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.
Which I guess means carbon dating isn’t real. Which I guess means our entire understanding of chemistry is wrong. Only possible explanation.
You think god is so stupid that she didn’t pre age those bones so that they appear older than they are using carbon dating?
Nonsense, God is a man
Ah, good to know, thank you
Is there even anything in Genesis to suggest that the ‘days’ were 24h long? I could see it being meant metaphorically…
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.
Dang, thats sick. Ive always wondered why that wasnt the default view. Nothing in science contradicts God, although it certainly contradicts a fair amount of the bible. Back when i was alternatively religious, i would commonly argue to my traditionally religious family that evolution doesnt have anything to do with whether God created the world, and that the bible states God made the world for us to explore and utilize. He also said that due to our sin, nothing would come freely, including those tools. I believed medicine was a part of Gods tools he created for us to use. Same with science. Hence my natural conclusion was that God retroactively evolved the creatures around us. He didnt spring them into existance, its fully within Gods power to alter the timeline so they naturally evolved on this planet. Its possible he had simply already evolved them to be ready for us, the guy knows the future.
It was a cool fanfic, but now im wholly athiest for moral reasons.
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.
Well duh, if they meant metaphorical day, they should have used the hebrew word for metaphorical days.
/s
Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.
This seems to happen to me more frequently these days. Sometimes a person will say something so absurd that it just stops me in my tracks and I’m sure they think it means they “won”
I dont know hebrew, but that does seem plasuable enough to me. My understanding is that different languages have different structures, and therefore its definitely plausible that hebrew has a “literal” structure. Similar to how we say literally, except we use it wrong a bunch.
Of course, I generally doubt anyone that says they know hebrew until they demonstrate it, so i doubt what they said was true, but I could understand how it might’ve been believable.
Yeah, I could imagine there being some kind distinction in a language, such that it is always clear when one is making a metaphor as opposed to being literal. I also don’t know if that actually applies to Hebrew.
But what baffled me was more that even if this were true, holding a belief that goes against pretty much all evidence, based purely on a grammatical quirk of an ancient culture. It’s quite a stretch 😅
Original Hebrew? Anything in Hebrew that is supposedly from the “original” is a translation.
“No, that wasn’t a metaphor! The Bible is literal truth!”
“What about ‘The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me,’ or ‘But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,’ or ‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.’?”
“Those parts were metaphorical!”
That’s a more popular justification now, but there’s definitely no textual defense of it, they’re just reinterpreting around the scientific consensus. How often do you expect a book to define the term “day” before moving on? It was almost certainly written and intended to be treated literally.
Genesis is full of absolute nonsense
The bible is just early fantasy fiction
Imma be real with you. If you show me a cool thing you made in a couple days, and your “days” aren’t 24h long… That’s just sad
On the other hand, show me a universe you made, and I’ll be impressed!
When I talk to my boss and tell them it took me 5 days to do something – my “days” are only about 1 hour.
Works both ways.
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
No mention of an eighth day in that story - we’re still in the “god rested” day!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Methodists are pretty chill from what I’ve seen.
I was homeschooled for most of K-12, and all my peers were crazy fundies. I have so many stories.
I collect that kind of stuff for fun + have some exposure to Christian education communities.
Were you doing ACE? Those workbooks should be illegal.
I did ACE. The (barely) fat kid was named Pudge. WTF. Looking back on it now, the educational parts were actually pretty good in places but everything else on top of it was pretty bad
the educational parts were actually pretty good
It’s just workbooks that you do independently and grade yourself, right? All of that seems like it’s what we’d call low “depth of knowledge.” Multiple choice questions and just memorizing facts.
Not ACE specifically. I actually hadn’t heard of ACE until you mentioned it.
Most of my peers did some combination of Abeka and Saxon curricula, with a smattering of whatever TF the annual “homeschool convention” had available to sell. And yes, the “science” curriculum always had at least one chapter on how stupid “mainstream scientists” are for believing the universe is more than 6,000 years old. (And some books were nothing but that stretched to the length of a text book.) And those chapters loved to quote Ken Ham and shit. My parents were in some ways less fundie than most of my peers, and they told me to skip that chapter. Lol.
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…
This is why I’m agnostic - it’s basically impossible to either confirm or deny the existence of a higher power, but I don’t believe in any particular gods or anything
Im largely the same. Im generally a non believer and my sense of spirituality is not tied to any deities, but I don’t know that they’re not out there so in vwry particular cases I still practife some amount of worship. Mainly at funerals.
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
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.
I mean that or just pre-calculate it and place the light at the same time you place the stars
But precalculating is just waste of resources when you are building a pure procedural universe.
I doubt that’s really a consideration when you are literally God
Well, obviously he isn’t a literal god since he made mistakes and retcons and had to rest afterwards.
It’s obviously a race condition in the simulation software. The stars database is loaded before the c constant.
This will be patched in a future update, however current simulation will need a data wipe for the updated behaviour to show.
Something about the simulation getting its CPU time shaped.
I feel like all of the quantum stuff would be a good way to save storage space. Superposition is essentially lazy evaluation.
This is part of the basis of a lot of simulation theory from what I understand. The way electrons behave under observation is very similar to the way a computer renders a 3d world. It doesn’t calculate or draw everything in the entire environment, simply what is under direct observation by the user(s).
There are plenty of things God “might have done,” But this sort of thing is neither scientific nor scriptural.
lol such a trickster.
Further confirmation that the Christian god is actually just post-Ragnarok Loki.
I love that due to the way religious silliness works that there is no real way to refute this assertion.
God might have allowed literally anything.
God has allowed a questionable amount, in fact.
So convenient, isn’t it?
Imagine all the cosmic background radiation and starlight of 4 billion years, as measured in the outer universe, landing on Earth in a time-dilated period of only 7 days. Earth would be cooked. By my calculation, the surface of the Earth would get up to 1900 Kelvin.
let it happen
my response to this kinda argument is “ok cool. math still the same”
Not if you get creative enough with it…
The creative justifications for creationism that try to approach something like science amuse me. Like Kents Hovind and Ham are both too stupid and incurious to be fun; a creationist who’s at least knowledgeable enough to look at “variable c” “”theories”” is entertaining to engage with. That’s part of how I’d justify calling this a “meme” anyway - it’s one of the brighter ones manufacturing a meme to sell to the stupid ones.
I am torn about this situation.
On the one hand, if this community is supposed to be about science (the procedure by which we achieve greater understanding of our world), not philosophy or religion, then does this meme fit here?
While on the other, this community is “A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking”, so carry on!🤪
The conversation around these memes are super therapeutic for those of us raised in fundie households.
I’m just joking around - part of science is to always continue to ask questions and be skeptical, so this meme definitely is about science 🤣
if this community is supposed to be about science (the procedure by which we achieve greater understanding of our world), not philosophy
Arguably, you can’t have science without philosophy. For example you’re distinguishing what’s science based on the work of 20th century philosophers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
The thing you have to realize about Ken Ham is: he has an Australian accent.
As a pre-teen in the south, that’s practically the Crocodile Hunter.
