Cut and paste rearrangement:
Calminian said:
My biggest concern with scientists is that they don't grasp the assumptions their field is based on.
I suggest that perhaps you should reign in on your arrogance of presuming to know what scientists do or don't grasp.
Any scientific investigation starts out with presumptions, those on the frontiers often start out with many presumptions.
But ultimately, each presumption is tested, shown to be justified, or modified to fit the evidence, or discarded.
Until finally the only assumption left is that what we percieve has some reasonably good correlation to reality.
Calminian said:
My point was [Creation Science organizations] are honest about their approach. They start with the presupposition that the Bible is historically accurate.
No, that is what one would be led to believe by reading the front page and the "about us" page.
Their approach is that Genesis 1-11 is literally true and that all evidence
must be interpreted in such a way to support that belief.
They have a superior method because they don't limit themselves to naturalistic assumptions.
On the contrary, the evidence demonstrates that their method is fatally flawed because they limit themselves to a particular supernaturalistic dogma.
Creation ministries use scientific evidence along with other forms of evidence (the Bible, etc.) in their rational arguments for a young earth.
Quote-mining and spreading false information may be rational by some views, but it certainly isn't Christian.
You irrationally limited yourself to methodological naturalism. Why be irrational? Why limit yourself?
For the same reason that I don't start looking in another state when I am trying to find my keys.
Experience.
Centuries of experience.
If we use the Bible as a science notebook then we believe that the Earth is unmoving with the Sun and moon rotating about it.
Many of the first geologists were Christian and believed in the Flood, but they couldn't find any evidence for it, and the evidence they did find pointed to a very old Earth.
If you ask Gluadys, she has a list of early geologists whose history is informative to read.
More recently, at the beginning of the last century it was noted that Africa fits nicely over S. America, with geology and fossils matching.
There was no physically possible way (known) for continents to move.
That left three choices:
Continental Drift is false
The continents moved but we don't know how.
God did it! Or more specifically, during the Flood God caused mountains to be raised and continents to move.
After much debate, most geologists took choice 1.
30+ years later the evidence started piling up and plate techtonics provided a naturalistic answer that fit the evidence.
30+ years after that we actually measured the movement of continents.
The flood hypothesis, any YEC hypothesis, predicts uniform age for the ocean floor.
Plate techtonics predicts that the farther from the central range where the plates are formed the older the floor.
It provides a ready and natural (as opposed to ad hoc) explanation for the pattern of reversed magnetic fields in the floor.
It predicts the difference in sediment depths.
Any YEC hypothesis must invoke miracle after miracle after miracle.
In order to defend their particular interpretation of the Bible they must add reams of unmentioned miracles to it. It isn't a question of whether God
could do it, but rather that there is no evidence that he
did do it.
Now, if a group of Christians started emulating the early Christians and when they laid on hands they had a significantly higher than normal recovery rate then science might start considering a supernatural cause as a hypothesis that should be explored
in that case, but just as medical examiners don't start looking at blocked heart arteries as cause of death when a young man is brought in with a bullet hole through the head, in general supernatural explanations are not worth investigating.