To illustrate the ineptness of Introibo on the question ...

See if Introibo approves my comments before St. Lucy ... · To illustrate the ineptness of Introibo on the question ... · If Curiosity Killed the Cat ... It's Bad

It's the second of the two posts I tried to comment on.

The problematic of Biblical hermeneutics and scientific advances came to the forefront when certain Catholic clerics began to question how to interpret the "days" of Genesis given the findings that indicate a universe billions of years old. Must the Hebrew word yom be interpreted as a literal 24 hour day, or can it be a certain "period of time" (as the word itself indicates) which can be much longer than 24 hours? The Pontifical Biblical Commission ("PBC"), the decisions of which are binding in conscience, investigated that question (and others relating to Genesis) during the pontificate of Pope St. Pius X.

As he goes on say, that was in 1909. Now, the pretended evidence for "a universe billions of years old" are either astronomical or radiometric. Introibo is going to mention Cygnus X-1, which was discovered in 1965. The radiometric "evidence that Earth is 4.5 billion years old" or back in the day of Pius XII in 1951 (record papal dupe, if he was indeed pope), "5 billion years" was Uranium-Lead, a method developed (or corrected) later.

What was the age of Earth in 1909, according to the then "thinkers" and "scientists" who disputed or ignored the Biblical chronology?

Thomson's initial 1864 estimate of the Earth's age was from 20 to 400 million years old. These wide limits were due to his uncertainty about the melting temperature of rock, to which he equated the Earth's interior temperature,[65][66] as well as the uncertainty in thermal conductivities and specific heats of rocks. Over the years he refined his arguments and reduced the upper bound by a factor of ten, and in 1897 Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, ultimately settled on an estimate that the Earth was 20–40 million years old.

...

Boltwood did the legwork, and by the end of 1905 had provided dates for 26 separate rock samples, ranging from 92 to 570 million years. He did not publish these results, which was fortunate because they were flawed by measurement errors and poor estimates of the half-life of radium. Boltwood refined his work and finally published the results in 1907. Boltwood's paper pointed out that samples taken from comparable layers of strata had similar lead-to-uranium ratios, and that samples from older layers had a higher proportion of lead, except where there was evidence that lead had leached out of the sample. His studies were flawed by the fact that the decay series of thorium was not understood, which led to incorrect results for samples that contained both uranium and thorium. However, his calculations were far more accurate than any that had been performed to that time. Refinements in the technique would later give ages for Boltwood's 26 samples of 410 million to 2.2 billion years.

So, the radiometric data was in 1909 new, untested, and the evidence was not yet reaching the 2.2 billion years some of Boltwood's samples would later be dated to, just 570 million years. I took these quotes from William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin and from Age of Earth. On wikipedia.

So, nothing in 1907 or in 1909 indicated to anyone, even the least Biblically minded that the universe were somehow "billions of years old" ...

But he tries to show off on Cygnus X-1 ...

Those who hold to a literal interpretation of the Hexameron argue the Earth/universe is about six thousand (6,000) years old.

Actually I am very happy to accept 7200 years and two decades more according to the Roman Martyrology for Christmas Day, and some Greeks prefer Syncellus who goes for 7500 years and three decades (Christ born Anno Mundi 5199 or 5509 according to the two sources).

Apart from this comment, the priest who on behalf of Pope Pius X answered question VIII in the affirmative had in his introduction to the Old Testament in the 1880's stated that from the creation of Adam on, Biblical chronology could perhaps need adjustment if geological evidence came up by admitting a few more gaps in the Genesis 11 genealogy than just the Second Cainan, but as far as he knew then, it was enough if Christ was born 5509 after Adam was created. ALL of the old earth data, ALL of it, as far as he was concerned was prehuman.

With obvious humans carbon dated to 40 000 BC, both Neanderthal and "Sapiens" / Cro Magnon race, this is no longer the case. And having a very low carbon 14 (like 1/64 of how much the proportion is now) at the Flood and just before is way easier to motivate if the Earth at the Flood was just 2242 years, rather than with millions of years, by which time the carbon 14 level would have already reached an equilibrium probably at 100 pmC, which would make a decay worth 40 000 carbon years impossible in the 5000 years since the Flood (a bit less than 5000 in Roman martyrology, a bit more in Syncellus).

There is ample evidence of an old Earth/universe. My basic data comes from multiple sources including M. J. Reid, et al. The trigonometric parallax of Cygnus X-1. The Astrophysical Journal, 742:83, 2011.

He confused his data with the data given by non-Biblicals in 1907.

As I always tried to make things as easy to understand as possible for my middle school science students when I taught, I will condense one line of argumentation into terse bullet points:

Being a middle school science teacher apparently warps one's judgement, then ... but I'll gladly take point by point.

The distance to some astronomical objects has been found to be greater than six thousand light years by a very simple method of measurement. (One light year is the distance that light covers in one year at the velocity it goes now.)

It is in fact not a very simple method of measurement. First, I go to his source: M. J. Reid, et al. The trigonometric parallax of Cygnus X-1. The Astrophysical Journal, 742:83, 2011. Reasearchgate won't allow me to access the full text, but there is an abstract.

The distance of 1.86 (-0.11,+0.12) kpc was obtained from a trigonometric parallax measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array.

I have a very clear suspicion that "parallax measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array" is something different and less straightforward than the "parallax measurement" Introibo is thinking of.

Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) is a type of astronomical interferometry used in radio astronomy. In VLBI a signal from an astronomical radio source, such as a quasar, is collected at multiple radio telescopes on Earth or in space. The distance between the radio telescopes is then calculated using the time difference between the arrivals of the radio signal at different telescopes. This allows observations of an object that are made simultaneously by many radio telescopes to be combined, emulating a telescope with a size equal to the maximum separation between the telescopes.

So, are radio observations in interferometry equal to optic observations in determining the angle?

I am fairly confident that even VLBI is not getting very far past 6000 light years ... otherwise, why would Cygnus X-1 have been news in 2011. But I could be wrong, this could be about as straightforward as using optically verified parallaxes for determining alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

But there is an even more basic problem.

That is whether we are in fact dealing with a parallax, as Heliocentrics presume, which can be used for trigonometry.

I have obviously greatly exaggerated the angles, for clarity. If earth stands still, left side diagramme, the different angles to alpha Centauri are due to alpha Centauri moving in time with the sun - same obviously for Cygnus X-1. And with angelic movers for celestial bodies, as the Church has maybe not positively taught but at least certainly endorsed and allowed individual priests to call the most probable position (Riccioli does so), these could be moving those movements, meaning that there is - as the diagramme shows - a very long triangle of no base line but only one tip touching earth. At what level of it you cut off alpha Centauri is arbitrary.

In that position, there is no such thing as "has been found to be greater than six thousand light years by a very simple method of measurement" ... because in this case it isn't one.

It's only in the right hand diagramme, with the Earth moving around the Sun, that we get a base line for the triangle, since in this view two positions are different ones of Earth itself and there thus is created (not from observation, but supposition) a baseline of Earth to Earth via the Sun.

If light has always been traveling at the same speed, it means it had to leave these objects more than six thousand years ago in order to reach us now. The universe is therefore older than this. Could it be that light went faster in the past?

I'm not very interested in that tenet of Setterfield's. If these objects are one light day up, even with absolutely uniform speed of light in vacuum (and marginally slower in transparent media), the light left these objects the day before we see them. If stars were created on day IV, and only Adam and Eve had to see them on day VI, they could have been two light days up. But some of the fish and especially birds created on day V needed to be programmed for migration by star map. So, the light reached earth on day V, and the distance to earth was 1 light day (and could still be that).

The speed of light is part of the known laws of nature ... / Every atom or molecule emits a very special kind of light, a kind of signature called “spectral lines.” ... / The spectral lines we observe from remote objects in the universe are exactly the same as those we observe now in the laboratory ...

A long way to refute Setterfield, which if arguing against my position is ignoratio elenchi.

Observations confirm that the laws of nature were the same six thousand years ago (and more) as they are now. The speed of light was therefore the same then, when light left these objects. This is not an assumption; it is an observation.

This is overkill. If I am not defending Setterfield, there is still a difference between "it is logically derived from observations" and "it is an observation" - as a lawyer he should be familiar with items like the cross-examination of a witness asking "is this what you saw, or what you concluded from what you saw?"

Now, his conclusion:

Unless light was miraculously created in transit, it had to be up there more than six thousand years ago in order to reach us now.

I will give this argument an overall form.

A) Light was either moving faster or created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.
B) Light was not moving faster.
C) Therefore, light was either created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.

And if I had opted to argue "it was created in transit" he could have told me that this involves making God a liar, since by such light created in transit showing novas of stars exploding that never existed. No, I am not going that way.

Let me correct the argument. First a preliminary.

A) If stars are much shorter away, the Heliocentric world view has to be wrong.
B) Either stars are much shorter away, or light was moving faster or created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.
C) Either the Heliocentric world view is wrong or light was moving faster or created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.

Now to the corrected argument.

A) Either the Heliocentric world view is wrong, or light moving faster or created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.
B) Light was not moving faster.
C) Therefore, either the Heliocentric world view is wrong, or light was created in transit or emitted a very long time ago.

So, he is committing a false alternatives fallacy by ignoring the possibility that the Heliocentric world view is wrong.

Let me put it like this - this is also less than brilliant.

Oh, by the way, the problem with the radiometric dating in 1907 is knowing how much uranium or thorium there was to start with, and whether all radium started out as uranium or not.

There is a flip side to this, I have already briefly mentioned it. If the Earth is very old, the carbon 14 level in the atmosphere very long time ago reached an equilibrium between how fast it is created in the atmosphere and how fast it decays. This in turn means (and was so far presumed by nearly all actually using radiocarbon), that all sample decays (after sample was cut off from atmosphere) started the decay at c. 100 pmC. And this would mean that mankind is too old for the Biblical narrative.

Remember what Question VIII actually asked and was confirmed in. It was about the length of the creation days. There was no such thing as an authorisation to say Adam lived much longer time ago, or even never existed at all. And as Introibo is not a modernist, he should know it./HGL

PS, glad to say that Contending For The Faith—Part 10 is excellent. No ineptness there whatsoever, on this other question./HGL