Ignorama!

So I was using the Stumble button in my browser and came across a page showing all the supposedly ‘badass’ sections of the Bible. Sections like Exodus 2: 11-12 where Moses kills and hides the body of an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew…or Kings 2 : 23-24, where Elisha cursed a bunch of kids for calling him a ‘baldhead’, apparently causing two bears to come out of the woods and maul the kids to death.

Now I’m not going to debate this. I’ve posted about religion enough to last a lifetime.

What I want to talk about is the sheer ignorance of some of the replies.

As you can probably guess, the comments for that post quickly turned into a major flame war. Religion versus Science. However, one comment stood out to me. A guy who obviously thought he’d ‘proven science wrong’. Here it is in its entirety:

“How do you explain starlight? Science tells us that most stars in the sky are millions of light years away and that the speed of light is constant. If both of these are true, then how can light from these stars reach us right now?”

Ummmm, yeah.

Basically, he’s saying if a star is millions of light years away, how can we see it? If it’s going to take a million years for the light to reach us, how are we seeing it now.

Let me just break it down for him:

Average life of a star : 100 million years – 100 billion years or longer (depending on its size)

Approximate Age of our galaxy : 11 – 13 billion years.

Approximate size of our galaxy : 100,000 light years across.

Approximate age of our solar system : 4.54 Billion years.

So our planet’s been here for around 4.54 billion years. The other stars have been here for around 13 billion years. In other words, the light from those stars have had about ten billion years to reach us.

Long story short, the reason we can see those stars right now is because the light we see has had billions of years to reach us. Sure, we’re seeing what they looked like millions of years ago, but we can still see them.

The moral of this story is simple. Don’t try to use ‘Science’ to prove your argument or disprove someone else’s argument when you don’t even come close to understanding the most basic concepts of what you’re talking about.

This is essentially like me saying:

“The Bible’s a big fake! It’s meant to have been written almost 2000 years ago…so why isn’t the paper in mine yellowed? How come it looks brand new? Why is it in English? Why isn’t it hand written on papyrus? Explain that!”