Tuesday 10 August 2010

I Want A Song That's Indelible

Conservapedia really is the gift that keeps on giving, After announcing last year that they were going to re-translate the Bible - using only people not qualified to do so because everyone who works in academia is a gutless liberal - they've finally alerted the world to the fact that the Theory of Relativity is a liberal hoax.

I'm clearly not enough of an expert on relativistic physics (or any other kind) to refute their "counterexamples" (though I'm man enough to cope with the idea that a theory might still have kinks the shedheads are working to iron out). Actually, though, it's #9 that bothers me. You can disprove the laws of physics if they've been violated by Jesus? How can that possibly be right? How can a miracle be God doing if the impossible if the mere fact God means we can't call it impossible?

When I was still in the church, I always assumed that the laws of physics were the rules the universe ran by unless God was directly influencing them. Rules don't not exist because the people who write the rules can change them. Back when the Crown was still going around executing people, no-one was arguing that it proved the laws against murder didn't exist.

If a Christian wants to go around stating the only law is "Anything is possible" because God can make anything possible, then that seems like a pretty useless way to view a world that, whenever the Hand of God isn't working the strings, follows rules which are consistent, measure able, and (generally) explicable (and all of this is to say nothing of my not agreeing that the example they cite necessarily means what they claim it does). As BigHead pointed out earlier, it's not like Jesus walking on water means the laws of gravity are incorrect (and yes, I checked Conservapedia didn't have a problem with gravity as well). You could, perhaps, make a distinction between things that are impossible full stop, and things that are merely impossible for a human, but that still sounds too limiting, to say nothing of reducing Jesus to the level of Manimal.

It also seems like a fairly major missing of the point. It's like the God of the Gaps, only worse, because that attempts to squeeze God into the inexplicable; this actively takes what is explicable and demands that it be reconsidered.

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