Are you denying that there is a difference between operational science and historical science?
There are loads of differences between all the sciences, but I never came across the operational / historical distinction when I was studying science. Sounds to me like categories Creationists made up to differentiate between sciences they like and the ones they don't, an excuse to ignore the evidence for evolution and the age of the earth.
Evolution is a very board term. It is slowly becoming ambiguous. Are you talking about "lizard to bird" Darwinianism or antibiotic resistance? Only one is supported by experimentation.
The experiment that had the most profound effect on me as a creationist was when they took the gene for cytochrome-c from a rat and transplant it into yeast whose cytochrome-c gene had been removed, yeast cytochrome-c differs by 40% from rat cytochrome-c, yet the rat gene was able to function and take the place of the missing yeast gene. This is a completely different biological kindgdom sharing the the same basic genetic code and biochemistry.
We have seen new genes arise in lab experiments allowing bacteria to digest food sources they were previously unable to use. The ability to digest Nylon a novel food source for bacteria arose naturally in Flavobacterium see:
Nylon-eating bacteria - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
But in a lab experiment the same ability to digest nylon was seen to evolve in Pseudomonas
Emergence of nylon oligomer degradation enzymes in Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO through experimental evolution -- Prijambada et al. 61 (5): 2020 -- Applied and Environmental Microbiology
For the evolution of the ability to digest citrate see
Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab - life - 09 June 2008 - New Scientist
In another experiment Chlorella vulgaris evolved from unicellular to 8 celled muticellular colonies when they introduced a predator that could only attack the unicelluar chlorella.
ingentaconnect Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey: A possible...
For other examples of evolution both in the wild and in the lab see
Observed Instances of Speciation
Not to mention of course the vast amount of evidence from fossils comparative physiology and genetic evidence, radiometric dating, astronomy and geology.
The farther removed in time or distance an indirect observation is, the greater the opportunity for distorted perception. All observations (direct/indirect) must be done of the present.
Which will give the most reliable evidence, a 2 millennia old fossil cast of a Roman from Pompeii, a 72 million year old fossilised velociraptor, or a 400 million year old trilobite? If anything, Potassium Argon dating is more reliable with older fossils because you are not trying to meaure trace amounts of Argon.
<snipped out>I seriously doubt any of the 16th and 17th century believers would have know what you were talking about with your 'operational science'. There was an attempt by geocentrists to limit heliocentrism to an abstract model, a way of calculating astronomical position, rather than a description of reality. But science and the church rejected this. If you want to compare the evidence they had back then to the evidence we have for evolution, we have vastly more evidence for evolution than they had when they accepted the reality of heliocentrism.
You think evolution does not count because we cannot travel in time, space travel was just as remote back then.</snip>No one could travel out into space to experiment with how objects move out there or see the motion of the planets from another perspective. Compared with the vast amount of information we have from fossils, comparative anatomy, physiology and genetics, they just had the regular movements of a handful of astronomical bodies and the occasional comet. You talk about presuppositions, geocentrists could fit all the observations into a coherent geocentric system, so could heliocentrists. It is just that the geocentric model was more elegant, especially when they abandoned Copernicus's circular orbits for Kepler's ellipses. But it was all still theory. No one saw the planets move in circles or ellipses, the saw the orbits side on as the planets moved across the night sky. The geocentrists had their geocentric explanation of the data, and one and an half millennia of church tradition interpeting scripture geocentrically. The heliocentrists had a more elegant mathematical model. Then Newton came along and gave a theoretical explanation for why the planets move in elliptical orbits - gravity.
<snipped out>
But look at the wild leaps Newton took in proposing this.
- Gravity operates in space as well as on earth, though no one had gone into space to see if this is true.
- Gravity does not just pull objects straight down, but if they are travelling fast enough it can also pull them in circular and elliptical orbits. No one had ever shown this was true. You could look at the parabolic curve of a cannon ball in flight, but to say if they are shot fast enough they would travel in a ellipse around the earth is a wild extrapolation, and I know how creationists love extrapolations.
- He claimed other bodies like the sun and planets exert a pull of gravity too, though we had only experience gravity on earth. It would have been even madder to suggest you could fire a canon ball from the sun and the sun's 'gravity' would would turn the cannon into another little planet orbiting the sun.
- He proposed that the force of gravity operated on the inverse square law. If you double the distance, the force of gravity is a quarter as strong. No one had ever tested this. They need it to be true to explain how orbital period varied with distance, but there was not evidence it was true.
- It wasn't until Sputnik was launched (those atheist scientists) that we had the first direct experimental evidence Newtons laws operated in space, and IIRC the Luna probes before we had direct evidence of gravity on other astronomical bodies like the moon drawing objects into elliptical orbits.
Heliocentrism was unproven and simply impossible to test directly. Even indirect evidence like stellar parallax did not come until much later. But the church accepted Heliocentism and changed their interpretation of scripture because Heliocentrism was simply the best scientific explanation available.</snip>
You are still talking about operational science. I don't see anything that deals with historical/origin science here.
Like I said your use of operation and historical science sounds like an excuse. You show here that you much prefer trotting out slogans than looking at the actual evidence. You ignore how little evidence science had for heliocentrism and how completely untestable it was when the church abandoned their geocentric interpretations as a mistake and found better ways to understand scripture. We have much more evidence for evolution, and from multiple lines of evidence too. Was the church was right to abandon their geocentric interpretations when they have much less evidence than we have for evolution.
Are you saying that the plain literal interpretation of a passage is always its true meaning. We both know this is not correct - so to define/label certain passages by their literal meaning is a fallacy. When the newspaper tells me the times for the "sunrise" and "sunset", I don't tell them to stop the presses. The sun may not be moving, but we still use such terminology. Why? Anyone who has spent much time watching the sky can testify that each day the Sun, moon, planets, and most stars do rise, move across the sky, and then set. Such observation and description do not at all address what actually causes this motion.
It isn't motion at all only apparent motion. It is not that the bible describe sunrise, but that it says God causes the sun to rise. It say God stopped the sun moving for Joshua and that a night, the sun hurries to the place where it rises. These passages seems to describe the sun literally moving in the heavens and for 3/4 of church history that was how people interpreted them. In fact the difference between the geocentric passages and Genesis is that there has been a long tradition of people like Origin and Augustine interpreting Genesis figuratively, while the geocentric passages were consistently interpreted literally. Should mean it is easier to interpret Genesis literally.
As creationists interpret Genesis literally. And just like the literal interpretation of the geocentric passages it should be abandoned when science shows us the interpretation is wrong.
Writing an account that is non-literal and writing an account that is contradictory are two different things. If the account is truly contradictory then the the writing negates coherency.
Quite true, but the figurative interpretations of Genesis 1&2 do not contradict each other, just the literal interpretations.
While reading through the book of Genesis or even Jesus' genealogies that link Him directly to Adam...at what point does true literal history kick in? After Adam? After the Fall? After the Flood? After Noah? After Abraham? How do you know when to start reading literally?
Does it matter? I would say you take each part of Genesis on it's own merits, Genesis even describes itself as being made up of different documents, this is the book of the generations of Adam. I don't see why a series of documents should all be in the same literary genre. In the OT the Jews seemed to look back to Abraham or the Exodus as the beginning of their history, not Adam. Matthew traces Jesus genealogy back to Abraham, though he gets quite symbolic dealing with the number of generations. Luke's goes back to Adam in his genealogy, but he only described it as 'supposed'. Is there anything in the NT references to Genesis that demand the earlier parts are literal?
You act like those are the only options I have, yet you know that my position holds to none of the above.
You position depends on your using the NIV's pluperfect which you were unable to justify. I prefer to look at what the text actually says.
