That is your security blanket...evolution did everything. Data only suggests that change happens, other claims have no such data and yet you will still claim evolution did it.
Simply false. New discoveries are changing the dogmatic claims that were once considered fact. One such element is HGT. It was considered a very small factor in evolution but is now known to be much more wide spread than thought.
Right, which means that there is no model in the scientific arena that can't be changed or discarded by a better model or new information which has happened throughout history. Yet, if evolution is questioned there is backlash against those who would question it.
Like evolution is true so no matter what question is asked...it is evolution-did-it.
No, I actually observe a multitude of evidence for my position.
That is bunk. There is so much objective evidence that many atheist scientists spend a lot of time trying to come up with something to explain away the evidence that points to God.
It used to be that way, what we are seeing now is a dogmatic stance in the scientific arena. Those that question evolution in anyway are now publicly ridiculed, or even those that accept evolution but question any part of it are too.
Religion is not science. Religions are not God. God is God. Muslims observe evidence in the universe, Jews observe evidence in the universe, and on and on.
This is the problem with your position, you feel that one can't live with the other and that is simply false. Science is a methodology that helps us discover things about our universe and the earth but it doesn't tell us what is true, it can but it isn't concerned about truth but about what best explains the thing being researched.
I guess that would depend on what you mean by a supernatural explanation. Without any real reference it is easy to say that. However, I am pro-Science. I am anti-Scientism.
I agree, you agree, we both agree and we disagree on what we agree upon.
There is some evidence of plant life prior to the Cambrian. It is non-conclusive but it is by some considered evidence that plants were present before the Cambrian. WE don't have evidence that they needed sunlight in the same way our modern plants do.
That is simply untrue.
What?
I just told you.
http://www.ldolphin.org/bumbulis/
THE EVIDENCE
Clue #1. The founders/fathers of modern science were shaped by a culture that was predominantly Christian.
The founders of modern science were all bunched into a particular geographical location dominated by a Judeo-Christian world view. I'm thinking of men like Louis Aggasiz (founder of glacial science and perhaps paleontology); Charles Babbage (often said to be the creator of the computer); Francis Bacon (father of the scientific method); Sir Charles Bell (first to extensively map the brain and nervous system); Robert Boyle (father of modern chemistry); Georges Cuvier (founder of comparative anatomy and perhaps paleontology); John Dalton (father of modern atomic theory); Jean Henri Fabre (chief founder of modern entomology); John Ambrose Fleming (some call him the founder of modern electronics/inventor of the diode); James Joule (discoverer of the first law of thermodynamics); William Thomson Kelvin (perhaps the first to clearly state the second law of thermodynamics); Johannes Kepler (discoverer of the laws of planetary motion); Carolus Linnaeus (father of modern taxonomy); James Clerk Maxwell (formulator of the electromagnetic theory of light); Gregor Mendel (father of genetics); Isaac Newton (discoverer of the universal laws of gravitation); Blaise Pascal (major contributor to probability studies and hydrostatics); Louis Pasteur (formulator of the germ theory).
If an appreciation for math and the cause-and-effect workings of nature were sufficient to generate modern science, how does one explain the historical fact the the founders of modern science were all found in a *particular* culture that just happened to be shaped by a Judeo-Christian world view? Instead of measuring energy in joules, why don't we measure it in platos or al-Asharis?
Of course, the cynics would claim these men were not *really* Christians. That is, they really didn't *believe* in Christianity, but they professed such beliefs because they did not want to be persecuted. This is the "closet-atheist" hypothesis. But it doesn't square with the facts.
Many of the founders of modern science were also very interested in theology. If you read Pascal, this is obvious. Mendel was a monk. Newton often said his interest in theology surpassed his interest in science. Newton did end his Principles with:
"This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being...This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God."
As Charles Hummel notes,
"Newton's religion was no mere appendage to his science; he would have been a theist no matter what his profession."
Boyle set up Christian apologetics lectures. Babbage and Prout contributed to an apologetics series called the Bridgewater Treatises. Aggasiz, Cuvier, Fleming, Kelvin, and Linnaeus were what we now call 'creationists.' When I speak about Biblical beliefs that paved the way for science, I will use both Kepler and Pasteur to highlight two specific examples.
Furthermore, many of these founders of science lived at a time when others publicly expressed views quite contrary to Christianity - Hume, Hobbes, Darwin, etc. When Boyle argues against Hobbe's materialism or Kelvin argues against Darwin's assumptions, you don't have a case of "closet atheists."
C
lue #2: Science was not born in any non-christian culture.
Yet it's not just the bunching of these founders in a Christian culture alone that is significant. Perhaps even more significant is the complete lack of analogs for these men from other cultures. Where is the Greek version of Newton? Where is the Muslim version of Kepler? Where is the Hindu version of Boyle? Where is the Buddhist version of Mendel? Such questions are all the more powerful when you pause to consider that science studies truths that are universally true. How is it that so many other cultures, some existing for thousands of years, failed to discover, or even anticipate, Newton's first law of motion of Kepler's laws of planetary motion? So it's not just that the Christian religion is associated with the birth of modern science, it's also the fact that modern science was not birthed in cultures which lacked the Christian religion.
Of course, the skeptic could reply as follows:
Many of the most important advances were made by Muslims in the Moorish Spain area, and other infidels.
I do not deny that other cultures contributed important ingredients, for I would never argue that the Christian world view alone was sufficient for the birth of modern science. But the fact remains that advances in mathematics and engineering do not count as modern science (as I am thinking of), for the Muslims and "other infidels" did not discover the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of chemistry, the laws of heredity, the law of biogenesis, etc. If you take any introductory undergraduate textbook in physics, chemistry, biology, genetics, physiology, paleontology, etc., it is not hard to point to the knowledge that is indebted to the work of these Christian scientists from Europe. But you would find very little that is indebted to Greek, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist philosophers (aside from tools like mathematics and Arabic numerals).
In fact, if you survey other non-christian cultures, their inability to generate modern science renders this clue all the more powerful. For these cultures not only lacked the Christian world view's perception of Nature *and* God, they held to a view that prevented the birth of science. In this view, the Universe was eternal, necessary, cyclical, and organismic. One could argue that this view of the Universe followed from reason and observation (like Geocentrism). But Christianity gave men a larger reason to deny this type of cosmology, and in doing so, it paved the way for the birth of science.
I don't think it can be overemphasized as to how detrimental cyclical thinking was to the birth of science. And what made the cyclic views even worse was their close tie to the animistic/organismic view of the Universe. This feature was shared by the Hindus, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Chinese. A detailed analysis of all these cultures, in this light, would make my case all the more obvious. Consider the Chinese.
The Chinese make an excellent case study in the stillbirths of science. For the Chinese culture experienced long centuries of relative peace, material prosperity, active social interplay, creativity of mind, and contact with other cultures.
The French sinologist, M. Granet, noted that "the conviction that the All and everything composing it, having a cyclic nature" was what stymied the Chinese awareness of causal links between events. Thus, there was nothing odd, as far as the Chinese were concerned, in attributing the political failure of a prince to the fact that human sacrifices took place at his burial. As Granet noted, the Chinese were not interested in causes and effects, rather "manifestations, whose order mattered little, conceived as they were separate, but grafted nevertheless on the same root. Equally expressive, they appeared interchangeable." Thus, as historian of science, Stanley Jaki points out, "if at a particular time, a mountain collapsed, a river ran dry, a man allegedly changed into a woman, and a dynasty came to an end, the Chinese sage took all these as equally significant indications of a "change of order" both in the cosmos and in history, without feeling any urge to search into a causal relationship among them."
It's hard for us to appreciate this mentality given that we have been shaped to think in linear terms. But if you can begin to grasp it, you will see how awful it is for the development of science. Yes, the Chinese and many other cultures would keep records about the position of the stars. Yes, they would invent calenders and be able to make predictions. But none of this had anything to do with trying to understand how nature works. It had nothing to do with science. And for thousands of years, it never anticipated science. It was simple record-keeping so that they could recognize the "signs of the time" and situate themselves in the rhythmic breathing of the eternally cycling Universe. And boy, did these cultures get carried away with their cycles. They'd break cosmic history into large repeating epochs, that spun like a wheel, and within each epoch were smaller cycles, and within each smaller cycle were smaller cycles yet. And on and on went the wheel. Thus, phenomena were not something to understand. They were merely signs that gave you an address. Or as today's neo-pagans would say (as yesterday's Stoics said), we need to live in *harmony* with nature.
This is why historian of science Stanley Jaki would remark:
"In such a outlook, measurable, quantitative aspects of events occurring closely in time could have no particular significance. Their frequency or order of magnitude commanded no special interest, nor did the normal sequence of events....The Chinese, bent on seeking the poetical, empathic, and organismic solidarity among facts, had no interest in their regular sequence. In their eyes, it was cyclic anyway, bringing about much the same situation after the completion of each period."
It's no wonder that Yu-Lan Fung, a Chinese scholar in the early 20th century, wrote the following in The International Journal of Ethics:
"China has no science, because according to her own standard of value she does not need any....China has not discovered the scientific method, because Chinese started from mind, and from one's own mind."
But it isn't just cyclical thinking that prevents the birth of science. Organismic thinking is also just as detrimental and is almost always associated with cyclical thinking. The Confucian method of finding cosmic order was premised on intuitive reflections of social life. Confucius himself wrote that "Custom is whereby Heaven and Earth unite, whereby the sun and moon are brilliant, whereby the four seasons are ordered.." Confucians believed this not only because they saw the cycles of history as reflections of cosmic cycling, but because they saw humanity as a reflection of the cosmos In fact, their organismic views got carried away, where Tung Chung-Shu (who succeeded in making Confucianism the official state doctrine in 136 BC) would claim that the number of lesser joints in the body was the same as the number of days in a year. He would then add that there were twelve large joints in the body, because this figure and the four limbs matched the twelve months and four seasons. Opening and closing of one's eyes was explained as a reflection of the succession of day and night. Winter and summer were reflected in man's strength and weakness. This thinking is alien to science. This is thinking held captive by a cyclical, organismic world view where the focus was on finding one's *place* in the spinning wheel.
What matters is that cyclical thinking was a great hindrance to the birth of science. It was very powerful and channeled much thinking and creativity away from a scientific pursuit. This is one reason why Greek science, which started with such promise, died. This is why astrology eventually overshadowed astronomy, so much so that even Ptolemy would consider his Tetrabiblios to be of far greater importance than his Almagest.
In fact, it is most interesting to view China through the eyes of some Europeans. Specifically, I'm thinking of the letters of Father Matteo Ricci. Ricci settled in the mainland of China in 1584. At first he was impressed, as he found that they were able to predict two eclipses of the moon without any knowledge of Ptolemaic astronomy. But as the years went by, Ricci began to realize that even with his own modest level of understanding, he was more knowledgeable about matters of nature than his hosts' best minds. He would write in 1595:
"In truth, if China was the entire world, I could undoubtedly call myself the principal mathematician and philosopher of nature, because it is ridiculously and astonishingly little what they know; they are preoccupied with moral philosophy, and with elegance of discourse, or to say more properly, of style."
Y'see, a few more years of eclipses showed Ricci that his Ptolemaic astronomy was superior to Chinese astronomy. In 1597, he would write:
"About the learned among the Chinese, let me say that this: the Chinese have no science at all; one may say that only mathematics is cultivated, and the little they know of it is without foundation.....They just manage to predict eclipses and in that they make many mistakes. All are addicted to the art of divination, which is most unreliable and also completely false. Physics and metaphysics, including logic, is unknown among them....Their literature consists wholly in beautiful and stylish compositions all of which correspond to our humanities and rhetoric."
In 1605, he would explain the following concerning those who predicted eclipses:
"they know nothing more than to make computations, without any insight into the rules, and when the result does not come out right, all they say is that they kept to the rules of their forebears."
Ricci also discovered that the Chinese were preoccupied with astrology and he blamed this, more than anything else, for the backwardness of their science. He noted that while they were very interested in predicting when eclipses would occur, they had no idea of the physical cause of the moon's eclipse. Put simply, cause and effect thinking was not used to understand nature. In fact, those who did try to explain the cause of eclipses simply used their philosophy shaped by cyclical, organismic thinking. For example, in AD 80, Wang-Chhung explained eclipses as periodic changes in the "life-strength" of the moon and sun and to the consequent rhythmic variation in their intrinsic brightness.
The Chinese were also very resistant to views that did not line up with their organismic, cycling universe. They could co-opt other cultures that shared these basic views, but they turned their back on ideas that stemmed from a different view. This is clearly seen when the European missionaries visited China over a span of several several centuries and tried to teach them science. In 1645, Father Schall von Bell was forced to change in the title of his great astronomical encyclopedia the expression "according to Western methods" to "according to new methods." And the Chinese were not really interested in these "new methods." For example, Juan Yuan praised Chinese thinkers for not falling prey to the lure of Western methods:
"Our ancients sought phenomena and ignored theoretical explanation. Since the arrival of the Europeans, the question has always been concerning explanations, circular orbits, mean movements, eclipses, and squares. The foreigners think the earth revolves about a fixed sun....but the theory of Tycho has been modified many times during the last century and I believe it will be again....Therefore, I do not see upon what the Europeans base their arguments...and really it does not seem to me the least inconvenient to ignore the western theoretical explanations and simply to consider the facts."
The perception of "where we are" was indeed an overwhelming obsession of many cultures that held to an organismic, cyclical world view. This type of thinking was poison to science. It smothered a spirit of progress and replaced it with fatalism. It turned phenomena into omens and made astrology far more important than astronomy. And it even led to severe closed-mindedness, as once you figured out where you are, you had no use for views that would disturb this harmony. A great example comes again from Father Ricci. Ricci's map implied the sphericity and true dimensions of the earth that really bothered the Chinese. Wei Chun would write:
"Lately Mateo Ricci utilized some false teachings to fool people... The map of the world which he made contains elements of the fabulous and mysterious, and is a downright attempt to deceive people on things which they personally can not go to verify for themselves. It is really like the trick of a painter who draws ghosts in his pictures. We need not discuss other points, but just take the example of position of China on the map. He puts it not at the center but slightly to the west and inclined to the north. This is altogether far from truth, for China should be in the center of the world, which we can prove by the single fact that we can see the North Star resting at the zenith of the heaven at midnight. How can China be treated like a small unimportant country, and placed slightly to the north as on this map? This really shows how dogmatic his ideas are. Those who trust him say that the people in his country are fond of traveling afar, but such an error as this would certainly not be made by a widely-traveled man."
While it is true that many cultures mapped and described the heavens, and they did seek to describe relationships between things, this had nothing to do with understanding how nature works. And it certainly had nothing to do with trying to understand why nature is as it is. The ancients were interested in finding correlations. Just because someone figures out that the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] crows when the sun comes up doesn't mean they were interested in how nature works. No one would ask how is it that the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] crows when the sun rises. No one would ask why the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] crows when the sun rises. In fact, their organismic thinking often might lead them to think the [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse] might be causing the sun to rise! For example, in China, it was believed that misconduct on the part of the Emperor, or his officials, would have a disturbing effect on celestial motions which would have a further disturbing effect on terrestrial affairs.
Concerning the Babylonian astrologers and magi, Jaki says:
"Their principal compositions were incantations appropriate to any of the sundry phenomena of the heavens. Among them most notable were, of course, the eclipses. Legion is the number of tablets on which all sorts of events on earth were connected with the moon's partial and total eclipses and with the various shapes of its horns. The invasion of locusts, the sickness of princes, the flourishing of market places, the peaceful reign of the king, the slaying of huge armies, general inundations, devastation of crops, eruption of fighting in the temple of Bel, the healing of sick, are only a few of the countless events connected in ancient Mesopotamian omens with eclipses."
Magic was also *very* common in all cultures.and it was almost always tied to a cyclical, organismic view of the cosmos. If human affairs could could effect celestial motions, and celestial motions could effect human affairs, then of course the magicians would look for incantations and formulas to tap into this vibrating, rhythmic world. And the number of these incantations and formulas would simply grow and grow over time. Why? Because magic is not science. If an incantation didn't work, the magician would not abandon it. He would simply figure that the timing was not right, and then move on to the next incantation.
Yes, you do have a priori beliefs.
That isn't what I claimed. I claimed that if Christianity is correct as the Bible claims this explains why we have consistency and laws that govern the universe. The Bible claimed these laws were in existence long before mankind discovered them.
There would be no consistency nor any laws in existence that govern the universe, that is how it would be falsified. It is exclusively the Christian God because the Christian theology...the Bible claims that is what should be present in the universe if it is true.
The metaphysical assumptions that God made the universe comprehensible and had laws that could be discovered. The assumption that God was unchanging and so was the universe so it would be able to investigate and be the same when investigated again.
I just did.
