Can Evolution and Creation Co-Exist?

[keith99]

And you also misunderstand the evidence for gravity when you think it is somehow direct and absolute. It isn't. Just to pick a simple example: how do we know how far away the moon is?

You can't just measure it. You can't simply take out a measuring tape and say, "Oh, it's this far away!" So how do we actually go about figuring this out? Indirectly, of course! Consider this ingenious method: look at the shadow the Sun casts on the Moon during a lunar eclipse. This shadow will be about as wide as the Earth, so if we know how big the Earth is, and we know how long it takes the Moon to cross this shadow, then we know how far away the Moon is, provided the Moon has a circular orbit!

FAIL. We can and have measured the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Simplest is simple geometry as we can measure distances on the Earth and then take sightings from 2 different points on the Earth to the same point on the moon. For a skeptic we can even arange to do it at the same time. That is simple, direct and has been used for surveys on earth because it (or related techliques) are more accurate than using a measuring chain over uneven ground.

 

[Chalnoth]

FAIL. We can and have measured the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Simplest is simple geometry as we can measure distances on the Earth and then take sightings from 2 different points on the Earth to the same point on the moon. For a skeptic we can even arange to do it at the same time. That is simple, direct and has been used for surveys on earth because it (or related techliques) are more accurate than using a measuring chain over uneven ground.

Yeah, you completely misunderstand the point of my post, which is that there is no such thing as an astronomical measurement (even to the Moon) which is direct. This isn't to point out that the measurements are unreliable, but rather that we trust indirect measurements as a matter of course. Nobody seriously questions that we know the distance to the Moon very accurately.

Perhaps even more to the point, while our methods today are much closer to direct than they were in the past (e.g. bouncing laser light off of reflectors we've placed on the Moon), previous methods turned out to be quite accurate to within their experimental errors.