The TRUE reason for the EvC controversy, and why it can not be resolved.

The OP seems to imply that since evolution and theories requiring an ancient universe are based on the assumptions of "naturalism" and "uniformism", and that these assumptions cannot be verified, then the creationism/evolution argument is a purely philosophical problem.Unfortunately for the OP, the assumptions of "naturalism" and "uniformism" can be verified. In particular, these assumptions allow us to construct a detailed and consistent history of the universe and of life on earth.If supernatural events played an important part of the history of the early earth, and if the laws of nature changed significantly after the Fall, it is not clear how the new laws of nature and the lack of supernatural events would lead to the construction of the consistent history that we have.It is not as if people just make these assumptions and then "shoe horn" the data to fit it. The theory of evolution, and the theories of the origin of the earth and of the history of the early universe, are straight forward, reasonable interpretations of the observations that are made. Remember that Noah's flood and the idea of a young earth were discounted by people who were expecting to confirm these ideas.It is certainly logically possible that the laws of nature were different in the past, and that the laws of nature, and physical evdidence, just so happens to be such that they indicate a universe with an ancient history and a common ancestor for all known life on earth; however, given the multitude of data and the work in so many different fields of science using very different methodologies, it seems to me that there are really only two reasonable alternatives:that the data really can be accepted at face value, and so the universe really is ancient and all known life on earth has evolved from a common ancestor over the last three and half billion years,or that the demiurge deliberately set up the post-Fall world with the appearance of ancient history.I will leave it to Gone full circle to choose his preferred idea.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Hello, Faith.

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There is nothing "reasonable" about the idea that the gradations in the fossil record must prove descent from one living form to another up the column.

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Then you didn't understand my reply. I wasn't talking about the fossil record, nor did I even mention it. I was speaking of the evidence from paleontology AND molecular biology and taxonomy and microbiology and anatomy and geology and etc. etc. all of which together paint a consistent picture. And without any forcing, too.Remember, Darwin himself presented the theory of evolution BEFORE the fossil record was known in any real detail.-

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And, the idea of Noah's flood that was discounted was a silly primitive notion that would now be a straw man in an argument with a creationist.

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I don't know what you mean here. According to the YEC model, the earth only existed for a couple of thousand years before the flood, existed only for a few thousand years afterwards, water covered the entire earth, and only covered it for less than a year.Even with what little knowledge I have in geology, I can come up with some things I would expect to see in the geological record that, as far as I know, have not been observed, and I know of a lot of observations that have been made that cannot really be reconciled with the idea of a global flood occurring in historical times.--However, these may be all off-topic here. I am more interested in discovering why Gone full circle thinks that it is natural to expect that the post-Fall world would be such that a consistent history of the world can be so easily constructed from the available data.Either that, or hear why he feels that somehow the available data have been forced unnaturally into an incorrect model.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Copernican astronomy has radical philosophical implications.

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In fact, I would view Copernican astronomy (and current astronomy) as a theory that does far more to "disprove" traditional Christianity. It, more than anything else, puts humans on a rather small planet around an insignificant star in an unimaginably large cosmos -- certainly not the center of creation that traditional Christianity advocates.I simply cannot see how modern cosmology (and I mean the current geography of the universe, not its history) can be reconciled with a literal reading of Genesis.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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The age of the earth, and all other prehistoric sciences make an assumption. If you see a pattern today, you can call it a scientific law, and pull it back till the beginning of time.

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Except that we see many patterns today, and if we extrapolate them all backwards we obtain a single, consistent history of the universe. What you are claiming is that after the Fall all the scientific laws and physical data became such that a single, self-consistent history of the universe can be naturally read. As I've stated before, the two most reasonable conclusions (in my opinion) that one can draw from this is:either the data really is accurate and we are safe in assuming that the universe really is several billion years old, and the history that we have read from the data really is more or less accurate;or God deliberately set up the world with the false appearance of age and history.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Or there is a fall.

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Yes, or there is a fall. Which just happened to change the physical laws in such a way that when we examine the physical data we can easily and naturally read a consistent but false history of the world.What I am asking is why you can see this as a reasonable scenario?

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Holy s***! Three pages of posts in just two hours! And most of them just repeating the same things over and over, heh.

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Since there was a complete system of laws prior to the fall, and those changes affected the entire system, I see no reason why the entire system would now give a unified distorted image of the past.

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I see a big problem here. Let me take one example of an amazing coincidence: radioactive decay. Radioactive isotopes that are used in radiometric dating decay by two different processes: alpha decay and beta decay. These are different processes, governed by different physical laws, that have very little in common. Yet, according to your scenario, it just so happens, by an amazing coincidence, that the two different laws that govern these two processes each changed in such a way that a dating method using isotopes subject to alpha decay will give the same results as a method using isotopes subject to beta decay when used to date the same material.As I said, these are completely different processes. There is no reason that they would change during the fall in such a way as to give a consistent set of dates except perhaps by an amazing coincidence. When you add all the other evidence, which are all governed by process and phenomena that are also all independent of one another, and all give the same consistent picture of the earth's history, I begin to smell a deliberate, well-planned set-up. It appears that God deliberately created the world in such a way that the Fall would produce a world with the appearance of ancient history.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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alpha decay and beta decay may well have little in common .... as far as we know. While the illusive search for the theory of everything is still going on, a unifying principle might still one day be found.

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And this is the problem with your scenario. You have to make some very big assumptions for your idea to work. You not only have to assume that alpha decay and beta decay are governed by a single, as yet unknown process, but that this unknown process is such that it will change after the Fall in such a way that both alpha decay and beta decay will give the same radiometric dates. In other words, even your assumption doesn't really adequately deal with the amazing coincidence that alpha decay and beta decay give the same radiometric dates.And this is just one example of the amazing coincidences of which you speak. As I said before, all of the evidence to date, in many different fields, using many different techniques of investigation, paint a very consistent picture of the history of the earth.It appears that you are trying to choose between two alternative scenarios:that the fact that the data shows, without forcing, a detailed and consistent history of the earth is an indication that it is reliable and the history of the earth that is inferred can be trusted as more or less accurate,or that the Fall mysteriously changed the laws of physics and the physical universe in such a way that the available data, when examined assuming the constancy of the known physical laws that we understand, amazingly and coindicentally give a detailed and consistent, yet completely inaccurate, history of the world.I don't know whether you really expect that an unbiased person would even for a moment consider the second scenario as reasonable an alternative as the first. Surely you can understand why a reasonable person would reject the second scenario out of hand. A problem like this is really an open and shut case of Occam's razor. You are multiplying entities unnecessarily in order to come up with a scenario to bolser a certain discredited creation myth. I cannot imagine that anyone would even look at the second scenario unless they have a strong emotional commitment to the creation myth presented in Genesis.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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1. A debate between the creationist worldview and the evolutionist worldview is pointless, because the difference is philosofical, not scientific.

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That is true. The "evolutionist" feels that data should be evaluated on its own terms, in relation to the other data. The creationists assumes, a priori that the Genesis story is literal history, and so data must either be forced into this narrative or somehow explained away.-

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2. The creationist can still believe in creationism despite science pointing in a different direction, because in the christian theology, God is creator of all things, and he reveils himself in his Bible.

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This is exactly the problem with creationism. It assumes that the Genesis account, as interpreted by the literalist, is literally true, and all evidence to the contrary must either be forced to fit the story or disregarded altogether.-

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3. And this is the one you constantly ignore - because the prefall conditions on earth is unknown, and the changes during the fall is unknown....

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No one has ignored this. Everyone understands that this is what you are saying. However, everyone is trying to explain that the only reason that one would accept such a scenario is because of a strong commitment to continue believing that the creation myth in the Bible is literally true.--

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It is only about why the debate exists, and why debating it won't help or harm either side.

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The reason this debate exists is because one side accepts evidence and tries to draw reasonable inferences from it, and adjusting the accepted beliefs in light of new discoveries, while the other side holds such a strong commitment to a certain set of beliefs that they feel compelled to somehow explain away the fact that the world simply does not conform to their beliefs.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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but that is off topic.

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Then don't bring it up. Bringing up a point and then closing the discussion on it is a pretty poor rhetorical tactic that does nothing to advance the debate.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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I'm saying that the rules of practicing "evolutionary science" and the rules for practicing "creation science" differ.

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This is true. The rules for evolutionary science, like any other science, is to examine the data and go where the evidence leads.The rules you are proposing for "creation science" is to assume that the Genesis account is literally true a priori and to think up excuses why the evidence doesn't support it.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

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Is this assumption any bigger than the assumption of an omnipotent God?

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Yes, it is. At least the assumption of an omnipotent god does not contradict evidence that we can see with our own eyes.-

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My assumptions is only inadequately for the evolutionist....

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Your assumptions are inadequate for anyone trying to understand anything. Your methodology, which is basically coming up with an ad hoc reason why the evidence does not support your preferred beliefs, can be used to justify any belief whatsoever. With your ideas, I can decide that if the evidence does not support my beliefs I can simply invoke a change in physical laws. Basically, we can know nothing and anything at all can be true.-

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Everybody has a world view, therefore no one is unbiased.

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So what? It is possible to rise above one's biases and examine data critically and draw the appropriate conclusions from them. If this were not possible, then the first people to examine the earth scientifically, acting under their initial creationist biases, would not have been able to determine that the evidence did not support the creationist beliefs.I also initially had a bias toward creationism. But I was able to rise above these biases and eventually reject creationism.-

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That is precisely why I say this debate is a clash of world views, and that the debate is therefore unresolvable.

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The reason that this debate is unresolvable is that some people have a belief in a literal reading of Genesis and nothing is going to make them believe otherwise. These people are going to come up with all sorts of reasons to explain away the data that does not support their beliefs. You seem to be an example of this. Your initial belief is that the Genesis story is literal history. You at least seem to be acknowledging that the evidence contradicts this set of beliefs; therefore you are attempting to explain it away. This idea of the physical laws changing is simply your way of reconciling your beliefs in the Genesis account with the fact that there is no evidence to support it.You can talk about biases and "world views" all you want. But people do examine data critically, people do examine ideas fairly, and people do change their opinions and "world views" when the evidence warrants it. You, on the other hand, are an example of someone who is cannot or will not rise above your biases to acknowledge that your beliefs are incorrect. So strong are your biases that you have to invent reasons, without any basis for your assumptions, that explains why your beliefs are inconsistent with the real world.Very few people reject out of hand the idea that the physical laws may have changed. The physical laws are only descriptions of what we observe, and it is always entirely possible that under different conditions the universe may behave differently. However, until evidence that the physical laws have changed is presented, evidence that shows precisely in what way the physical laws have changed, this idea remains a merely interesting idea.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)