Bet on science
Biblical literalists have struggled since the time of Galileo to reconcile their reading of the Bible with the facts and evidence that have emerged since then. Somehow, it is inconceivable that a novel written by Iron Age pastoralists in the Levant could have been allegorical. As I’ve told medical students, science tells us *how* the world was made, religion tells us *why* the world was made.
The contortions creationists must engage in order to justify clinging to their plagiarized creation myth would just be a source of amusement if it weren’t for their efforts to supplant science with their facially implausible fiction.
I’ve encountered this in the form of anti-evolution nonsense so silly it would make a dog laugh. But the latest post over at Panda’s Thumb has an account of how the evidence for interstellar comets (1) thoroughly eviscerates 6000-year-old earth creationism and (2) has been met with silence by young earth creationists.
“The physics of 3I/ATLAS are simple and uncontroversial. Its perihelion velocity was measured at approximately 68.3 kilometers per second. Combining that value with the object’s hyperbolic eccentricity allows computation of its hyperbolic excess velocity, the speed it had when effectively outside the Sun’s gravitational influence. This velocity is about 58 kilometers per second.
“Even on a very generous 6,000-year timescale, an object traveling at that constant speed could traverse only about 10^13 kilometers: just under 1.2 light-years. This figure establishes a firm upper bound: under young-earth cosmology, any natural parent system for 3I/ATLAS must lie within a sphere extending less than 1.2 light-years from Earth, and the comet’s incoming trajectory must align with that location.
“We know, however, that no such star systems are presently catalogued. Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, and Barnard’s Star—the nearest known stellar neighbors—lie at distances several times that limit, and none align with 3I/ATLAS’s observed arrival direction anyway. Within Faulkner’s framework, therefore, 3I/ATLAS could not plausibly have originated from any known star system. This realization should drive young-earth cosmology to an obvious and specific prediction: there must exist one or more yet-undiscovered star systems, brown dwarfs, or massive planetary bodies within 1.2 light-years of Earth lying along the comet’s trajectory that served as its point of ejection.
“If creationists adhered seriously to their own cosmology, this conclusion would be exhilarating rather than inconvenient. Each interstellar comet would provide a geometric “search cone” on the sky defining where the undiscovered parent object must lie. Reducing the universe to a 6,000-year age compresses the allowed volume so tightly that the relevant search zones become modest and tractable. Modern infrared surveys, and especially the James Webb Space Telescope, are capable of detecting extremely faint stellar and substellar objects that earlier instruments might have missed. Creationists should be pressing for dedicated sky surveys in the predicted regions, attempting to identify their missing neighbors before secular astronomy stumbles across them incidentally.”
All scientific conclusions are provisional and subject to falsification by experiment. As David MacMillan details in the link, creationists could use the observations of interstellar comets to falsify an ancient universe. Why don’t they?
Interstellar comets falsify young earth creationism
The contortions creationists must engage in order to justify clinging to their plagiarized creation myth would just be a source of amusement if it weren’t for their efforts to supplant science with their facially implausible fiction.
I’ve encountered this in the form of anti-evolution nonsense so silly it would make a dog laugh. But the latest post over at Panda’s Thumb has an account of how the evidence for interstellar comets (1) thoroughly eviscerates 6000-year-old earth creationism and (2) has been met with silence by young earth creationists.
“The physics of 3I/ATLAS are simple and uncontroversial. Its perihelion velocity was measured at approximately 68.3 kilometers per second. Combining that value with the object’s hyperbolic eccentricity allows computation of its hyperbolic excess velocity, the speed it had when effectively outside the Sun’s gravitational influence. This velocity is about 58 kilometers per second.
“Even on a very generous 6,000-year timescale, an object traveling at that constant speed could traverse only about 10^13 kilometers: just under 1.2 light-years. This figure establishes a firm upper bound: under young-earth cosmology, any natural parent system for 3I/ATLAS must lie within a sphere extending less than 1.2 light-years from Earth, and the comet’s incoming trajectory must align with that location.
“We know, however, that no such star systems are presently catalogued. Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri, and Barnard’s Star—the nearest known stellar neighbors—lie at distances several times that limit, and none align with 3I/ATLAS’s observed arrival direction anyway. Within Faulkner’s framework, therefore, 3I/ATLAS could not plausibly have originated from any known star system. This realization should drive young-earth cosmology to an obvious and specific prediction: there must exist one or more yet-undiscovered star systems, brown dwarfs, or massive planetary bodies within 1.2 light-years of Earth lying along the comet’s trajectory that served as its point of ejection.
“If creationists adhered seriously to their own cosmology, this conclusion would be exhilarating rather than inconvenient. Each interstellar comet would provide a geometric “search cone” on the sky defining where the undiscovered parent object must lie. Reducing the universe to a 6,000-year age compresses the allowed volume so tightly that the relevant search zones become modest and tractable. Modern infrared surveys, and especially the James Webb Space Telescope, are capable of detecting extremely faint stellar and substellar objects that earlier instruments might have missed. Creationists should be pressing for dedicated sky surveys in the predicted regions, attempting to identify their missing neighbors before secular astronomy stumbles across them incidentally.”
All scientific conclusions are provisional and subject to falsification by experiment. As David MacMillan details in the link, creationists could use the observations of interstellar comets to falsify an ancient universe. Why don’t they?
Interstellar comets falsify young earth creationism
Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, I used to know a couple of these people. “God can do anything” was his go-to response, followed by “we can’t know God’s will.” His wife chipped in with “it’s a test of our faith,” showing that she, at least, believed we *could* know God’s will.
Doubling down on the incomprehensibly stupid is an odd part of human nature, but plenty of examples abound. They were nice people, good people in fact, but that’s no excuse, and there are plenty of good atheists too.
@John,
The “test of our faith” alibi is a familiar one. My response is why should I believe in a “god” who created us with reason in order to deceive us?
The point being made at the Panda’s Thumb link is that creationists who claim to use the tools of science are avoiding the use of those tools when they don’t guarantee support for a 6000-year-old universe.
The people who lived in Biblical times knew about metaphors and allegories. Young earth creationists (and biblical literalists of all stripes) apparently do not. Belief in the absence of proof is faith. Belief in defiance of proof to the contrary is just deliberate ignorance. That applies to a lot more than religion.
@Jane,
Well-stated.
We’ve long had plenty of evidence that’s firmly inconsistent with a six-thousand-year-old universe. For example, we can see many celestial objects which are much more than six thousand light years away (millions, in some cases), meaning that if the universe were that young, the light from those objects would not have had time to reach us, and we would not be able to see them. Yet we can.
More to the point, there’s no way that Iron Age pastoralists in the Levant could have known anything about the real nature of the universe as revealed by modern physics and astronomy, therefore they could not have put any such knowledge in the Bible, allegorically or otherwise. The Bible is not allegorical. It’s just completely irrelevant.