The 'Young-earth' "theorists" take the bible literally and the earth is no older than 6,000yrs old

Thanks for taking the debate Aequitas. I was actually giving you an opportunity to have the first argument but since you are swinging it back my way I will show that the earth and the universe, which was supposedly created at the same time are much, much older than 6,000 years old. Due to your status as a Young earth creationist, it will be hard to actually convince you of the facts, even with the facts staring you in the face. One debate is probably not going to overcome 22 years of conditioning, but I will give you the facts. Though you didn't explicitly say how old you thought the earth is, by taking this debate, I must assume you do believe the earth is at most 6,000 years old. Genesis 1: 1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. 4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 16: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 17: And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18: And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19: And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. The stars were created on the fourth day of existence. To some Bible apologists, they say, 'well, it's not literally 4 - 24 hour periods of time like we know it, four days is simply speaking metaphorically" Not so fast says the Young Earth Creationist (from now on is YCE). Bible says four days, then four days it is, the earth existed a full 3 days BEFORE stars. This ties the greater universe to the time line of the earth. Only until about 500 years ago, most people thought the earth was the center of the universe. The sun, the other planets, the stars and the moon all revolved around the earth. Then Kepler came along. Kepler was able, through observation and calculation to create three physical laws: Kepler's three laws of planetary motion can be described as follows: http://www.glenbrook.k12.il.us... * The path of the planets about the sun are elliptical in shape, with the center of the sun being located at one focus. (The Law of Ellipses) * An imaginary line drawn from the center of the sun to the center of the planet will sweep out equal areas in equal intervals of time. (The Law of Equal Areas) * The ratio of the squares of the periods of any two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their average distances from the sun. (The Law of Harmonies) The distances to the planets can be computed and refined using Kepler's laws. The orbital period of the planets is proportional to the length of the semi-major axis of their orbits. Since we know this value for Earth, we can compute it for the other planets based on their orbital periods. In recent decades, more accurate values have been obtained by powerful radar signals and spacecraft flybys. There are several methods used to measure interstellar distances. For nearer stars, we can use direct triangulation: The position of a star relative to more distant background stars is measured, and then is measured again six months later. Since the Earth is at the opposite side of its orbit than it was six months before, the minute shift in the star's apparant position (know as its "parallax") is a direct measure of its distance from our Solar System. This is where the term "parsec" comes from. It means "PARallax of one SECond"; in other words the distance at which a start will have a parallax of one second of arc (which is about 3.26 Light Years). For more distant stars, the properties of their spectra can be used. Different spectral classes of stars have different known brightness ranges, so by comparing their apparent brightness with the known brightness range the distance can be estimated. Certain types of stars have other properties that allow their distances to be measured very accurately. A type of star called a "Cepheid variable" gets brighter and dimmer in a fixed cycle. The maximum brightness correlates with the rate of the cycle. Thus, if you can see a Cepheid variable at all, you can know its distance just by measuring the cycle time of its brightness. This method has been used to measure the distance to nearby star clusters outside our galaxy. Certain type of supernovae also have known brightness properties. They are so bright they can be seen when they flare up in nearby galaxies--and allow us to measure the distance to those galaxies. For more distant galaxies we can determine their distance by their "redshift". Since the universe is expanding more or less uniformly on a large scale the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be receding from us. The light from these galaxies is doppler-shifted into the red by this apparent motion. This redshift can be measured on a spectrograph and, using the Hubble constant, this redshift can be converted into a distance. The speed of light: The approximate value of 3ï¿½108 m/s is commonly used in rough estimates. In imperial units, the speed of light is about 670,616,629.4 miles per hour or 983,571,056.4 feet per second (roughly one foot per nanosecond), which is about 186,282.397 miles per second. Astronomical distances are sometimes measured in light years (the distance that light would travel in one Earth year, roughly 9.46ï¿½1012 kilometers or about 5.88ï¿½1012 miles). Because light travels at a large but finite speed, it takes time for light to cover large distances. Thus, the light we observe from distant objects in the universe was emitted from them long ago: in effect, we see their distant past. Even in terms of our own star we see into the past as well. Light from the sun takes around eight and one-third minutes to reach the earth. The speed of light is of relevance to communications. For example, given the equatorial circumference of the Earth is about 40,075 km and c about 300,000 km/s, the theoretical shortest amount of time for a piece of information to travel half the globe along the surface is 0.0668 s. The speed of light can also be of concern on very short distances. In supercomputers, the speed of light imposes a limit on how quickly data can be sent between processors. If a processor operates at 1 GHz, a signal can only travel a maximum of 300 mm in a single cycle. Processors must therefore be placed close to each other to minimize communication latencies. If clock frequencies continue to increase, the speed of light will eventually become a limiting factor for the internal design of single chips. Hubble Telescope: http://hubblesite.org... Some of these galaxies are millions of light years away. LIGHT YEARS! As I have shown above, the light we see from these galaxies has been traveling for 300 million years to reach us. So to simplify all of this. If the earth and the stars are less than 6,000 years old, we could only see a handful of stars in the sky. It would be mostly black, awaiting that distant light to get to us. Good luck refuting math.