I've just got around to perusing one of the items on the CMI website. To say that I was startled is an understatement - I thought that creationists had abandoned this long ago, but it seems I was mistaken, and that they are still flogging a horse which is not only dead, but thoroughly decomposed beyond any chance of rescusitation.

[ 'Speed of light slowing down after all http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/2551']

If you are going to post references to something as ratty as this, you should be aware that the whole thing was thrashed out in the early 1980s, much to the discredit of all nearly all teh creationists involved.

I've got a massive file on this, and the date of the last revision is 1989, so in scientific terms it's almost ancient history. But since Carl Wieland was writing in 2002, and still seems to be in favour of the idea, I'll dig it outr and post various parts of it over the next week or so.

In the meantime, people might like to go to the site for the Institute for Creation Research in USA http://www.icr.org and read the article "Has the Speed of Light Decayed" by Gerald Aardsma, Impact number 179, May 1988. The final sentence of the Introduction reads:

"At the present time, it appears that general support by the creationist community of the decay of teh speed of light hypothesis is not warranted by the data upon which the hypothesis rests."

That should convince even some creationists that Setterfield's work isn't worth much.

Or you could try the Talk Origins Archive http://www.talkorigins.org and look at the article by Rob Day which is on it.

"The Answer Book" has a section about this...

The article finishes with a comment by Russell Humphreys. He is another creationist who has written a book "Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe", which is littered with errors.

I'll comment on some of these as well, but this may take longer, and it will get a bit complicated in some places.

[ 'The sad thing is that the public is overawed by these things [ big bang and long-age cosmologies] just because there is complex maths involved. They didn't realise how much philosophical speculation and imagination is injected along with the maths - these are really stories that are just made up. Prof. Wanser]

I'll see if I can find this article and list a few of the errors Wanser makes.

I'm not being arrogant in saying that the article contains errors before I've even read it - I have yet to read anything written about science by a creationist which doesn't have a number of errors in it, so I'm pretty safe in claiming the same about Wanser.

Salaam

Ken Smith