"Unless of course, creationists no longer believe in trigonometry" - You made me spill my coffee on my screen by my nose and I almost choked to death laughing of this. It was worth it. Still, good answer, but you could make it even better by adding references to the second and third paragraphs!

Skepticism isn't limited to the scientifically minded - young earth creationism rests on a foundation of skepticism of science. For instance, GR is tough, I'll wager that few people have a deep enough interest (or capacity) to really, truly grasp the validity of the speed of light, so any explanation built on it is likewise something tough to take at face value. All it takes is a reason to disbelieve, such as validating a religious dogma, and communication breaks down. Just saying, one need not disbelieve trigonometry to attempt to poke holes.

You should add the sources you are using.

@Jason Speaking as someone who is not a young earth creationist but who has known a lot young earth creationists, a lot evolutionists appear to have "dogmas" as well. It looks really bad when you simply pass off people's beliefs as religious dogmas.

Please cite (1) the non-1-in-25 numbers, (2) that Tammann renounced his earlier estimate, (3) that old SNRs are not visible, including the 10,000 year figure (4) that G166.2 + 2.5 is over 100,000 years old. You should also show the kpc->light year conversion you've used. (5) supernova become pulsars/black holes, and they are hard to observe.

@DonyorM - that's pretty much my point. There is a limit to what an individual can understand, the rest of the discussion comes down to who do we trust and why. Anyone on either side of the discussion that doesn't acknowledge some uncertainty beyond their own understanding is de facto operating on dogma.

@Oddthinking: "You should also cite the kpc -> light year conversion you've used": What? Why?! There is only one.

@DonyorM Well, plenty of people just replace religion/mysticism with The Belief in Science. Do these rituals, and you'll divine truth about the universe! It really seems to be a default for humans (and animals). It takes lots of conscious effort to really think scientifically - continually challenging your assumptions, making a real effort at disproving your claims... Look at all those pages like "I **** love science!" which rarely show any real science (or scientific work). Our brains just don't like to think like that - it's the flawed lense we use to look at the universe, and it lies.

@Luaan precisely, I mean no offense to anyone who is willing to either accept that they have presumptions (I certainly do) or actually accept only the evidence. Some people will use words like dogmas to describe others, even if they have similar styles of beliefs themselves. I may have misjudged Jason's intent in that comment, his response seems to indicate this is not what he meant.

@DonyorM Yeah, you already acquired some through osmosis from your friends/acquintances. There is no such thing as an "evolutionist". That's a creationist term that tries to put contrary study and evidence on the same grounds as creationism; in reality, evolutionary science is only the tiny bit that cares about how evolution works, and how life changes over the lifetime of the planet. The creationist term "evolutionist" also includes cosmologists, astrophysicists, geologists, bunch of other physicists, chemists... pretty much anyone disputing creationism in any way :) It just happens.

@Luaan I find it an easier term to use than "person who believes in evolution" and it seems descriptive, so I use it. If there's a better term please let me know. :)

You need to cite the stuff odd thinking mentions. Also "creationists no longer believe in trigonometry" is snarky; it doesn't help anything.

@Luaan (and others commenting on "faith in science") I would argue that there is still a difference between accepting religious teachings and accepting scientific teachings, even if one does not fully grasp the science and is accepting someone’s word for it. The scientific method, itself, is supposed to increase reliability and credibility. It’s still quite flawed, of course, but it does give a reason to trust scientific consensus without performing experiments oneself. And, for example, in the case of relativity and the speed of light, many experiments have been done. Knowing that is enough?

Regarding not believing in trigonometry and/or the c speed limit, the explanation for that kind of thing that I have seen creationists use is that some things in the universe were created old. That is, when god created the world, light from that star was also created already in transit, which is how it reached a 6,000-year-old Earth from a distance of 167,000 light years. Which is exactly the kind of unfalsifiable thinking the separates scientific and religious thinking on observable phenomena, but it’s arguably more “reasonable” than disbelieving trigonometry.

@KRyan Yes, I think you missed the main idea - it's not that you don't know things, or that you believe things somebody else told you. It's being aware of those limits. Many people take science to be an immutable truth that will never change, while it's anything but - an approach that's exactly the same as with religion. They don't think about falsifiability - they assume that whatever they just learned in the popular science magazine is Truth. They don't think about real processes, they don't get confused about weird phenomena - they slap a magic word ("Thermodynamics!") and are done.

@Luaan I suppose that I have a little more faith ( :P ) in people.

@KRyan And the obvious result is that people get even more distanced form actual science and scientific thinking - and toward further mysticism. The crucial part is "stop and learn". If you see a metal plate next to a heater, and it's colder on the part closer to the heater, stop and think. It's weird. You should be confused. The answer isn't "thermodynamics", that's just a magic word. "Science mysticism" is just as easy as "abrahamic mysticism" or "astrology mysticism" (so scientific - it has to do with astronomy, right?) or "agile" or whatever else.

@Luaan Your inclusion of Agile on that list definitely got a chuckle from me. I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, I’m just (perhaps naively) optimistic that there are a significant number of people who “get it” without mystifying it.

@KRyan I like that kind of thinking because using it means one could argue that the universe began seconds ago.

"All these values are really only good guesses." Arguably values form before roughly 1995 aren't even good guesses. Computational astrophysics underwent a huge change in the 1990 making all the old jokes about astrophysicists putting the error bars in the exponent obsolete in about a decade. Then the "era of precision cosmology" comes along in the mid naughties.

For example, this nature paper uses 26-Al to estimate 1 supernova per 50 years. This is WELL within the margins of uncertainty of theoretical supernova rate estimates from initial mass functions of stars + however you want to estimate Type Ia supernova rates. Note that uncertainties for any of this is going to be large since everything is model dependent (trying to count supernovae would be worse since you would have to model galactic dust and work with terrible statistics of supernova counts).

@DonyorM: But in this particular case, the "Young Earth Creationism" IS a religious dogma. There is no particular reason for believing the Earth is young other than the scripture of a particular religion. Though it does rather puzzle me that the YECists can come up with various not-that-long-ago dates, when their scripture says the actual date was October 23, 4004 BCE :-)

@jamesqf "There is no particular reason for believing the Earth is young other than the scripture of a particular religion" True. On the flip side there is no reason to believe that nature is predictable and (somewhat) reproducible other than we want too.

@NPSF3000 "there is no reason to believe that nature is predictable and (somewhat) reproducible". Apart from the fact that it does seem to be so. And, even YECs use mobile phones, so they implicitly accept that general relativity and quantum mechanics work, and hence that the universe is OLD..

@KRyan The "created old" argument is inconsistent with the original hypothesis that insufficient SNRs prove that the universe is young. If the universe was created old, there would be sufficient SNRs.

Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis

@JAB The hypothesis is also known as "Last Thursdayism" by its detractors.

@TonyK Is there really only one? Well, to demonstrate that, you've provided a link, which is all I asked for!

But more seriously, the author quoted a number in light years, and linked to a paper that did not contain that number. The jump between the two is Original Research, and should be spelled out so we can see how mild it is.

Meanwhile, I did the conversion myself, and got a different (albeit similar) number. We probably selected different source numbers from the paper. If I spent a few more minutes, I could have probably figured out how @hdhondt had computed it, but the onus for that should be the answerer, not me.

@Oddthinking Oh, of course, I wasn’t giving any merit to that argument. My comment was not meant as any kind of defense of the original claim.

@Oddthinking The paper I referenced gives the distance as 51.2 +- 3.1 kpc. As 1 pc = 3.262 ly, that makes it 167 +-10 kly

@Oddthinking: multiplying by 3260 does not constitute Original Research. Even dividing by 3260 does not constitute Original Research. So what's your problem, really? (And what does "albeit similar" mean, in concrete terms? In this context, two decimal places would be more than enough.)