I’m not a scientist and I don’t claim to be one. At least I can admit that. Dr. Jason Lisle of Answers in Genesis can’t seem to do the same.
He claims to have solved the “distant starlight problem“:
This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe is only thousands of years old. Solutions have been proposed by creationists, but we haven’t had a definitive answer… until now.
Like I said, I’m not a science expert. But I know that science is about looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions from it. Lisle is starting with the conclusion (the earth is thousands of years old) and trying to match the evidence to it.
Bad scientist. Bad.
It gets better, though.
He hasn’t produced the paper yet and one critic faulted him for not submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal. But Lisle was ready with a comeback:
The same critic made the following comment, which I found amusing: “Jason isn’t submitting his paper to a prestigious science journal, the editors of which will send it out to be reviewed by experts of their own choosing”… But the really embarrassing thing for this critic is that, actually, I have already submitted the paper to the Answers Research Journal, and the senior editor has already sent it out to experts for peer-review. How embarrassing for the critic!
Yeah! Take that, you godless critic! He’s sending it to a journal run by Creationists. I wonder if they’ll accept it… (I also wonder: How bad would a paper have to be for that journal to reject it?)
This is even funnier when you read PZ Myers‘ post about this “discovery” from a couple weeks ago when Lisle made his initial announcement:
If he’s really made this amazing breakthrough, he ought to be sending his technical paper to more prestigious journals, like Nature and Science and Physics Review Letters and Cosmopolitan. Publishing in Answers Research Journal is an admission of failure.
I hope they do accept it. And publish it. Only because then it’ll be online for real scientists to pick apart and amuse themselves with.
For some reason, I don’t think physicists are shaking in their boots.