SCIENCE: -- "observational science" vs "historical science" vs ... science.

My answer to the forensics comparison is that criminal forensics all goes on in the present really, but certainly not the PREHISTORIC past, which was what I was saying was the problem for science, not the past as in historic times. There are plenty of clues and witnesses in historic time that don't exist in the prehistoric past.

I think that your argument has rather a lot of problems. I'm going too into to two major issues, each of which covers multiple problems you need to face.1. In Egypt, at least, probably Sumeria, maybe even other places, your date for the Flood puts it in the HISTORIC past. And you're going to have to quite drastically contract the history to shoehorn your ideas in. I know you'll reject the dates but the compression is still necessary.2. We have lots of clues about the prehistoric past. Geologists and palaeontologists and archaeologists have worked very hard to find and understand these clues. Denying that they exist - or worse - is simply not an adequate response.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

I missed your reply to Message 41:

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Obviously we have to hypothesize that the pre-Flood world produced tree rings at a greater rate. In fact the idea is that there weren't even seasons back then, so the trees just grew according to some internal clock of their own, and when the climate changed after the Flood the production of rings would have been tied to the seasons.

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So you agree that the rings are objective evidence that we can count.

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You do realize

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1. that there is no discernible difference in the rings produced, so you are claiming that the "pre-flood" rings magically mimic precisely what we would see from annual rings -- that the evidence was made to lead people to false conclusions.
2. that the variation in ring thicknesses correlate with climate, so that if there were a substantial difference in climate as you are suggesting that there should be substantial differences in the rings ... unless they are created to portray a falsehood.
3. that Bristlecone pines do not survive under water for a year, yet this tree and several others in the same area lived continuously through their extensive lives
   1. the "Prometheus" tree (aka WPN-114), with 4862 measured and counted tree rings of when cut down in 1964 for research, however this is a minimum number because the core of the tree is missing,
   2. the "Schulman" tree (my name for the tree because Schulman took the core and he was a pioneer in dendrochronology in the area), with 5,264 tree rings today,
   3. the "Ancient Sentinels" - standing dead trees, with over 7,000 tree rings.
   4. there are pieces of dead wood lying on the mountain top in the same area.
4. all these pieces of trees and dead wood can be matched ring for ring into a continuous chronology extending to over 8,700 tree rings
5. the location is not that far from the Grand Canyon, where you posit massive flows laying down sediment, yet there is no such deposits over these trees

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And that is just for starters. I notice that there are several rather severe problems for your explanations: to be consistent we should see the evidence of massive sedimentation in these locations that should have buried all vegetation older than the flood, the dead wood pieces that are older than your flood date should have been carried away by the flood, and that your fantasy about a different climate before the flood doesn't explain how this evidence survived the flood ... contradictions Faith that you need to explain, ... or change your hypothesis.

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In addition please note that the tree rings can be tied to historic events in written history and I can provide you with this information if you are interested.So where is the flood time and how do you identify it in the tree ring record?When do I need to stop counting and measuring ring width, and how do I know?Edited by RAZD, : ..

Two things.(1) The tree rings exist today and are clues that have been witnessed in many ways. The question is where do we find your purported boundary between what we can reasonably count and measure and where we cannot do so.(2) We don't need to go back in time to replicate the tree rings that we see in the Methuselah tree -- that has already been done with the Prometheus tree, the Schulman Tree and the Ancient Sentinels. All we need to do is observe whether the replications result in the same information, a comparison that occurs in real time today.

Scientific study of the prehistoric past uses the same kind of data and reasoning as criminal forensics. Your problem is that you're trying to substantiate a myth that isn't based on that same kind of data and reasoning.

And yet the absence of these clues and witnesses doesn't stop you from believing that there were once living stegosauruses. So that's not actually the criterion you're using, is it?

The problem here is that you are talking out of both sides of your mouth. If the earth is only 6000 years old and was created in 6 literal days, the only "prehistoric" past is the first 5 days. So you can't even refer to any "unwitnessed past" since humans have existed since day 6. All the events that we have evidence of happening in the past are in the "historical past," are they not?If we start with that assumption, then everything we are talking about becomes part of this "observable past" and so is subject to present reality. Therefore, we can apply uniformitarian principals to past events and make inferences as to how things happened. Uniformitarianism doesn't mean that no events could have occurred in the past that are different from what we experience today, but that those events would leave evidence that we can interpret based on principals that we can observe and test in the present.I know that is what you think you are doing, but you're not. What you are doing is saying that since these events happened in the prehistoric past that no one can really know for sure what happened since no one was there to witness them. Therefore, you are free to speculate as to how things might have been, or how the evidence supports your idea. And since no one can know for sure, your ideas are as likely as anyone else's.So what is it? When would this "pre-historic past" have existed? What can we not know about the historical past that is not based on our understanding of current processes? Take just ONE geological layer from the GC and analyze how it could have formed based on current understanding of geological processes (you can do this because that layer was laid down in the historical past). Take just ONE speciation event and analyze how it happened based on current understanding of genetic processes (you can do this because that speciation event also happened in the historical past).What do you think you will find?HBD

Isn't the only difference between pre-history and history the presence of written records?In forensics are not many, many crimes "solved" with no witnesses and no written records of the event?Other than a witness or a written description (or a picture I guess) what is the difference between a clue that is 10 minutes old -- 10 days old -- 10 years old -- 1,000 years old or 100, 000 years old?Are all the crimes "solved" without witnesses or a written description of the crime a miscarriage of justice?

Such an arbitrary division of time. Why does evidence only become valid after humans start writing stories in clay tablets? Care to explain? Did the act of using Cuniform somehow magically transform all evidence on earth from invalid to valid?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

If you don't have a witness in the past you don't have a way to confirm your interpretation of the evidence. You can interpret but you can't confirm. Laboratory sciences and forensic science in historical time have ways of confirming, testing, doublechecking things that you do not have for the ancient past. A written record from the past would be something at least. But all we get from you guys is your interpretations, and since we have different interpretations it's a tad annoying to be given yours as if they were fact. We have no argument with real science based on testable evidence as in the laboratory sciences, but we have a ton of problems with all that imaginative hooha about what happened millions of years ago, especially when it's determined from a few items buried in a rock that looks like it was laid down in a Flood.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And the presence of human beings who may have personal knowledge or expertise on things related to the crime, and the presence of artifacts of different sorts connected to the crime that can provide clues through what people know about those too, including experts. Items that can speak as it were. In the ancient past you have NO items that can speak, or let's say very few anyway. You have only physical artifacts and your own imagination and that of your fellow scientists of course, but under those circumstances you could all be operating under a mass delusion and never know it because there's no objective test for any of it. Which of course is what creationists think of all the sciences of the prehistoric past. I don't know, but I do know that there are plenty of potential witnesses and experts and all kinds of information available that isn't available from the prehistoric past. As I've been saying, the possibility of confirmation from many sources. The only confirmation of the prehistoric past you have is a shared imagination, which can be, and in my opinion is, a delusion, because you can only assert it, you can't prove it. You'd have to give examples.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Read my last two posts. Of course creationists are speculating too and of course for us there is no prehistoric past. But for evolutionists and old earthers there is so you are all flying blind. All either side has is interpretations, and your interpretations win by aggression, not proof.

The problem is not with once-living stegosauruses, it's with the scenarios in which the stegosauruses supposedly lived, which are made up out of whole cloth by evolutionists / old earthers and cannot be proved, only asserted and forced on others.

Yes, it's good evidence based on uniformitarian assumptions, but if things were appreciably different in the past that includes the time covered by the rings, and I don't mean laws, I mean conditions, climate, etc., then the evidence needs to be subjected to other tests and considerations than the uniformitarian assumptions.

Why can't we use empirical evidence that was produced by the past event that we can test in the present? You know, like forensic science? Forensic science can still be used to reconstruct a crime even if there are no witnesses. You can confirm that the evidence in the present is consistent with your hypothesis. This is known as doing science. None of those methods includes an eye-witness. In fact, they use DNA comparisons to confirm relatedness, just as scientists do for humans and other species. It's the same test. It would be a very weak something since people can write made up stories. Then the laboratory sciences confirm evolution:Just a moment...The authors of that paper use laboratory science to confirm that humans share a common ancestor with other ape species.