Been feeling a little lethargic lately? Do you think perhaps you're not moving as quickly as you used to? Are you seriously considering graduating from bifocals to trifocals so you can read the newspaper while still being close enough to turn the pages? If you were afraid that all of these things might be attributable to increased age, I've got good news for you. There is an alternative explanation. Maybe you're not changing, but the laws of the universe are. You see, according to one writer, the Einsteinian constant isn't. The speed of light (which you will recall is commonly stated to be 186,000 miles per second) is decreasing, and doing so at an exponential rate.

I was so upset by this revelation that I rushed home, in a very Chicken Little frame of mind, hoping against hope that I would find something that would disprove this frightening assertion about the speed of light. I mean, what if it were true? Do you recall Satchel Paige's story about the ballplayer that was so fast he could turn out the light and be in bed before the room was dark? Such achievements would become commonplace. And, can you imagine going to a theater and finishing off one of those jumbo popcorns after they turn on the projector but before the light reaches the screen? Of course, any change has its advantages. Laser tag could become a favorite pastime at retirement homes, and by racing around behind yourself you could finally get a good look at the back of your own head. It wasn't long, however, before I was relieved of this burden of figuring out how I would adapt to this new, slow-light universe. It seems that this matter of the degradation of the speed of light had already been raised and discounted. The original source of this wild hypothesis was those scheming creationists. They desperately want to blow big holes in the Einsteinian conception of the universe, and the fastest way to do that is to attack the Einsteinian constant itself. They even have a neat little term to represent the rate at which the speed of light is shrinking: cDK. You will recognize the term c from Einstein's famous formula E = mc². DK stands for decay.

The only "scientific" evidence that the speed of light has changed was produced from a highly questionable analysis of various speed of light experiments over the past couple of hundred years. The reasoning, from the creationists' point of view, is that, although light sure travels fast now, it went even faster when those stars first emitted it only a few millennia ago. Hence it got here a lot faster than most scientists think it did, and the universe is actually much younger than it appears. Pretty tricky, that god of theirs, messing with light. Is nothing sacred?

I first read of the change in the speed of light in literature distributed at a symposium concerning the Shroud of Turin. I attended this meeting expecting an honest and balanced examination of the evidence now available on "the Shroud." That expectation was seldom fulfilled in the six hours I spent at this conference, which turned out to be infested with true believers. While still trying to digest the full import of the devotion to cherished myths displayed by the attendees of the Shroud symposium, I was subjected to another unexpected insult of cockeyed religious thinking, reported in an article appearing in the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Loyal D. Rue, a Lutheran professor of religion and philosophy, proposed that religion be reconstructed around a new set of myths. Rue felt that the old myths are beginning to look decidedly frayed about the edges, and that science had "eroded away the plausibility of the Judeo-Christian myths." He concludes that destruction of religious myths can result only in nihilism, which he terms a "monstrous truth." Rue proposes that the old religious beliefs be repackaged into what he calls a "noble lie," that would be both consistent with modern science and seductive in its beauty, if not its truth. Rue's position reminds me of the song I Want a New Drug.

Underlying all of this talk of the necessity of religion, loopholes in physical laws, and the rehabilitation religious superstition is a very dark, negative view of humanity. The religious types who hold this low view of human nature are motivated to protect humanity from the apparent truth. At times, as in the case of Professor Rue, they feel that, while they themselves might be quite capable of dealing with the reality of a godless universe, the masses of humanity would be much better served if faith were somehow preserved. His call for religion to be reconstituted leaves the impression that Rue doesn't read the newspapers. How does he account for the changes that have reshaped Christian cosmology since its murky inception? And if he wants an example of fresh myths, combining the old with the new, he need look no further than Mormonism, the Elijah Muhammad interpretation of Islam, or Nazism.

Religion is constantly re-inventing itself in an effort to avoid collisions with truth, be that truth couched in the physical realm, such as the speed of light, or in the social arena, such as the equality of all persons. When it isn't convenient to change the dogma to match the facts, believers will do everything they can to change the facts to match the dogma. This all puts us freethinkers in the position of being the guarantors of truth. It's a dirty, thankless job, but somebody has to do it.

Copyright 1998 by Patrick Inniss.  All rights reserved.