Thanks for the feedback. I understand where you're coming from, I really do, and I think the key difference between Creationism and science is captured by what you say here:
Nothing the Bible says is evidence at all here, but that is absurd.
If by "evidence" you mean "scientific evidence", then you're correct, the Bible is not considered evidence here.
What I meant was that the Bible appears to be treated as fiction, not even as a historical record here, same as it is among most academics and scientists and even, sad to say, some people who consider themselves Christians.
One of the key requirements of science is replicability. A single observation by an expert scientist means little by itself. It is only after the observation has been repeated by many other scientists that it becomes accepted. And a single observation by a layperson with no scientific training a couple thousand years ago in a religious book carries no weight as scientific evidence at all.
You describe it as if Moses had picked up a stone and declared it Kryptonite.
Even if we accept Biblical evidence, say if we consider the Noah's flood account as one observation, then the scientific requirement of replicability demands that we verify it by repeating the observation today.
Scientific replicability can't possibly apply to ancient historical events. They are one-of-a-kind events by definition. If an earthquake in 1500 BC made a huge crack in the earth into which thousands of people fell and were buried, you don't expect to replicate that event in order to find out if it really happened. How much of what we know about the time of the Greeks and Romans is known only by the report of a single historian here and there? History isn't science and can't be verified by scientific method, but it is a source of knowledge in its own right. And while we may reenact this or that historical event, say a war, we try to be true to the historical accounts, and consider it wrong to deviate from them. Except when it comes to the Bible, of course, which is apparently fair game for all manner of revisionist rewriting these days.
This is precisely what early geologists tried to do in the 18th and 19th centuries,
Do you really mean that they tried to REPLICATE the Flood? Don't you mean they looked for EVIDENCE of the Flood?
and they quickly came to the conclusion, even by the paltry evidence available at that time, that there had never been any global flood. And all evidence gathered since that time has reinforced that view a million million times over.
Well, that sure does open and shut the case with a bang, doesn't it? I guess the only way I can hope to refute this claim is by thoroughly studying just what "paltry evidence" they drew their conclusions from. My impression has been that scientific thinking in general back in those days left a lot to be desired, according to scientists themselves, but in this instance apparently it's given an unusual respect. Heck, even "cold" murder cases can be reopened and new evidence be brought to light.
From a faith standpoint you can know that the flood really happened, but from a scientific standpoint there are no supporting facts.
I believe that there are many supporting facts but evolutionists dismiss them on the basis of apparent contradictory facts and scenarios of their own imagination. No theory has ONLY supporting facts in its favor. Science isn't omniscient. You have some supporting facts and some contradictory facts and a lot of obscure who-knows-what plus a working hypothesis and you juggle it all. But in the case of the Flood the supporting facts are simply swallowed up by the evolutionist preconceptions. It is not the case that there are NO supporting facts for creationist views. Much of the actual data that is appropriated to evolutionism can be explained in creationist terms just as well, but the evolutionist explanation is simply preferred, not scientifically validated over the other, merely preferred.
Did complex biological organs require a Designer or could they have arisen by the juggling of genes over millions of years? There is no PROOF of either. There is no way to REPLICATE anything whatever for such a question. It is ENTIRELY a matter of extrapolation, conceptualization and inference. In the end there is only the PREFERENCE for the evolutionist explanation that gives it the prize.
The seriously critical characterizations I made that you found so objectionable have very specific Creationists in mind like Gish, Snelling and Austin among many others who simply make up facts for presentation to the faithful so they can rest easy that evolution is really false. If you doubt the insincere nature of Creationism then just look at the contradictory arguments of Creationism over the past decade or so:
Debates with Creationists used to be dominated by different arguments than today. Issues like lack of moon dust and the shrinking sun were common grist for the debate mill. While the Creationist position on these issues lacked any scientific evidence whatsoever, few were the Creationist websites that didn't repeat these arguments, and many still do, and as a result many Creationists argued that the truth about these issues was being kept from children in science class by evilutionists. Once Creationist organizations like AIG began counseling to avoid these arguments they faded away. We hardly ever see them here anymore.
How does this prove deception? So they were wrong. Yes they are driven by a need to disprove evolutionism and that certainly does open up opportunities for foolish false assertions, but you have no reason to think they didn't BELIEVE what they were teaching was the truth. Probably a major problem with KNOWING the Flood happened is that it can all too easily lower the scientific standards for proof, and the desperation to protect children from atheism adds to the problem. But this isn't deception or nefarious motives, it's simply deficient thinking. They're getting smarter thanks to AIG among other influences though.
And I'm sure much of creationism has been scientifically loony, I'll give you that. But loony isn't deceitful, it's just loony.
The water of the flood came from a vapor canopy (ICR), or the water of the flood came from vast underground reservoirs. Switching from one view to the other is easy when evidence doesn't matter.
Both those ideas have their source in the Biblical account which speaks of the opening of the "fountains of the deep" and waters of the "firmament." I don't know if there would ever be a way to find out what that meant even accepting that it is true. And again, I can't count "switching" from one idea to another to be deception. It's perhaps desperation and bad science but these guys KNOW there was a Flood. They are simply too eager to pounce on anything that appears to support it. There is no need to suppose any kind of intentional deception at all. But it is very bad for their cause that they have been so incautious.
Traditional Creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science class, or ID should be taught alongside evolution in science class. Of course, neither has any scientific supporting evidence. And once traditional Creationists realize that ID does not accept a young earth the fascination with adding it to science curriculums will disappear.
This is all such a nasty can of worms I just want Christians to pull their children out of public school and either homeschool or start up Christian schools. There really isn't just one coherent creationist theory to be taught alongside evolutionism, there are many observations that may support Biblical claims however, and I would teach children not to accept ANY theory myself, just learn how to think about evidence. I'm not impressed at ALL with how evolutionists deal with evidence at least in most popularized reports. They ASSUME the theory and CRAM the data into it. You can't even find out what the facts are about a given phenomenon. What did this particular fossil really look like? Where was it found exactly, what were the conditions of the find? Are there other fossils nearby? I would expect this to be the relevant information, from which the reader could possibly draw conclusions of his own, but what you get instead is the evolutionist INTERPRETATION, not the bare facts. This is what kept frustrating me when I kept trying to prove evolutionary theory. You don't get facts to think from, you get only theory in the place of the facts. When it supposedly lived and what it supposedly evolved from etc. All theory no fact. I laugh when I see a plaque telling me how old a rock formation in the mountains is and the name of that period of time instead of what kind of rock it is and how it got there. THAT could be considered deception but I suppose it's done in good faith. Other possible explanations of any given phenomenon are simply ruled out at the beginning -- even the ability to THINK about the phenonmenon is rendered impossible as you are simply left with this one and only possible interpretation of the data.
A specific instance of incredible Creationist insincerity: It is a well-established fact of radiometric dating that the longer the half-life of the radiometric element, the less appropriate it is for dating recent events. For example, 14C has a half life of around 5730 years, and so it can validly be used to date events as recent as a hundred years ago. But the half life of 40K is 1.3 billion years, and it can only be used to date events millions of years old, certainly nothing younger than a half million years. Yet Andrew Snelling of ICR turns out paper after paper where he uses K/Ar dating on volcanic events only a hundred or two years old. He gets incorrect results, just as any scientist would expect, and reports them to the faithful as evidence that radiometric dating is flawed. What he's doing is equivalent to using the mile markers on a highway to measure the width of a human hair - of course you'll get wildly inaccurate results. Further proof of Snelling's dissembling are the recent efforts of Creationists Humphreys and Baumgardner described in Message 1 (Thread Accelerated Radioactive Decay).
Of course I'm incapable of judging any of this. But I doubt nefarious motives. Always seems the best policy.
Another specific instance of incredible Creationist insincerity: Steven Austin's analysis of the age of the Grand Canyon. Austin weaves an extremely complicated web, I won't try to sort it all out in this message but you can see it all unraveled at
A Critique of ICR's Grand Canyon Dating
Project.
So Creationism that once advocated teaching the vapor canopy in classrooms is now advocating teaching ID. What they share is a lack of any scientific foundation, and since evidence isn't involved Creationism will have no problem switching horses once again somewhere down the line.
I'll give you that they seem to be thrashing around in the dark, but I'm not prepared to give you nefarious motives.
Science doesn't teach what's true. Science teaches what the methods of science have discovered.
Well, as I point out above, scientific method can't validate or invalidate historical events because replication is impossible with historical events and the idea that it is applicable at all is already bad thinking. The Flood of course should be subject to scientific evidence, if it left evidence, though not replication. You can't even extrapolate credibly from observed conditions such as local floods to a worldwide flood as described in the Bible, because there had to be too many unique factors involved, but I'd say that Morris' extrapolations from his hydraulic models have more credibility than extrapolations from sediment deposits in deltas or even oceans to the idea that millions of years of sedimentation of only one kind are packed into one layer of the Geologic Column. Neither is the Geologic Time Table subject to replication. You can only extrapolate from observed events, from historically validatable time frames to historically INvalidatable time frames, and in that arena I find a lot of boggle and little credibility.
If you want to believe that the flood of Noah was a true event that is your right. But there is no scientific evidence for Noah's flood, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or fooling himself or lying.
There's a ton of such evidence but that evidence is currently appropriated to evolutionism. MOST of the actual facts support a worldwide Flood as well or better than they support great ages theory. You refute the Flood idea by this or that apparent contradiction in some local phenomenon here or there, or by an imaginative scenario about what kind of evidence such a Flood would have left, but seeming contradictions may eventually be corrected by better explanations of the facts, and reasonable imaginative scenarios are not confined to evolutionist assumptions.
By the way, it's important to recognize that the objections of Creationism to science go way beyond evolution. To Creationists it is the entire edifice of science that is wrong. In essence Creationists are saying cosmology is wrong, astronomy is wrong, physics is wrong, chemistry is wrong, geology is wrong, radiometric dating is wrong, genetics is wrong, paleontology is wrong and archeology is wrong. And I probably forgot a few. To Creationists it must seem that only scientists working on new TVs and new cars and new communication satellites and new medicines and new crops ever get anything right. All the rest just make one stupid mistake after another. Do you really believe this?
Observations and experiments are solid science and I don't see Creationists disputing actual facts, except maybe dating methods, which MAY not be as trustworthy as they are claimed anyway. It is the extrapolations and interpretations of the observations that are not necessarily trustworthy. These are derived from the theory. I have no doubt that geneticists have excellent knowledge of how DNA works. But I have no reason to believe that one species ever evolves into another -- the claims that this has been observed are terminological (definition of "species"), not actual.
The argument that when science disagrees with the Bible then science is wrong is a religious argument, not a scientific one.
What is a "religious argument?" This notion all hinges on whether or not the events recorded in the Bible are historically true, and that's not a "religious" argument, it's an argument about FACT. You simply deny that the report is true. You really HAVEN'T proven that it isn't true, though you believe you have. Evolutionists make assumptions about what kind of evidence a Flood should have left and claim it didn't happen because they don't see that kind of evidence, as if they were able to posit all the possibilities from their own fallible imagination, but that just about imputes omniscience to scientists. There are plenty of other possibilities than just those assumptions.
Science is a systematic methodology for learning about the universe we live in. Science class teaches what we've learned using scientific methodology.
Not when it subsumes observable facts into theory before the student has had time to digest the observable facts themselves. Oh, this is a creature that lived in such and such a period and evolved from such and such.... No it isn't. It's a skeleton or a bone or a fossil that has certain describable attributes that was found in such and such a place in such and such an environment ... Oh, this stack of rocks is a record of the great ages of time all the way back to 600 million years. No it isn't. It is a stack of rocks of particular properties in particular positions found in particular environments and different ones are found in those different environments... That's science. The other stuff is all interpretation. And not the kind of interpretation that can ever be verified or falsified such as, say, Galileo's theory of the earth's movement around the sun could be, as the interpretations of the Geologic Column cannot be replicated or tested in any way at all. Unless you want to rest the entire thing on radiometric dating and ignore everything else, and then we can just wait around until assumptions about radiometric dating are falsified.
The knowledge of Creationism comes to us by way of revelation and not by way of scientific methodology,
It TAKES OFF FROM the Bible, but the science involved cannot come from the Bible and is not built on revelation at all by any creationist argument I've ever read.
and so it has no place in science class. The evangelical community's desire for inclusion of Creationism in science class is religiously, not scientifically, motivated. Creationism will become represented in science class when it finds support using scientific methodology to find supporting scientific evidence.
I have no interest in including creationism in public schools. The political climate is too hostile. I want it explored in private schools. I believe I have good reasons not to trust the scientific credentials of evolutionism in any case as I've said above. Daily science, experiments, observations, yes, that's science. Evolutionism isn't.
And that is how the debate is framed here at EvC Forum. Science *does* have a definition, and it doesn't change just because its methods arrive at conclusions that offend some group's religious sensibilities. Within the science forums one is supposed to argue from evidence that has been established scientifically. Arguing from a Biblical foundation simply concedes at the outset the unscientific nature of Creationism.
I don't argue from a Biblical foundation. I'm very careful not to. And all I would claim for the Bible in the scientific arena is that it is a historical record and has been regarded as such by many of the greatest thinkers in Western Civilization up until quite recently. Nevertheless I haven't used that in any argument here, either, merely somewhere had the temerity to refute somebody's absolute dismissal of the Bible as evidence of any kind whatever.
If you really believe the Bible contains scientific evidence that trumps observation of the natural world (which is supposedly as much the creation of God as the Bible),
You can't have contradictions between the revealed word of God and the creation of God. The Bible is unique in that it is known by believers throughout time as the revelation of the nature of God by His own direct intervention and inspiration, which we have no other means of knowing because of the spiritual death we inherit from the Fall. There is an immense testimony of withnesses to its supernatural origin back to Moses and up through the greats of Western history including scientists.
BUT fear not. I have not claimed that the Bible contains "scientific evidence" only historical fact, AND I am careful to avoid arguing from it even about historical fact. I may argue FOR it from time to time but I know better than to argue FROM it in such a hostile environment.
then you can make that argument in the The Bible: Accuracy and Inerrancy, Faith and Belief or The Bible: Accuracy and Inerrancy forums. But in the science forums one is expected to argue scientifically.
[Edit: bottom of post was cut off. Here's the rest of it.] Again, I haven't argued FROM the Bible here. As for the Bible sites I'm really not attracted to the usual Bible debunkery debates, but eventually I'll take a look at them.
span class=LI1>
This message has been edited by Faith, 03-19-2005 07:30 PM
This message has been edited by Faith, 03-19-2005 07:55 PM
™ Version 4.2
