Responding in Kind: Carts Before Horses
I’m clearly behind on everything, still. Hopefully the recent beginning of classes will help me organize my thought enough to get back into this with vigor. Nonetheless, I bring you comments on another scrap of Sal Cordova nonsense, hand picked because at first glance it doesn’t seem to be nonsense. Here, he proffers the possibility of a variable speed of light as the solution to the problems of young earth creationists.
We will simply have to wait and see how the physics of a Variable Speed of Light (VSL) will play out. But it could yield much fruitful support to a Young Cosmos hypothesis. For example, a VSL-YEC cosmology would resolve the problem of stellar-age homogeneity. I have in the past humorously tried to describe the situation with pictures of people. What we would expect to see in a constant speed of light cosmology is old stars nearby and young stars far away. …
He does not, however, provide a mechanism by which this variable speed of light will fix the apparent problems of the young earth creationism perspective. Stellar age seems to be fairly trivial for a YEC, and it’s not even made clear how a non-constant speed of light resolves this issue. Granted, I am not a cosmologist, but neither is Mr. Cordova, and he puts forth very little of any actual reasoning behind his claims. Should any of these have come from reputable sources, I’d love to have these as references.
However, I think his greatest shortcoming here is putting the cart before the horse. I’ll proceed to illustrate this in similar form to his demonstration of stellar age: with a photograph:
The idea that this kind of turn of events could easily sweep the idea of an ancient universe off the pages of science books is ludicrous. The simple fact of the matter is that we can probably say very little about the implications of a variable speed of light. It’s much the same as the search for what are called CPT violations–those are three religiously conserved symmetries: charge, pairity, and time. If someone could find evidence for a situation in which charge is not conserved, where pairity fails, or where time reversal does not produce the same process running backwards when it “should” then there will have to be a return to the drawing board.
What we would find while standing before said drawing board, however, is much beyond my understanding. The details, of course, matter. The details of the violation make all the difference. Now I’m not familiar with the latest cutting edge research into a changing speed of light, but it could potentially go many different ways. Does the speed increase or decrease? How fast? When? In what conditions? It could tell us very much about the universe we live in. But to say it could prove to be a triumph for YEC is more than premature.
As a person studying physics, one might think I’d be ready to jump upon the notion that “it’s all physics!” But it isn’t all physics. We do not yet understand the interplay between the physics of small systems like atoms and macroscopic systems like rocks, planets, living creatures, and ecosystems. Even if some very advanced research in physics reported that the universe was only 6000 years old, I would be skeptical. Because geology tells us that the earth itself goes back billions. Biology tells us life took nearly as long to develop. One discovery, especially a new and tentative one, in physics will not overturn lifetimes of work in other fields of science just like that.
I don’t expect the known age of the universe to change too significantly in my lifetime, especially not from 13.7 billion to 6000 years. There’s just too much that tells us otherwise right now to put any stock into such a prediction.
Tags: cosmology, young earth creationism