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Member (Idle past 1598 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: SCIENCE: -- "observational science" vs "historical science" vs ... science. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
You can't compare this to the sciences involved in trying to explain things from the UNWITNESSED PREHISTORIC past where there are no testable clues because there are no witnesses, again meaning any kind of documented knowledge as well as human witnesses. You can know some things about the unwitnessed past such as the former existence of creatures that are no longer living ... So we can, as you I persuaded you to concede on the other thread, know that stegosauruses lived. Hooray, we're getting there. But then ...
but the theories/hypotheses about how they lived or died or the climate they lived in or their genetic relatedness to other creatures are impossible to test, you are stuck with the hypotheses and no way to corroborate them. ... apparently we're not allowed to say that stegosauruses didn't fly from tree to tree, because that would touch on how they lived. The idea that they didn't fly sounds suspiciously like something an atheist would say. Or pretty much anyone with a lick of sense, really. Similarly, it seems that we can't say that a tyrannosaur and a stegosaur aren't brother and sister, since this claim about their genetic relationship is untestable. One can learn so much from creationists about science, such as how not to do it. However, there's something more you should tell us. On what principle do you declare that we can know that stegosauruses lived, but not whether they could fly. Now that you've retreated from your general claim that we can't know the unwitnessed past, what criterion are you using to decide what we can and can't know? Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Faith writes: but the theories/hypotheses about how they lived or died or the climate they lived in [...] are impossible to test, you are stuck with the hypotheses and no way to corroborate them. OK ... so we can't know how fossil creatures died or what the weather was like when they lived. But wait, what's this you say on the other thread ... ?
Faith writes: The worldwide billions of fossils are terrific evidence for a worldwide catastrophe that buried them all at one time; the strata could only have been formed in water, and their immensity and existence throughout the world suggest an immense and worldwide catastrophe. This is so obvious it takes dishonesty to deny it. Or stupidity. So ... we can't know how fossil creatures died or what the weather was like ... and also it's obvious that they were killed by a big flood, one would have to be stupid or dishonest to deny it.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
No you do not have evidence for your uniformitarian principles. That's an assumption, period. What do you suppose you're invoking when you correctly conclude that there were once living stegosaurs?
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Now I could argue that historically, my great grandfather could fly like superman, and had all of the abilities of superman and I could show you my inductive, historical evidence. I could show you where he punched holes in the wall of my house, photographs of him flying and so forth, but if he still existed today, would you say there would be no difference in the quality of the science if we were to put such claims to the test? Well yes, reconstructing-thing-A-in-the-past is always going to be slightly weaker evidence than seeing-thing-A-in-the-present. Living stegosauruses which we could see would have to be somewhat stronger evidence for living stegosauruses than the bones that we actually have. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's weaker evidence than seeing-thing-B-in-the-present. For example, which would you be more confident of --- the proposition that stegosauruses once lived, or the proposition that the latest heart disease drug has fewer side-effects than the last one? The former, of course, although the latter is testable in the present. (By analogy, a murder case against person X is always somewhat more plausible if you have a confession. But that doesn't mean that the case against X with a confession is stronger than the case against person Y without one.) Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
With the Stegosaurus, the bones are not history, they are an element of the present, operational, experimental. Well, exactly --- the evidence is in the present, the thing it's evidence for is in the past. But people like Ham want to divide science not according to the nature of the evidence, but according to the time when the thing it's evidence for occurred.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I see no connection. Well, when we infer living dinosaurs from the bones, we are, very automatically, using the uniformitarian principle that you need to have a living animal first before you get bones, and that this is true of these particular bones, that they didn't just fall out of the sky, or grow in the ground, or get magicked out of nothing by God. Without uniformitarianism, we wouldn't be able to infer the living dinosaurs, we would have no grounds on which to do so.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined:
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The creationist objection to uniformitarianism does not imply an objection to natural laws, but only to EVENTS, as it interprets the fossils and strata as having been built up over time as we experience it today rather than in a singular catastrophic event. No laws were different. So you'd reject any creationist attempt to explain away the evidence for age by positing varying rates of the speed of light or of nuclear decay?
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined:
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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. 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?
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
The problem is not with once-living stegosauruses If the problem is that "There are plenty of clues and witnesses in historic time that don't exist in the prehistoric past" then that is a problem with once-living stegosauruses.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Bumped for Faith.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
How about Radiometric Dating which is taken as proof of the age of this that or the other. Method: It is known that some kinds of atoms decay into other kinds of atoms at a particular rate. Therefore the amount of one or the other atom in a substance can tell you how old that substance is Method: Extracting some portion of that substance and analyzing it for the amount of either or both atoms Assumption: Whatever portion you are able to get and analyze should tell you about the age of the whole Assumption: How much of either atom was already present at the origin of the substance Assumption: What exactly the origin of a substance is supposed to be. When it came out of the volcano? When it was laid down in the strata? Assumption: Any errors you find can just be discarded. What exactly is an error anyway and how would you know? Replication/testing: Too much slippage for this to be reliable from one testing lab to another. You really have only whatever result you are willing to accept, that fits with your other assumptions about time etc. Conclusion: Carbon 14 dating may be somewhat reliable for events within a few thousand years involving organic material, especially where the age of the material is already known so you have a witness to test the dating method itself by, but there are lots of errors possible there too. Conclusion: Radiometric dating cannot be proved as reliable. Wrong. Why don't you find out how radiometric dating actually works? It was in my book, you know.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
And wrong.
Really, you should try to find out something about what you're talking about.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined:
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I've got some time, let's look at this crap.
HISTORICAL SCIENCE: Siccar Point: Hypothesis: took millions of years to form. Observation: vertical and horizontal sections of strata. Reasoning/Assumption: upper horizontal section was laid down after lower vertical section was tilted. Evidence: None Replication or testing: Nothing to replicate or test. Other angular unconformities subjected to the same reasoning, also based on no evidence. It's all theory, no proof. We can see what Hutton wrote about Siccar Point by the daring expedient of seeing what Hutton wrote about Siccar Point. This is so subtle and ingenious an idea that I'm not surprised Faith didn't think of it. As Hutton was a notoriously bad writer, I shall elucidate quotations from his book with my own notes. So, what was Hutton actually up to? In his explorations of Scotland, he observed lower strata of schist with the bedding planes nearly vertical, and upper strata of sandstone and clay with the strata nearly horizontal:
From Portpatrick, on the west coast, to St Abb's Head, on the east, there is a tract of schistus mountains, in which the strata are generally much inclined, or approaching to the vertical situation [...] Such was the state of my mind, in relation to that subject:, when at Jedburgh upon a visit to a friend, after I had returned from Arran, and wrote the history of that journey; I there considered myself as among the horizontal strata which had first appeared after passing the Tweed, and before arriving at the Tiviot. The strata there, as in Berwickshire, which is their continuation to the east, are remarkably horizontal for Scotland; and they consist of alternated beds of sand-stone and marl, or argillaceous and micaceous strata. This led Hutton to wonder as follows:
The question which we would wish to have solved is this; if the vertical strata had been broken and erected under the superincumbent horizontal strata; or if, after the vertical strata had been broken and erected, the horizontal strata had been deposited upon the vertical strata, then forming the bottom of the sea. That is, did the sequence of events look like this: (1) Deposition of the lower strata; deposition of the upper strata; uplift of the lower strata. or like this: (2) Deposition of the lower strata; uplift of the lower strata; erosion of the lower strata; deposition of the upper strata. In favor of point (2) Hutton adduced the point that the upper strata were remarkably flat:
That strata, which are regular and horizontal in one place, should be found bended, broken, or disordered at another, is not uncommon; it is always found more or less in all our horizontal strata. Now, to what length this disordering operation might have been carried, among strata under others, without disturbing the order and continuity of those above, may perhaps be difficult to determine; but here, in this present case, is the greatest disturbance of the under strata, and a very great regularity among those above. Here at least is the most difficult case of this kind to conceive, if we are to suppose that the upper strata had been deposited before those below had been broken and erected. He also wondered whether the erosion in sequence (2) took place above or beneath the sea. He reasoned that if it took place on land, water could have washed away the clasts; if it took place underwater and was followed by marine deposition of the upper strata, the clasts would still be there forming a very thick layer between the lower and the upper strata. While there were some clasts (confirming, incidentally, that the lower strata were lithified before they were eroded) there weren't enough of them to justify the latter hypothesis.
If this shall be admitted as a just view of the subject, it will be fair to suppose, that the disordered strata had been raised more or less above the surface of the ocean; that, by the effects of either rivers, winds, or tides, the surface of the vertical strata had been washed bare; and that this surface had been afterwards sunk below the influence of those destructive operations, and thus placed in a situation proper for the opposite effect, the accumulation of matter prepared and put in motion by the destroying causes. Now it is obvious that both these points are best elucidated by looking at the surfaces of contact --- the unconformities --- between the upper and lower strata, where they are exposed in cross-section: which is what we can see at Siccar Point.
So Hutton writes about Siccar Point as follows:
But Siccar Point, we found a beautiful picture of this junction washed bare by the sea. The sand-stone strata are partly washed away, and partly remaining upon the ends of the vertical schistus; and, in many places, points of the schistus strata are seen standing up through among the sand-stone, the greatest part of which is worn away. Behind this again we have a natural section of those sand-stone strata, containing fragments of the schistus. What makes Siccar Point particularly interesting, from the point of view of the history of science, is that it is, as Hutton says (in the title of the section in which he describes it) one of the "Observations made on purpose to elucidate the subject". That is, in his hands geology had finally attained such maturity as a subject that he and his friends could distinguish between hypotheses by going and looking at, indeed looking for evidence: they could say to themselves "If things were like this, then the unconformity will look like this, but if things were like that, then the unconformity will look like that --- so let us go and find the unconformity." (If we compare even this primitive state of affairs with modern-day "flood geology", we can see that Hutton was already more of a scientist than the "flood geologists" ever will be.) As to why Faith is so howlingly wrong about Siccar Point, I think we can clear her of actual malicious falsehood. As usual, she has been too lazy to find out what she's talking about, and too arrogant to realise that this disqualifies her from opening her big yap and talking about it. And Faith, this is not the first time this has happened. Perhaps in future you might take steps to avoid it.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined:
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The point is that there is no way to confirm what he concluded, it is ALL his own interpretation, it's a subjective judgment. There is nothing that can be tested, there is no hard evidence, it can only be submitted to others' subjective judgment. There is no way to know for sure if his judgment was correct. Was the order of the deposition as he surmises? There no way to know for sure. Can we be certain that the strata would always look as he surmised if the situation were as he surmised? There is really no way to know for sure. His thoughts may be reasonable, but a lot of hypotheses in science sound good until they are tested and his can't be. That's the difference between a historical and a testable science. But this is not true. On the one hand, you have not argued for your assertions; and on the other hand, we can read what Hutton wrote.
I did think it interesting, however, that he actually considered the possibility that the vertical strata had been broken and set upright while the upper horizontal strata were in place, something nobody here will admit as a possibility as I've brought it up many times. You great loony, we rejected your dumb hypothesis for the same reason Hutton rejected it with respect to his unconformity. We considered it, like him; like him, we saw that all the evidence was against it.
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Dr Adequate Member Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Well, again, on the one hand we have your assertion, on the other hand, we have Hutton's book, which I quoted. Now plainly he is using evidence to test hypotheses, the exact thing you say he wasn't doing.
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