe was small, it was doubling very rapidly. But as the universe gets bigger, the doubling time gets exponentially longer. This rate of expansion is quoted in "The Principles of Physical Cosmology," a textbook that is used literally around the world.

(In case you want to know, this exponential rate of expansion has a specific number averaged at 10 to the 12th power. That is in fact the temperature of quark confinement, when matter freezes out of the energy: 10.9 times 10 to the 12th power Kelvin degrees divided by (or the ratio to) the temperature of the universe today, 2.73 degrees. That's the initial ratio which changes exponentially as the universe expands.)

The calculations come out to be as follows:

The first of the Biblical days lasted 24 hours, viewed from the "beginning of time perspective." But the duration from our perspective was 8 billion years.
The second day, from the Bible's perspective lasted 24 hours. From our perspective it lasted half of the previous day, 4 billion years.
The third day also lasted half of the previous day, 2 billion years.
The fourth day - one billion years.
The fifth day - one-half billion years.
The sixth day - one-quarter billion years.
When you add up the Six Days, you get the age of the universe at 15 and 3/4 billion years. The same as modern cosmology. Is it by chance?

But there's more. The Bible goes out on a limb and tells you what happened on each of those days. Now you can take cosmology, paleontology, archaeology, and look at the history of the world, and see whether or not they match up day-by-day. And I'll give you a hint. They match up close enough to send chills up your spine.



--
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  #2  
Old 12-06-2005, 11:07 PM
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

and on the 7th day God rested...perhaps implying the apocalypse will be coming in 1/8th of a billion years? Or whatever he does on the 8th day, assuming we are in the 7th day now.
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Old 12-06-2005, 11:38 PM
Lestat Lestat is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

I'm not a physicist, but if the pro-rating of time does indeed work out like he suggests, I find it a very interesting coincidence.

Now if only someone could just find a way to fit the rest of the many other biblical contradictions to fit real world logic and reality, I think people might start coming around.
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Old 12-07-2005, 02:56 AM
imported_luckyme imported_luckyme is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

have you how Kennedy has 6 letters and Oswald has 6 letters?
Let's see. "Day" refers to one rotation of the earth and has varied and still does. It has nothing to do with seconds, it's not like 'hours'. They were probably incredibly shorter just after the big bang ;-)
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  #5  
Old 12-07-2005, 06:14 PM
ThinkQuick ThinkQuick is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

[ QUOTE ]
have you how Kennedy has 6 letters and Oswald has 6 letters?
Let's see. "Day" refers to one rotation of the earth and has varied and still does. It has nothing to do with seconds, it's not like 'hours'. They were probably incredibly shorter just after the big bang ;-)

[/ QUOTE ]

This dosen't make sense to me. Please clarify your argument if you're going to make one.

[ QUOTE ]
The problem is that the sixth day, at a quarter billion years ago, is much farther back than the appearance of the first humans, which is less than 100,000 years ago.


[/ QUOTE ]

Interesting. Although to him the sixth day began 1/4billion years ago but ended only ~6000 years ago. 100k years falls into this range. With a range like that I gather he could capture all kinds of evolution. Evolutionary timeline would be a problem though I think... like birds being made before beasts, etc.
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  #6  
Old 12-07-2005, 08:13 PM
imported_luckyme imported_luckyme is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

[ QUOTE ]
This dosen't make sense to me. Please clarify your argument if you're going to make one.

[/ QUOTE ] Actually I made one, but obviously not clearly enough. I'll do point form -
- If I say I'll pay you $1 for each time you run around the house and touch the front door, it's a 'position' related event, not a time related.
- The time you take to do it will vary, but the meaning of 'once around' doesn't.
- It makes no sense to talk about "seconds it takes to run around house" if over billions of years the length of time has changed enormously.
- It's especially difficult in the case of "Days" because of the "when was the 1st rotation" of earth problems. At one time, was it a small cluster of debris rotating at 10 times per second, or a gaseous spheroid slowly cooling and spinning at different speeds at different heights.
- 'how many seconds in a day' has no meaning if there is no reason to pick one specific moment in the earths history and treat that as the 'definitive' day.
- that's one reason we don't base our timing ( seconds/hours ) on portions of 'days'. Even in our short span here it's too inconsistant to be useful as a time measurement below a very kludgy level.
hope that's clearer, luckyme
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  #7  
Old 12-08-2005, 01:16 AM
ThinkQuick ThinkQuick is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
This dosen't make sense to me. Please clarify your argument if you're going to make one.

[/ QUOTE ] Actually I made one, but obviously not clearly enough. I'll do point form -
- If I say I'll pay you $1 for each time you run around the house and touch the front door, it's a 'position' related event, not a time related.
- The time you take to do it will vary, but the meaning of 'once around' doesn't.
- It makes no sense to talk about "seconds it takes to run around house" if over billions of years the length of time has changed enormously.
- It's especially difficult in the case of "Days" because of the "when was the 1st rotation" of earth problems. At one time, was it a small cluster of debris rotating at 10 times per second, or a gaseous spheroid slowly cooling and spinning at different speeds at different heights.
- 'how many seconds in a day' has no meaning if there is no reason to pick one specific moment in the earths history and treat that as the 'definitive' day.
- that's one reason we don't base our timing ( seconds/hours ) on portions of 'days'. Even in our short span here it's too inconsistant to be useful as a time measurement below a very kludgy level.
hope that's clearer, luckyme

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm not sure where to start because I don't know specifically what aspect of the theory you are trying to refute.

Maybe you're just trying to say that a 'day' is a stupid thing to analyze because it can't be well defined. Schroeder however, has defined it, as a contemporary 24hr day, based on scriptural evidence.

The argument contends that there are many points in space (due to the expansion of the universe), where if the time period of six contemporary human days on earth pass, it would be perceived as ~15 billion years here. This dosen't claim that the earth has undergone 6x10^12 rotations or anything, just that 6x10^12 periods of time equivalent to a modern 'day' have passed.

I suppose it would be fair to pick the modern 'definitive day' as the length of the average day 3000 years or so ago. If you are confused by the changing length of daylight through the year, I believe most calculations involving the length of a day use either 24hrs, 1/365.25 * time for a year, or 1/365.24 * time for a year. These agree to within 4 minutes tho.

Ummm..... where else should we go with this?
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Old 12-08-2005, 01:32 AM
Zygote Zygote is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

you're definitely right, thinkquick. schroeder's calculations are accurate.
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  #9  
Old 12-08-2005, 02:24 AM
imported_luckyme imported_luckyme is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

[ QUOTE ]

Ummm..... where else should we go with this?

[/ QUOTE ] [ QUOTE ]
I suppose it would be fair to pick the modern 'definitive day' as the length of the average day

[/ QUOTE ]
Why is that 'fair' ...because it makes the numbers work? Why not the length of day when the information arrived at the end of the 1st "Day"? At least for the calculation of the length of the 1st day. My original "kennedy has 6 letters, Oswald has 6 letters" was attempting a quick comment that if you're allowed to simply pick numbers that fit some theory rather than have to come up with a reason for those numbers then we can always find starting points or connection points that make some set of numbers work.
The issue isn't just over 'days', but if that one isn't bothering anyone, no need to dig around anymore. And if it is bothering anyone, the case is closed.
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  #10  
Old 12-07-2005, 08:30 PM
tolbiny tolbiny is offline
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Default Re: Is the Universe 6 days old?

Ahh- but if birds are desendants of dinosaurs and beast refers to mammels we have it!
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