Christian relativity

nastler · 07 Apr 2006, 13:33 · from 2006-April.txt.gz

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From: nastler at yahoo.dk (nastler)
Date: Fri, 7 Apr 2006 15:33:28 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: (urth) Christian relativity
Message-ID: <20060407133328.70091.qmail at web54208.mail.yahoo.com>

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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