Explanation of Distant Galaxies?

Latvia
October 30, 2009 5:23pm CST
I was in a very calm, organized debate with a very fundamentalist christian friend the other day and we each had our points we wanted to bring up and all was fine, but then when I pulled out my last question, he went off the deep end. "If the earth and the heavens are less than 10k years old, then how are we seeing galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of light-years away?" His best answer he could give me was that it defies all logic and reason, and eventually stumbled upon saying it was also put there to test our faith, like dinosaur bones? What are your thoughts on it?
4 responses
@bird123 (10632)
• United States
31 Oct 09
You already know the answer to this one. Beliefs aren't always true. False beliefs will always be shaken in the light of the real truth. Funny, isn't it, the real truth in time always floats to the top.
@vandana7 (98695)
• India
31 Oct 09
Hi stan, most of fundamentalists do not understand their religion in depth! I too have similar doubts on what has been written in our scriptures. To doubt is to look for a wiser person, who can clarify them, and ur mind mind will then have a new set of things to think over. :) I can only repeat what 20 year old advised me when I joined mylot. 4 stages of human mind.. mentioned in Gita. 1i am right,the world is wrong 2i am wrong,the world is right 3i am also wrong,world is also wrong 4i am also right,world is also right.. When v reach the last stage, we can love everybody I suppose. :) So go on looking for wise and knowledgeable people like that first from ur religion, and then from other religions. And remember no one person has all answers. BTW the person who gave me this wisdom was Shravandone.
@xfahctor (14118)
• Lancaster, New Hampshire
30 Oct 09
Wow, that's an....um...interesting explanation. Aparently the one thing that trumps "C" (the asronomical symbol for light speed) as the absolute limit for velocity, is faith testing. If we could bottle that up and put it in an engine, inter stellar travel would just be around the corner, lol. I consider myself a man of science. I realize it doesn't explaining everything and there is much we don't yet understand out there, but a lot of the stuff we do understand we understand pretty well, because we have tested and re tested these things and they stand on empirical evidence from consistant and duplicatable results.
@trruk1 (1028)
• United States
31 Oct 09
The problem with understanding the world around you based on faith rather than evidence is that you begin with your conclusion. You decide how things are and then use whatever evidence you may find to support that view. Anything that might tend to lead to another conclusion is denied, discounted, or ignored. It is like assuming that all traffic lights are green. If you happen to come up to a red one, you can proceed on through the intersection because you "know" that the light is really green, no matter what sort of contrary evidence might present itself.