Several thousand years ago when god created the universe he had everything much closer together. He then moved everything apart partially by moving the objects through space but more so by increasing the space between everything. This overcomes the problems with relativity, inertia, doppler effect…

At some point god reduced the rate of cosmic expansion. And viola. goddidit. There’s no evidence for this. How could there be? but anyone willing to buy into the rest of the supernatural tripe obviously doesn’t require evidence.

Should I submit my paper to the answers journal?

That should be enough to get it dismissed! lol.

Reading the further comments, I have a better understanding of what peer review entails. I think this is what should be made clearer to laypeople such as myself. It’s invaluable info.

In any case this journal is pretty much by definition not a credible journal.

Here the conclusion of their “About Us” page:

“It is our hope that the online publication of ARJ will encourage Christians with powerful results of the latest creationist research, providing them with new resources for use in their own research and education—and in their witnessing to the truth and authority of God’s Word.”

Hmm yes. Any Muslim or Buddhist wants to try submit to this “reputable scientific peer-reviewed” outlet?

It is part of the religious obfuscation machine, not much else really. They have learned the buzz-words to confuse the uninformed.

However when creationists started flooding the site they had to introduce a minimal peer review system to keep complete drivel out of it. It’s really sad.

Peer review usually implies that people who look at your paper are established experts in the field in which it was written. That is what “peer” means. That is if you write a paper on a very specific topic of microbiology, some established researchers that is on or very close to the topic will look at it and judge if it merits publication.

Number of peer reviews vary but I would say 3 is typical.

Typical review criteria are, is the paper sound/correct, does it contribute something new to the field, but also stuff like is it well-written (to scholarly standards) and does it fairly and sensibly discuss prior and related work.

A real peer-reviewed paper can be considered vetted by expert on multiple key dimensions. The paper may still be flawed, contain mistakes, or promote a theory that later proves to not be the right direction, but the standard of that paper is much higher than something that has not gone through the process. It defines a base-line of quality. Papers that do not make it through peer-review have been found not publishable in its current form by expert peers.

So to have a historian look at a physics paper would not constitute peer review. Or if a general editor reads a paper, that is not peer review.

Within creationism that’s of course a perverted. Notion, sure you can find other creationists who will review a paper positively, but the flaw is that they themselves never have been established as credible authorities and good judges of the material.

The reason why creationists create phony peer-review journal is because they have learned in debate that they get trumped by the claim that their work doesn’t even appear in peer-reviewed journals. It’s a shell-game for status.

Unfortunately people who do not understand how to establish and review evidence and scientific merit can indeed be confused by this because peer-reviewed is peer-reviewed, right?

I am not a scientist. I am willing to stand corrected if my understanding of the peer review process is wrong. It is my understanding that journals are places where folks can submit research papers and have other scientists look over their work, compare it to other papers, established facts, available evidence, etc, and evaluate it based on a well-founded criteria (ie: as little human judgement or error as possible).

I am not a scientist, either, but I don’t think that’s entirely right. At least not the “compare it to other papers” or “available evidence”. My understanding of the peer review process is that they are simply looking for mistakes in methodology, either experimental or analytical. The evaluation and comparison with other papers is just something that is done the people who read these papers.

I’ve heard it often described as a “low bar”, which makes the fact that creationist papers don’t make it past peer-review even more pathetic.

At least this is the impression I get from folks who speak about scientific journals, on the basis of never having read one myself, or having seen the process at large.

I think the best approach to illustrating how wrong a theory can be is precisely this process: have it submitted on the same grounds as ALL OTHER papers and be subjected to the review process. It stands exactly the same chance as all the other papers and is judged on the same merit as all other papers.

This way, it can be dissected and thoroughly pulled apart just like every other paper is. This will immediately eliminate the playing of the persecution card, which they so love to play. Its flaws can be illustrated on the solid grounds of peer review.

Personally, I find it sad that Lisle is attempting to find an independent line of reasoning to back up Bishop Ussher’s calculations of the age of the Universe based on adding up the ages of the characters in Genesis, when dendrochronology already disproves it by over 20,000 years, and that’s a calculation that doesn’t even require special relativity!

PS: Apologies for the wikipedia links. If anyone knows a good peer-review journal to which I can link to the above, I’d be happy to read it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair