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Debate:Is Relativity in direct conflict with the Genesis account? (view source)
Revision as of 17:07, June 22, 2007
, 17:07, June 22, 2007no edit summary
::..or in a gravitational field - General (as opposed to special ) Relativity. Suddenly producing matter out of nowhere will affect the gravitational pull of the ... what on earth am I doing? I am tring to conduct an Einteinian analysis of a completely mythological account of an hypothesised creation. The fact is that General Relativity would, per se, prohibit the creation account in the bible anyway. I am rapidly losing the will to live here.--[[User:Felix|Felix]] 05:46, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
::..or in a gravitational field - General (as opposed to special ) Relativity. Suddenly producing matter out of nowhere will affect the gravitational pull of the ... what on earth am I doing? I am tring to conduct an Einteinian analysis of a completely mythological account of an hypothesised creation. The fact is that General Relativity would, per se, prohibit the creation account in the bible anyway. I am rapidly losing the will to live here.--[[User:Felix|Felix]] 05:46, 20 April 2007 (EDT)
OK, I don't know how someone who actually knows what (s)he is talking about ended up on conservapedia ("trustworthy"? hah!), but here I am anyway. Felix seems to be suggesting that relativity renders invalid every "historical narrative", which is a load of rubbish. All it does is show that the time difference between two events (and the spatial separation) will be measured to be different by different observers. Additionally, as has been mentioned, the time order of events can be reveresed, according to different observers; but THIS IS ONLY TRUE FOR SOME PAIRS OF EVENTS, AND NOT OTHERS! Roughly speaking, if a person is capable of travelling from one event to the other then every observer (no matter how they are moving) will agree which event happened first (in this case, no one will come to the conclusion that the person arrived before they set out). As this is the manner of description of events in the Bible (eg, Jesus cured someone, then went on the next day to feed the 5000), there is no contradiction from the order in which the events are described. As for talk about the length of the past, yes, this is a more reasonable point, although the Creationist account could be taken to be a standard Big Bang model happening 6000 years ago according to an observer stationary with respect to what would become the Earth. It is fairly reasonable to assume that the biblical account would be geocentric.
For those who know a bit more relativity, we define the space time interval as t<sup>2</sup> - x<sup>2</sup> (where we have set c=1); the crucial point is that all observers, no matter how fast they are moving, will agree on its value (as can be seen by using the Lorentz transformation). If the interval is greater than 0, so a timelike worldline connects the 2 points, then all observers will agree on this, and hence agree on the order of the events. It is only for spacelike separated events that the time order is not absolute. This can be extended fairly easily to higher dimensions (t<sup>2</sup> - x<sup>2</sup> - y<sup>2</sup> - ...), non-constant velocities (by using calculus), and general relativity (by using tensor calculus to find the metric, as the expression given for the interval is not valid in curved spacetimes), and the results can be shown to hold. Thus, the Bible and relativity are consistent, at this level at least.
The moral of this story is, "Don't invoke complicated physics/maths/whatever if you failed it earlier in life". [[User:Tristan|Tristan]] 18:02, 22 June 2007 (EDT)
==NO==
==NO==