first in a series of essays of mine...
May. 6th, 2005 10:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eyelessgameI've started to collect a couple of essays I've written. I want to publish them somewhere, and this is the only real forum I have.
Origins stuff is in the news recently, given Kansas' mock trial and the theocratic stirrings in the nation, and so this becomes at least a little timely.
This particular essay became rather famous (at least for me), as it was voted post-of-the-month for talk.origins, and came to the attention of James Randi, who published it in his newsletter.
As much of my talk.origins and other usenet essaying, it suffers a bit from being a response to someone else. The discussion was regarding the omphalos principle, and I simply took the principle to its logical conclusion.
But that position undermines itself right from the start. See, you're precisely right.
The universe looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it has one, specific, consistent history.
Like it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point.
Like light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields.
Like events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off of other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away they are and how old their light is.
The earth looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it's been around for four and a half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half billion of it.
Like the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time.
Like the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time.
Like Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits build up on the continents and the sea floor spreads; the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring.
Like radioactive isotopes have been here, changing to their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of the daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements found in the rock. Like they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.
Life on earth looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it's been here for almost the entire history of the earth.
Like it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before.
Like coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactives in the rocks it was growing on, showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the earth's rotation over three hundred million years.
Life on earth looks like it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it.
Like it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged.
Like the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy.
Like the errors in DNA share the same nested hierarchy, like why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.
Certainly God could have created the earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look as if it had all this history.
Exactly like it.
Origins stuff is in the news recently, given Kansas' mock trial and the theocratic stirrings in the nation, and so this becomes at least a little timely.
This particular essay became rather famous (at least for me), as it was voted post-of-the-month for talk.origins, and came to the attention of James Randi, who published it in his newsletter.
As much of my talk.origins and other usenet essaying, it suffers a bit from being a response to someone else. The discussion was regarding the omphalos principle, and I simply took the principle to its logical conclusion.
Let's start with this: You say the earth is vastly older than 10,000 years. I say it only LOOKS older than that. At the moment when God created the earth, He created it as an "adult." Just like Adam and Eve LOOKED like adults when they were only one day old. They didn't start out as embryos, and neither did planet Earth.
But that position undermines itself right from the start. See, you're precisely right.
The universe looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it has one, specific, consistent history.
Like it has been expanding for fifteen billion years from a single point.
Like light has been traveling through it, lensing through gravitational fields.
Like events hundreds of thousands of light-years away have sent light at right angles to us, hundreds of thousands of years ago, which reflected off of other objects and then came toward us. We can use Euclid's geometry to show how far away they are and how old their light is.
The earth looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it's been around for four and a half billion years, and was hot and molten for the first half billion of it.
Like the continents have been gradually moving for the entire time.
Like the oceans and rivers and streams and tectonic flows have been shaping it, slowly, for all that time.
Like Africa and South America have been receding from each other for millions of years, as the deposits build up on the continents and the sea floor spreads; the magnetic iron and nickel in the volcanic deposits recording the earth's changing magnetic field, exactly in time with the changes we have been measuring.
Like radioactive isotopes have been here, changing to their stable daughter elements in accord with the laws of physics, changing the ratios of the daughter isotopes in exact proportion to the elements found in the rock. Like they've been doing so for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.
Life on earth looks old. Exactly like it's old.
Like it's been here for almost the entire history of the earth.
Like it's been changing all that time, with new species appearing, each similar to something that was here before.
Like coral, dated to three hundred million years ago by the radioactives in the rocks it was growing on, showing four hundred days in a year, exactly matching the predicted slowing effect of lunar tides on the earth's rotation over three hundred million years.
Life on earth looks like it's descended from a common ancestor. Exactly like it.
Like it's arranged in a nested hierarchy of similarity, instead of all the infinite other ways it could have been arranged.
Like the junk, noncoding DNA in each animal has exactly the same similarity relationship as the morphological hierarchy.
Like the errors in DNA share the same nested hierarchy, like why humans and chimps and gorillas can get scurvy but all the other mammals can produce their own vitamin C.
Certainly God could have created the earth six thousand years ago. Or last week, for that matter. But regardless of when it was created, it was created to look as if it had all this history.
Exactly like it.
