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3. The intervening yearsJust to fill in the bits in between in my Christian background. I have attended Anglican, Baptist and now an Independent Baptist churches, the latter is also a member of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches (FIEC) and is my current church. I have attended this church for the last 20-odd years. My church tends to a view that the gifts (or at least the interesting ones) died out at the end of Acts (~65AD) which seems an easy way out of difficult questions about why do we not see miracles today. (Not that any of the groups that claim miraculous happenings seem to have anything that could be called strong evidence and investigations seem to indicate they are self deluding at best.) For me this raises further questions of just how do you validate the spectacular miraculous accounts of the early church with everyday experience? It does not seem adequate to say there is no validation of the Christian’s faith except as a warm feeling. The Astronomical problem still worried me from time to time. With biology and geology I had not enough understanding of the details except to feel uncomfortable about a young earth view but astronomy is a field in which I have some expertise. The problem is that the Universe is big and can be shown to be big. The speed of light is constant as far as we know and means that the observable universe has had its light travelling for a long time. Long enough for the geology etc to all have had plenty of time to happen. The issue is that the chronology cannot be fudged for the astronomical data. The hard core creationists have tried to provide a theory that covers this by saying the speed of light has changed with time. The problem is they give themselves 10,000 years, maximum, for the age of the Universe and this means that the speed of light has to change by a huge factor. Why a problem? Well the speed of light does not just come into how far light can travel in a given time it affects pretty much everything and means that the Universe could not stick together the way it does with a different value for c the usual representation of the speed of light in physics equations (e.g. e=mc2). The other alternative favoured by creationists is that the Universe we see is only a simulation of the real thing. God created all the light and particles in transit as though they had taken ages to get here. It just gets sillier and sillier. So when I was asked what I thought about the ideas in a book that claimed to solve the paradox of an ancient universe I was very interested. The book was “Starlight and Time” by D R Humphreys.[22] |