Religion or Science - How do they compare?

Of course, we have traveled this road many times before. Your opponents are now going to say that the Bible is a belief and not a source of knowledge or facts. They then will attempt to get you to confront evidence rather than sticking to your guns.We go around this same mountain so many times here at EvC.And my friends tell me that my faith is weak because I don't accept the Bible as the source of reality.My conclusion is that if what you believe is true, reality is not as it appears.Not to say I disagree with your beliefs...I share many of them, but GDR would at this point bring up his ongoing argument regarding Biblianity vs Christianity...And it goes on and on and on

Except neither you nor Faith seem to actually believe the Bible says what it says so it is not the Bible you place as authority but rather the dogma created by your chapters of Club Christian.

Again, this is just something you've chosen to believe, not something you can demonstrate. Same comment. This would be false.You like forensics. A cold-case murder is a single event in the past, right, the type of event you just described. And how many old cold-case murders have been solved, often by DNA? A lot, right? Maybe you heard about the recent identification and capture of the Golden State Killer using DNA and genealogy websites (To Catch a Killer: A Fake Profile on a DNA Site and a Pristine Sample).So of course science can be used to study "single events in the past." Technology is just applied science. Scientifically acquired knowledge with no technological application (i.e., images of the craters on Pluto) is still scientific knowledge.--Percy

I've answered the forensics claim many times. It only works for the historical or witnessed past, where you actually have information from that past but for the prehistoric past all you have is today's observations, a few ways to compare things in the present that may apply to that distant past, but no way to verify anything from that actual past. You interpret the geologic column as representing periods in that past but you can't prove that, you can only assume it. If in fact it's only the result of the Flood which killed all the dead things contained in the rocks you misinterpret as representing time periods, there is no way to prove it one way or the other. There is no way to prove that evolution occurred from one species to another because the only thing you can actually observe is variation within a Kind, it is merely assumed. Fear not, I think all this assumption and speculation will soon be tumbling down as there will be proof of the Flood. I feel it in my bones as it were.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Evidence is subjective because it is gathered, examined and analyzed by imperfect human beings. Through replication we increase our confidence in evidence. Naturally for the events of normal day-to-day living evidence is often simple and obvious and requires little or no replication, reexamination or reanalysis (that *is* alcohol on your breath), but in science the circumstances are usually much more complicated and replication is required. With sufficient replication a consensus develops and the knowledge becomes accepted. Tentatively. Life becomes so much simpler when even the need for such questions is recognized as unnecessary. There are both good and bad believers and unbelievers, and none of that seems to have any effect on what happens to them in this life. Some believe there are things that happen to them after this life, but that cannot be demonstrated. I'd like to know the answer to that, too.--Percy

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I've answered the forensics claim many times. It only works for the historical or witnessed past, where you actually have information from that past but for the prehistoric past all you have is today's observations, a few ways to compare things in the present that may apply to that distant past, but no way to verify anything from that actual past.

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If it can work for unwitnessed events in historical times, why should it not work for unwitnessed events in prehistoric times ? And why do the various cross-checks, using independent methods fail to qualify as verification? Radiometric dating methods, for instance rely on well-established physics and chemistry. Unless you are going to say that those operated differently in the prehistoric past it seems that you don’t really have a point here.

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You interpret the geologic column as representing periods in that past but you can't prove that, you can only assume it. If in fact it's only the result of the Flood which killed all the dead things contained in the rocks you misinterpret as representing time periods, there is no way to prove it one way or the other

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We can however note that the evidence is very strongly in favour of our interpretation - to the point that there is no reason why it should not be considered settled science.

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There is no way to prove that evolution occurred from one species to another because the only thing you can actually observe is variation within a Kind, it is merely assumed.

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The idea that there are Kinds which impose a limit on variation is merely an assumption, without any real evidence. The evidence, notably including transitional fossils but also including genetic analyses and the distribution of species in time and space is consistent with large scale evolutionary change.

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Fear not, I think all this assumption and speculation will soon be tumbling down as there will be proof of the Flood.

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You have assumption and speculation. We have the evidence. It is not at all likely that there will be any proof of Flood geology. Even restricting ourselves to the modern version you’ve had a hundred years and it still isn’t close to explaining the evidence.

Mostly because in recent times there would be people who were around at the time of the crime that you can interview about it, and the more recent the crime the better, and in older historical times possibly many documents witnessing to the events in question if it involved well known people or events. And there would also be familiar objects that can be tracked, even written documents from around the time of the crime if it was recent, and so on and so forth.I just watched the series "Unforgotten" on PBS over the last few weeks which made use of some pretty fancy forensic methods. They had found a body that had been buried for an unknown length of time that had an electronic pager and a credit card and a written diary buried with it, all of course in bad condition since they'd been there for such a long time. I may be blurring two cases together but I don't think that matters to the point. The body itself was just a skeleton but there was enough evidence to show how the man died but nothing to identify him or the time of his death.Then the forensics lab was able with chemicals and special photography to find legible enough numbers on the pager to trace it to the time and place of its original manufacture and then to repair records, which gave a rough time frame for the man's death, and finally made it possible to identify its owner though I don't remember all the steps involved. Of course there were blind leads and misinterpretations along the way.The notebook was very hard to reconstruct but some pretty fancy very careful methods finally brought up a list of names and numbers which allowed the detectives to track them to their owners, some of whom were dead but some still living, and further difficulties involved in trying to locate them got resolved so that they eventually had some people they could talk to who had been on the dead man's list.
Some claimed not to remember it was so long ago, some claimed not to know him, some gave true stories about their acquaintance with him, some false.The credit card was in very bad shape but with some laborious methods of reconstruction they got enough information off it to track its use around the time of the man's death to a particular bank in a particular neighborhood. Etc etc etc.All these clues led to information from the man's actual past that could be tracked from many different angles because there were people still alive from that time who could be interviewed, there were written records that were preserved, and so on and so forth.If there was nobody still living they might still be able to reconstruct something from the objects themselves about times and places when the man himself was living. But without the witnesses, liars though many of them were, finally getting to the cause of the murder itself, the motives and so on, might not have been possible at all, and even if they could construct a plausible scenario proving it would have been impossible.They also had more than one theory as the story went along and had to give up their best theory in the end for a completely unexpected explanation. Which was finally confirmed by the people involved at the time. Without that they couldn't have solved the case at all.I also like to watch the series "Forensics" on Netflix, all about true cases that forensics was finally able to solve. They all have a murder suspect who is still living and can be arrested when they've solved the case. But some cases never get solved.Now they have DNA which has revolutionized forensics, identified the real criminals and set free some innocents.You've got radiometric dating which is really the only solid evidence you have for the timing factor. But if other evidence contradicts that, as I believe it does, it remains to be seen how well that method will stand up.Otherwise you have nothing at all like the evidence for the kind of criminal case I describe above, nobody still living from the time of the event, no documents from that time (we have the Bible, though you've thrown that important piece of evidence out), dinosaurs didn't carry cell phones or use credit cards etc.You DO have artifacts from archaeological digs which can contribute to dating information at least. But if you are expecting to find evidence of the Flood in a single layer of the geo column when it actually built the entire column you're so far off the track you'll never get there anyway. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Rather than turning this thread into another geology/evolution discussion, let's examine your underlying principles. This would be incorrect. Forensics works for the unwitnessed and unhistorical. Why do you think otherwise? My example was of an old cold-case murder - no witnesses, nothing historical, yet forensics works. Why do you think evidence from the distant past can't be analyzed, or in your words, that there are "few ways to compare things in the present that may apply to that distant past"?How do you know where the distant past begins? Or put another way, how distant is too distant and how do you know? Why do you think Flood evidence is imminent now after all these centuries?--Percy

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Mostly because there would be people who were around at the time of the crime that you can interview about it, but there would also be familiar objects that can be tracked, written documents and so on and so forth.

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Does any of that actually matter for the sorts of cases we are considering ? In terms of getting a date for when a rock cooled from lava or magma it doesn’t seem terribly relevant.

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Now they have DNA which has revolutionized forensics, identified the real criminals and set free some innocents.

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And supports evolution, too.

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You've got radiometric dating which is really the only solid evidence you have for the timing factor. But if other evidence contradicts that, as I believe it does, it remains to be seen how well that method will stand up

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There is no valid evidence that contradicts it. And plenty that supports it. You can argue over exact dates but the difference between YEC time frames and those accepted by science is night and day and the evidence rules out the possibility of YEC dates being even in the right order of magnitude.

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Otherwise you have nothing at all like the evidence for the kind of criminal case I describe above, nobody still living from the time of the event, no documents from that time (we have the Bible, though you've thrown that important piece of evidence out), dinosaurs didn't carry cell phones or use credit cards etc. You DO have artifacts from archaeological digs which can contribute to dating.

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Even YECs put the writing of the Bible after the Flood, so you don’t have documents from the timeunless you want to argue that the Book Of Enoch really was written by the Biblical Enoch. And if you can tell me what use cell phones or credit cards would be in in dating a rock please do.

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But if you are expecting to find evidence of the Flood in a single layer of the geo column when it actually built the entire column you're so far off the track you'll never get there anyway.

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It’s pretty obvious that the Flood didn’t build the whole geological column so you’d be pretty off track trying to find it there, too.

That is just more claims without evidence to back them. And that's the difference between religion and science. Religion just states things. Science follows evidence.

Do a believers and non-believers get different results when they sequence a genome?Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Ah, I do have to admit it's mostly wishful thinking, but I think today's evidence by creationists happens to be very good, and in fact I think they've proven the Flood, it's just a matter of getting the material organized effectively and presented effectively. I'm hoping.

You left out the non-radiometric dating methods, which I and others have pointed out to you many times.

No, facts are facts, but there is also an interpretive factor involved even in genetics -- or is it "genomics?." For instance the assumption that mutations are the explanation for all the viable alleles is an assumption that probably guides your thinking as you work. I don't know how far such an assumption can take you if it happens to be false. I do wonder. If it were false is there some way you could discover that through your normal procedures that you know of? Or isn't it likely that you can just rationalize it all away as you go? Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Why does DNA fingerprinting only work if someone witnessed the crime? We do have information from the prehistoric past. We have fossils. We have the DNA found in modern species which is a direct record of ancestry. We have the geologic record which is information from the prehistoric past. You have never shown that it is misinterpreted, so the evidence stands. There is a way. It's called DNA and fossils.