(urth) Christian relativity

[Iorwerth Thomas]

Of course, assuming physics 'as we know it' to be true is a bit of a risk; 
relativity being patchy is probably at least as likely as not.


>From: nastler <nastler at yahoo.dk>
>Reply-To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
>To: URTH <urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
>Subject: (urth) Christian relativity
>Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 15:33:28 +0200 (CEST)
>
>Quote suggesting one reason a Christian author might
>wish to write a universe without relativity. The time
>scales in the Sun series are extended, but the
>principle holds. The "news" cannot have spread through
>the universe without bypassing physics as we know it.
>
>Thus in SS we would just have to accept that
>relativity is patchy in order to understand the story;
>just as we have to accept a form of Lamarkian
>evolution.
>
>"Suppose that, at the moment of Christ's death, the
>news of it had started traveling at the maximum
>possible speed around the universe outwards from the
>earth. How far would the terrible tidings have
>traveled by now? Following the theory of special
>relativity, the answer is that the news could not,
>under any circumstances whatever, have reached more
>that one-fiftieth of the way across one galaxy — not
>one- thousandth of the way to our nearest neighboring
>galaxy in the 100-million-galaxy-strong universe. The
>universe at large couldn't possibly be anything other
>than indifferent to Christ, his birth, his passion,
>and his death. Even such momentous news as the origin
>of life on Earth could have traveled only across our
>little local cluster of galaxies. Yet so ancient was
>that event on our earthly time-scale that, if you span
>its age with your open arms, the whole of human
>history, the whole of human culture, would fall in the
>dust from your fingertip at a single stroke of a nail
>file."
>Dawkins
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