Information and Evolutionary Mechanisms

Imho your questions--which primarily focus on composition and state of universe at beginning--are changing the subject @Varelse1 started in post #111 about light from quasars taking 13 billion years to reach us to which you responded light could have been created transit to which I responded in turn.  So right now I am only addressing the light travel issue.  I have made the point that I see no reason to doubt "local" light year distances or far away for that matter because they follow the same reasoning, so if we accept some light year measurements but not others without providing justification then that is arbitrary, so where do you draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable?  As far as burden of proof, if you want to convince us that the scientific expert consensus on the subject is wrong, then that's your responsibility.  The assumptions are that we can take observational evidence at face value.  I see no reason to doubt this assumption, nor have you provided a non-arbitrary reason for why we should accept some observational evidence but not other observational evidence.

Okay, you find fault with the questions and are unwilling to acknowledge the answers. I think of one of the things we (myself included) are going to have to answer for will not be the complex things in the universe we had no clue about, but the simple right in our face truths about what can be known. My responsibility is to acknowledge what I know and admit what I don't, I have admitted I don't know how old the universe is, I'm not the one proclaiming knowledge on that topic I nor anyone else can really have without the answer to the questions I posed. We can predict what is going on around us now with mathematical certainty, but without knowing the details on how it began that's all we can really know.

"How" something began and "How old" something is are two different questions.  We've been talking about "How old."  When we look at the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy we're seeing what it looked like 1,000 years ago because it's 1,000 light years away and that's how long it takes the light to travel to us.  When we look at the galaxies of the Deep Hubble Field we're seeing how these galaxies looked 13 billion years ago because they're 13 billion light years away and that's how long it takes the light to travel to us.  I'm asking you why it's reasonable to accept the first case but not the second.  Are the physics of light different in the second case?  Is it unreasonable to assume that light is behaving the same way in both cases? 

I see no reason to believe that light is behaving one way in one case but not in another just as I see no reason to believe that the physics of gravity operates differently in different parts of the universe.

If it's not unreasonable to assume that the physics of light are the same everywhere in the universe, then it's not unreasonable to accept that light from galaxies of the Deep Hubble Field 13 billion light years away is 13 billion years old.

Listen you are not answering my questions, I have no interest in hearing you dance around that.

Do we need to know and understand the manufacturing process for a car in order to say how old it is?  If someone asks you how old your car is do you tell them you can't answer that because you first have to know how the car was made and what form it had in the beginning?  I mean seriously.  I made points about the age of light in our universe to which you "respond" by asking me questions about the form of the universe in the beginning and by what process it came into being (which we already both believe was God!), and which has nothing to do with the points I originally made about light year distances, so you can't ask irrelevant questions and then claim I'm being evasive for not answering such questions.  And besides, I'm the one who first made the points that I did and first asked YOU a question.  Responding to my question with (irrelevant) questions is NOT a response.

How difficult is it to answer the following, simple question which you can easily just state your opinion on: Is it unreasonable to assume that the physics of light behaves the same way everywhere in the universe?

You are evasive, a couple of simple questions, a single word could each one. Instead, nothing about the questions were answered; all I get is why you believe looking at the current state of things is reasonable to assume you know without actually answering my questions.

One of your questions (in post #120): How did the universe come to be? (i.e., by what "mechanisms" was the word you specifically used).  My answer: God did it.  Satisfied?  I'll even answer another one of your questions from post #120: What form did the universe have at the beginning?  My answer: it had no form; it was formless.

Now will you please answer one of mine: Is it unreasonable to assume that the physics of light behaves the same way everywhere in the universe? 

It isn't lost on me we have traded places.

I just answered two of your questions, so the least you can do is answer one of mine:

Is it unreasonable to assume that the physics of light behaves the same way everywhere in the universe?

God did it!? Yeah, and the shape it was in when He did that, how large was it, that was part of the questions, what form was it in? I'm aware that the earth was formless, not the heavens in the beginning. So I'm clear, you went to what for that information, scripture, or some other source?

I would think everything we see in the here and now reasonably would behave in the same way throughout the universe, unless some conditional changes occur due to something acting on it that could alter behavior.

I'll take that as a yes, and I agree with you.  Given the reasonable assumption we can make that light behaves the same way everywhere in the universe, then just as light from the sun is eight minutes old, and four years old from Alpha Centauri, and 1,000 years old from the Orion Arm it is not unreasonable to conclude the same for other light-year distances as well whether they be 10,000, 100,000, a million or a billion. 

As I said, you don't know the size or its form when created, you assume. I'm not arguing rate and distances, had you been paying attention you'd seen that.

So you agree with me about rates and distances then.  Great.  And as I said, my comments have been focusing on light year distances and the reasonable conclusion that just as light from the sun is eight minutes old, and four years old from Alpha Centauri, and 1,000 years old from the Orion Arm it is not unreasonable to conclude the same for other light-year distances as well whether they be 10,000, 100,000, a million or a billion.  Glad we agree and recognize the logic behind the old age of the universe.

As far as the size and form of the universe when created, I've already said I agree with you that it had no size or form, and yes, that is an assumption based on religion.  However, since the birth of the universe we have the history mapped out pretty well.

I guess you still don't see.

Lol, I guess you don't either

At least we can do that in kindness.

True .  I can also appreciate and respect that you have a different opinion, and I have no goal or agenda to change your belief.  I do think it's a mistake, though, to argue that old universe and young universe are on the same epistemic footing.  They are not.  The prima facie evidence supports an old universe on the assumption that we can take what we observe about light speed and light-year distances at face value.  A young universe belief requires that we can't.  Once again, it's not about obtaining absolute "proof," which is impossible, but whether we have good reasons for believing the universe is old, and we do.  Just because we weren't there to observe it doesn't mean we can't make inferences based on the evidence that is left over from the past that we do observe.  If I walk into a kitchen and observe that the temperature gets increasingly warmer the closer I get to the oven but the oven is off, then it is very reasonable for me to infer that the oven had been on in the past even though I wasn't there.  When we observe doppler red shift of galaxies and the black body spectrum of our universe's cosmic background radiation, then it is reasonable to infer the universe has undergone an adiabatic thermal expansion according to the laws of physics.  When we observe galaxies 200 million light-years away, then it is reasonable to infer on the basis of physics and the speed of light that those galaxies are at least 200 million years old.  

I'll just leave this as we agree to disagree.

By disagree then I take it that you think it's unreasonable to infer on the basis of physics.  Got it.