In Reply to: re: an eye for an iphone? posted by Realist on January 10, 2010 at 11:59:00:

I you do not understand what single quotation marks mean when placed around a sentence that is taken (quoted) from another source then I'm afraid I cannot help you. I was very careful to put YOUR sentence in QUOTATION marks. Go back and check.

Of course it still doesn't make whatever the point you were trying to make any the clearer.

The best I can come up with is that you think time is relative but not in an Einsteinian way. It's just relative when creationists want it to be relative. To even use the term 'millions of years old' is surely against the Bible as Day 1 of the Creation is set at 6000 years ago by creationists surely?

This does give rise to reality problems though which for a realist you should be interested in.

The basic constants and 'laws' of physics, chemistry and biology are just that - constant and unchanging across the universe and over time - same here, same on Mars or the other side of the Milky Way. Same today as 6000 years ago or 60 million years ago.

We have an awful lot of real hard evidence for this view. We use the fruits of this understanding of how our world is put together for all sorts of useful things - driving your car, using a mobile phone, sending an email, heating your home, sending men to the moon, watching TV - the list is endless. Things that are based on the well tried and tested understanding of how things are put together at a very fundamental level - electricity, magnetism, weak force, strong force, gravity, quantum effects and so on.

We even use this knowledge of our universe to fly probes around other planets, to drive rovers on Mars. We also use it to heal people, to produce medicines unheard of 100 years ago, to breed food crops that are resistant to disease and so on - it's a long list. On a daily basis even those who poo-poo science are making use of many of these successful outcomes of modern science's understanding of the way things work - based on fundamental unchanging constants and 'laws'. Sure they even use CERN's most famous invention - the world wide web - to diss the very institution that gave rise to this trillion euro phenomenon called the web.

Of course if you have some new insight that says all of this is wrong you will be up for the Nobel prize I'm sure.

But remember that being realistic about it you cannot have fundamental constants and laws that change at random (or even at a whim of a deity who is not clever enough to have planned it all correctly from the beginning and it needs ongoing repairs and fixing like a clapped out second hand car.)

Remember Genesis: 'Let there be light'... - fundamental constants were set way back in Genesis so why mess with them? Do you think God made some mistakes when he made the heavens? Do you think he said:
'Oh gosh! - I made a mess of the way time goes by but I will stop it every now and then so that people won't realise that the world is only 6000 years old. I will fool them into thinking that it is much older by hiding fossils in rocks.'

If that's reality you are welcome to it but it's a bit embarrassing to believe in an idiot God who messed up creation so badly that he has to go hiding fossils for people to find so that they won't realise he made a mistake with his fundamental constants and the design of matter!