So grace among Christians is meant for whom? Just "right thinking" Christians?
Who is there to refute anything with? One must be heard to be able to refute.
You're a lawyer, right? Imagine that one day a client walks in and asks you to defend him on a case. You look at the evidence and the details, and just as you're formulating a plan, he goes "Hey I have a brilliant idea. Why don't I defend myself using that thing about Double Jeopardy?" He explains his idea, and for a while it even makes sense. But hey, you're a good lawyer, and you soon realize that there are some holes and flaws that simply aren't apparent to someone who hasn't been practicing law for decades. So you try to tell him. "Well, you're not really under the stipulation of that particular clause - good try though", or "If the other side is experienced like me they'd tear us apart in ten minutes by saying such-and-such" etc. And so he listens - and then he answers by muddling up even more laws and clauses and case studies to prove his point.
If, after umpteen explanations, he says "Look, I'm a lawyer and I know how this stuff works," wouldn't you at some point resort to calling him a crank and a fraud?
That is essentially what has happened with KerrMetric. As a layperson in astrophysics I'm justified to doubt, and nothing more. I look at papers like these:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/0606/0606294.pdf , and I can see that the idea is at best sidelined and at worst already rejected by the astrophysical community, and with probably good reasons. I look at how Tifft seems to have done nothing (as far as I'm aware) with the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (
http://magnum.anu.edu.au/~TDFgg/ ), with notable bias
for intrinsic quantized redshift (
http://www.astro.bas.bg/galaxies/galaxies_files/voids.html, explaining how now-accepted superclusters and voids explain the data which Tifft was trying to explain with quantization). When I see his ideas being cited next to those of Halton Arp (against whom the QSO papers are
painfully relevant) and on the same site as Tom Van Flandern (debunked e.g. here:
http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/07/06/einstein/print.html ), I can be quite sure that something is wrong with how Tifft is being cited even if he himself is on to something.
As a layperson I am in a place to doubt my judgment. But as someone involved in the actual area of course KerrMetric will have strong feelings about this, just as you would if someone mucked around with law and then said
you were wrong just because he doesn't understand why he is. Is his language justified? I don't know. Calling someone a crank and a fraud is downright insulting but it's really not half as bad as implying that some aren't Christians or hinting with phrases like "why gamble all of eternity" in a Christian-only forum.
But I can see why he feels the way he feels (even if I can't agree with the way he expressed it), and if you want to prove him wrong about Setterfield, you'd better be able to do it concretely. So far what I see from his physical theories is a lot of ad hoc declarations as to what stays constant and what doesn't. I can understand why his theoretical framework would change
c and
h, but
G as well - to say nothing of the problematic construct of changing dimensional constants at all (which I can easily change by measuring everything in feet rather than meters), rather than changing dimensionless constants. (A particular question: what experimental setups showed a decreasing value of
h?)
Like it or not, there will always be people who voice their opinion unfavorably. If you think I'm being partisan in saying you should respond to KerrMetric with
substance rather than a demand for an apology, you're probably right. But the utterly pragmatic thing to do (besides putting him on ignore, if you're so inclined) is to shut him up not with hot-headed words of your own but with
substance.
