Science: A Method not a Source

When following the scientific method, if your results lead to a particular conclusion you accept that conclusion.When following the religious methodology, if your results lead to the wrong conclusion (one which does not follow scripture, for example), you don't accept that conclusion.A perfect example is the recent creationist RATE Project. A number of credentialed scientists, who were also creationists, set out with over a million dollars of creationist money to disprove the decay constant. This was seen as a critical step in showing that radiometric dating techniques are wrong and the earth is indeed young. These creation "scientists" came up with results that showed millions to a billion years of decay, confirming what real scientists had been saying. So naturally they refused to believe their results and fell back on scripture as the more accurate source of information on this topic.Creation "science" is the opposite of real science.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Fair enough. So, you maintain that the scientific method is not applicable to certain forms of information?Jon

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One cannot make a determination given these options. If two independent falsifiable theories repeatedly stood the test of falsification, there would be no criteria by which to accept one of them over the other. Okay; the scientific method, you claim, is discriminatory in regards sources for informational inputs. If you could explain why that is and how it works, then I could understand your position better. And you are going to have to tell me how 'why' makes a hill of beans difference in the scientific method; if I study cancer treatments because I like to learn or because my parents both died from cancer, what on Earth difference does it make to the application of the method? ... unfalsified, falsifiable explanation... Do I really need to keep correcting this? I think it would be beneficial if you could explain the role you believe predictions to play in the scientific method. From what I gather, your understandings of 'predictions' are different than the ones laid out in the Scientific Method thread. Perhaps an explanation of how you see predictions in relation to the scientific method might help clear some things up.Jon

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Okay, good start. May I ask how folk following the 'religious methodology' first come to their understandings of what conclusions do and do not 'follow scripture'? Then it's a really good thing we're not talking about 'creation science', eh? JonEdited by Jon, : No reason given.

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Experience, built up over time in very small steps. Logic has almost nothing to do with the subject. Of course they are rational and they originate from the same source as all other answers, from using reason and logic and reality.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Simple. The results of the RATE Project study showed evidence of radioactive decay going back millions to a billion years. This is incompatible with their belief in a young earth, so they refused to accept their own results.From a review of the RATE Project:

In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.

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Assessing the RATE Project

From another review:

Young-earth creationists have long claimed there is no evidence for an old Earth. The fact that billions of years of nuclear decay have occurred in Earth history has been denied by most young-earth creationists. Now, the RATE team has admitted that, taken at face value, radiometric dating data is most easily and directly explained by the Earth being billions of years old.111 This is a remarkable development because no longer can young-earth creationists claim it is merely the naturalistic worldview that makes scientists believe rocks and minerals are millions or billions of years old.

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Are the RATE findings sufficient grounds to reject mainstream science? What is known to science is radioactive decay would produce the quantity of daughter products on the Earth in a timescale of millions or billions of years. Unknown to science and lacking any independent verification is the idea that nuclear decay rates were accelerated in the past by five orders of magnitude (100,000 times) or more.112 Thus, we are faced with a choice: either we can accept the vast majority of radiometric data that indicates the Earth is very old, or we can believe the Earth is 6,000 years old based on a handful of anomalous results. Looking at the data objectively, the RATE research does not meet the burden of proof necessary to demonstrate that radiometric dating is fallacious.

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Page not found - Reasons to Believe

This illustrates the difference between creation "science" and real science. The folks who conducted the RATE Project refused to believe their own results, and instead fell back on prior belief based on scripture.This is the exact opposite of real science.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The most famous example is the Big Bang theory Vs the Steady State Theory.One theory's acceptance over the other as a superior and more accurate portrayal of reality was a direct result of the predictions made.

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For most cosmologists, the refutation of the steady-state theory came with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965, which was predicted by the Big Bang theory. Stephen Hawking said that the fact that microwave radiation had been found, and that it was thought to be left over from the Big Bang, was "the final nail in the coffin of the steady-state theory."

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Note: It was not just the existence of the radiation that was predicted by BB theory but the precise value measured. A verified prediction that vindicated the theory exactly because of it’s specificity. What are you talking about?We choose our predictions on the basis of achieving the most exacting and objective test of our theory we can devise. For example it is no use claiming that a new theory of gravitation has been verified because it’s predicts that the Sun will rise tomorrow. A theory is vindicated if it predicts new and previously unknown phenomenon. Why don’t you lookup General Relativity and see all of the verified predictions that theory has resulted in? You might learn something.I asked you why we make predictions and test them. We do this because it is the most exacting and most objective test of our theories we can come up with. It is relatively easy to construct a theory that meets all the known facts and yet which is full of subjective biases and wrong turns. But you devise a theory that directly predicts and leads to the discovery of new facts and you have every right to think you are onto something worth pursuing.And it is this component of the scientific method which your various scenarios and falsification only strategies are woefully lacking.

That isn't an answer to any of the above.Do you agree that it is much more difficult to construct a theory that successfully predicts new observations than it is to construct a theory that merely incorporates known observations? So it has nothing to do with logic. So it is derived from logic after all. Huh?And can you explain how a conclusion such as the one that the world will end if no human sacrifice is made originates as a result of "reason, logic and reality"?I am struggling to see how this conclusion can have arisen without a healthy dose of human imagination thrown in- Can you enlighten me?

Okay; here's what I am trying to get to. How is it they came up with the 'young Earth' belief? I do not recall any biblical passages mentioning a 'young Earth'. From what nooks of Scripture is this notion derived? It is certainly unscientific behavior for folk to reject application of the scientific method to understandings of certain evidences. In fact, any rejection to apply the scientific method would be, by definition, unscientific behavior. But, in this thread, I am not interested in looking at all the places where folk have rejected application of the scientific method; rather in looking at the places where they have used the scientific method and how it compares, sources notwithstanding, to other applications of the scientific method in form and process.Unless, of course, you find the source of the information crucial to the scientific method and can demonstrate which aspects of the scientific method so stipulate the nature of the informational source. This is what is at issue in this thread.Jon

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That's for you and them to figure out. A young earth is their belief based on the bible, and how they got there is not my problem.They clearly reject science and the scientific method when it conflicts with their beliefs.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I think you'll find little lacking in my presentment of the scientific method; but let's take a look at the issues you raise and see what can be said about them: But what had the Steady State Theory 'predicted' regarding CMBR? If we read on, we see more:

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Wikipedia on the Steady State Theory:

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Within the steady state theory this background radiation is the result of light from ancient stars which has been scattered by galactic dust. However, this explanation has been unconvincing to most cosmologists as the cosmic microwave background is very smooth, making it difficult to explain how it arose from point sources, and the microwave background shows no evidence of features such as polarization which are normally associated with scattering. Furthermore, its spectrum is so close to that of an ideal black body that it could hardly be formed by the superposition of contributions from dust clumps at different temperatures as well as at different redshifts. Steven Weinberg wrote in 1972,

The steady state model does not appear to agree with the observed dL versus z relation or with source counts ... In a sense, the disagreement is a credit to the model; alone among all cosmologies, the steady state model makes such definite predictions that it can be disproved even with the limited observational evidence at our disposal. The steady-state model is so attractive that many of its adherents still retain hope that the evidence against it will disappear as observations improve. However, if the cosmic microwave background radiation ... is really black-body radiation, it will be difficult to doubt that the universe has evolved from a hotter, denser early stage.

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If 'vindication' to you is simply failure to be falsified (despite being falsifiable), then so it is; I will not debate on your usage of words. I will say this, however: had both BB and SST predicted the nature of the CMBR as it was discovered, then its discovery would have added nothing to the debate; it was only in as much as the discovery of CMBR was inconsistent with the notions of SST that one theory was able to be 'tossed' while the other be 'vindicated'. It would, thus, appear, that the 'vindication', or 'verification', of theories is not a positive process, but rather a negative one that results when certain of competing (falsifiable) explanations are falsified. The discovery of informations pertaining to certain (falsifiable) predictions seems completely useless if it does not serve to falsify one of a series of competing explanations. Without falsification it is impossible to get anywhere in science.If two competing theories, X and Y, both predict z, and z is found true, does this verify theories X and Y? I think here is where you will find the error of your thinking, for if we follow what you say, then indeed the finding of informations consistent with a theory's predictions serves to verify these theories; in cases such as X and Y, the finding of z verifies two theories which cannot both be true. This approach, then, leads us to believe in the truth of a contradiction, and any method that so allows this, as the scientific method per your description does, is not worth its weight in air and should definitely not be regarded as 'reliable' in any sense of the term. Certainly, this is not what we want; you yourself have argued, often, the importance of a reliable method. Such a method, of course, does exist, but depends on falsification of falsifiables, not verification of verifiables. With such a method, we can find z true without creating a contradiction, as it does nothing in the way of verification, and we rest both our theories as yet unfalsified, a clearly non-contradictory stance that does not jeopardize the reliability of our scientific method. Believing you have something worth pursuing is much different than having something that is 'accurate'. Clearly, proponents of both X and Y would continue pursuing further research to their theories, but simple logic tells us that at least one of them is false. Finding a theory to be 'worth pursuing' does nothing to 'vindicate' or 'verify' said theory. I think we should drop the topic of 'why' someone participates in any aspects the scientific method; one's personal motives are completely unrelated to anything regarding the method's actual values and merits. Speaking about relationship to the arguments, I would hope that we can find a way to bring this discussion of 'predictions' back around to the topic of the thread:

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Jon in Message 1:

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I propose that the use of the Bible and other 'historical' literature to generate knowledge about the physical world is not, as many claim, unscientific or (dare I say) 'supernatural', but instead perfectly good science differing only in results (by means of different inputs) from presently accepted knowledge in the overall scientific community. To clarify, I am not addressing specifically the knowledge itself that is so generated, but rather the methodologythat is, the generation of knowledge about the physical world based on the reading of histories.

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As I recall, this issue of 'predicitons' was brought up in discussing the hypothetical scenario in the OP. It has been decided that, to save all our sanities, we should switch from matters related to the OP's scenario to matters related to the OP's argument. If we cannot relate 'prediction' to the general topic of the thread, then perhaps it should be dropped or brought to another thread.So, how do 'predictions' relate to the general points of the OP?Jon

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So you are not aware of the methodology employed in retrieving the young Earth age estimates from the pages of Scripture? And when it does not conflict with their beliefs? I agree, that it is certainly unscientific behavior for folk to reject application of the scientific method to understandings of certain evidences. In fact, any rejection to apply the scientific method would be, by definition, unscientific behavior. But, in this thread, I am not interested in looking at all the places where folk have rejected application of the scientific method; rather in looking at the places where they have used the scientific method and how it compares, sources notwithstanding, to other applications of the scientific method in form and process.Unless, of course, you find the source of the information crucial to the scientific method and can demonstrate which aspects of the scientific method so stipulate the nature of the informational source. This is what is at issue in this thread.Jon

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I'm not sure.And how is experiences built up over time not the answer? Learn to at least read what you quote. I said "Logic has almost nothing to do with the subject." But imagination is part of reason, logic and reality.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

So anything that is imagined is as reasoned, logical and real as anything discovered?

Nope, doubt that was what I said.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!