Consequences of the a-priori commitment to materialism

[npetreley]

I pointed out elsewhere that having an a-priori commitment to materialism forces you to look at evidence in a narrow-minded way. Here's a perfect example of that narrow-mindedness at work. In 1968, William J. Meister found a fossil that appeared to show that someone wearing a sandal stepped on a trilobite.

By the way, contrary to the claims of so-called debunkers, other footprints were found in the same area, so this was not likely to be a rock shape that just "looked like a footprint."

Anyway, regardless of what you may or may not think of this discovery, the following account at the URL below is rather revealing of something I've said a number of times now. People with an a-priori commitment to material causes have no choice but to believe in evolution, because it's the only thing they can think of that would explain how we got here by material causes. So they cannot tolerate any evidence that contradicts their conclusions, and are required by their a-priori commitment to materialism to just toss out that contradictory evidence or explain it away -- even if they have no way to explain it away.

http://clearwisdom.net/eng/2000/Dec/29/SCF122900_2.html

In a subsequent news conference, the curator of the Museum of Earth Science at the University of Utah, James Madsen, said [ignoring the fact that it's a sandal print]:

There were no men 600 million years ago. Neither were there monkeys or bears or ground sloths to make pseudohuman tracks. What man-thing could possibly have been walking about on this planet before vertebrates even evolved?

Madsen then went on to say that the fossil must have been formed by a natural process, though of what kind he was unable to suggest.

Put simply, "Don't bother showing me anything that contradicts my conclusion, because it can only be reliable evidence if it confirms my conclusion."

Sort of like, "It doesn't matter what these people say, or if these people have a PhD in Biology from Purdue or UC Berkeley. They are still clearly liars, uneducated and ignorant. Why? Because they don't agree with me."

 

[RufusAtticus]

Originally posted by npetreley
Put simply, "Don't bother showing me anything that contradicts my conclusion, because it can only be reliable evidence if it confirms my conclusion."

Sort of like, "It doesn't matter what these people say, or if these people have a PhD in Biology from Purdue or UC Berkeley. They are still clearly liars, uneducated and ignorant. Why? Because they don't agree with me."

Sounds like you have summed up the creationist position quite well.

 

[chickenman]

no its more; "don't bother postulating a conclusion that contradicts other evidence that we have".

 

[Jerry Smith]

Chickenman: right on the money!

Originally posted by chickenman
no its more; "don't bother postulating a conclusion that contradicts other evidence that we have".

Lets add - don't bother postulating a conclusion on the basis of one isolated fossil that looks kind of like a footprint

when this conclusion is contradicted by scads of other evidence we have. Did we learn nothing from Paluxy?????

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Poor Nick misunderstands the challenge in front of him again. In another thread I said:

"Show us where exclusion of the supernatural has proven to be needlessly narrow-minded and/or has led to erroneous conclusions. Show us where consideration of the supernatural would have allowed us to develop a more descriptive theory. Show us where elimination of the supernatural caused science to develop an incorrect theory."

The alleged "sandal" you've shown is really quite laughable. For this you expect to toss out all the rest of our well tested and supported scientific knowledge? Maybe if the word "Nike" was clearly readable on the sole...

 

[Ray K]

Originally posted by npetreley
By the way, contrary to the claims of so-called debunkers, other footprints were found in the same area, so this was not likely to be a rock shape that just "looked like a footprint."

LOL!!! A "footprint" ???

That is too funny. Oh wait, it's not a footprint, it's a sandal. Why? Because all we have is a rough shape of a foot. How much rock was removed at that break by the "toes"? There's no telling, is there?

At this area, we can't find bones. We can't find tools. We can't find evidence of man-made structures. We can't find art or jewelry or pottery. Yet, these are things we find easily in the archaeological remains of known human habitations.

So what do we find here? A print in the vague shape of a sandal! It can't be a foot, because that would be too hard to occur naturally (toes, arch, etc).

Wow, what a convincing find!


NOT.

 

[Jerry Smith]

Moral of this story:
This "find" was not dismissed because of any a-priori commitment to naturalism. The conclusion that it is a sandal-print is dismissed because there is not enough evidence that it really had anything to do with a sandal to push human existence back 100-300 million years before the first human remains have been found.

Moral #2: if there were a human foot-print on the trilobite (with 100% certainty both that it was a human foot and that it was a trilobite), and the find was dated to the Cambrian (or some such), then we would have to either find a good explanation for it, or we would have to consider the possibility that neo-darwinistic evolution falsified. We still could not start looking for supernaturalistic explanations for this data unless we decided that it would be a good time to abandon science.

So, what about those "consequences"?

 

[randman]

Nick, good job. It is obvious that any data which contradicts evolutionism will simply be thrown out.

Btw, I am still waiting for some explanations of the 3 species Jerry demanded Nick list on the other thread.

 

[randman]

"On July 20, 1968, the Antelope Spring site was examined by Dr.Clifford Burdick, a consulting geologist from Tucson, Arizona, who soon found the impression of a child's foot in a bed of shale. "The impression," he said, "was about six inches in length, with the toes spreading, as if the child had never yet worn shoes, which compress the toes. There does not appear to be much of an arch, and the big toe is not prominent." The print was shown to two geologists and a paleontologist. One of the geologist agreed that it appeared to be that of a human being, but the paleontologist's opinion was that no biological agent had been involved. Dr.Burdick stuck to his guns:

The rock chanced to fracture along the front of the toes before the fossil footprint was found. On cross section the fabric of the rock stands out in fine laminations, or bedding planes. Where the toes pressed into the soft material, the laminations were bowed downward from the horizontal, indicating a weight that had been pressed into the mud.

In August 1968 Mr.Dean Bitter, and educator in the Salt Lake City public school system, claimed to have discovered two more prints of shoes or sandals in the Antelope Spring area. According to Professor Cook, no trilobites were injured by these footfalls, but a small trilobite was found near the prints in the same rock, indicating that the small sea creature and the sandaled wanderer might have been contemporaries."

 

[Jerry Smith]

Originally posted by randman
Nick, good job. It is obvious that any data which contradicts evolutionism will simply be thrown out.

Yeah, like a sandal-shaped rock with a trilobite embedded in it. And the Paluxy "man tracks". And the "coso artifact". Yeah.

Btw, I am still waiting for some explanations of the 3 species Jerry demanded Nick list on the other thread.

You aren't willing to wait very long are you? You will, of course have your explanations, and I will throw in the Cycads & the crocodiles to round out the "4 or 5", since Nick could apparently only think of three... This I will do after work today, not during.

 

[DialecticMaterialist]

First off I wonder why materialism is being discussed in the science section....isn't that philosophy?

Secodnly, its true materialists fit evidence into theory, but ALL evidence is fit into a theory. That's human nature. It's whether or not the evidence is very compatible with the theory that matters.

Also materialists don't have to accept evolutionary theory, many materialists accepted spontanious generation for example as well as many myths in greek days which posited materialist explanations for life.

Evolution is just accepted by most materialists and even supernaturalists because it is proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

[Jerry Smith]

A brief article showing a few of the reasons this trilobite sandal-print isn't taken seriously:

According to Dr. Melvin Cook (1970), a local rockhound named William J. Meister was hunting for trilobites along a hillside near Antelope Springs, Utah in 1986 when he broke open a slab and discovered something curious: an oblong shape that he took for a human sandal print. This was quite surprising, since the rock at this locality is identified as the middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation--over 500 million years old.

The supposed sandal print measured approximately 10 1/2 inches by 3 1/2 inches, and occurred on both sides of the slab (with opposite relief). The specimen included what Meister took as a heel demarcation, as well as several small trilobites.


The "Meister Print". Arrow points to one of the trilobites in the specimen


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Shortly after Cook's report, other creationists (Kofahl and Segraves, 1975; Baker, 1976; Wysong, 1976; Huse, 1983; Petersen, 1987) cited the Meister find as evidence against evolution and the standard geologic timetable. However, the putative print does not stand up to close scrutiny.

The specimen does contain several real trilobites, but the "print" itself is questionable on several accounts. Upon closer inspection the overall shape is seen to consist of a spall pattern in a concretion-like slab, similar to others in the area. There is no evidence that it was ever part of a striding sequence, nor evidence that it was ever on an exposed bedding plane. The "print" is very shallow and shows no sign of pressure deformation nor foot movement at its margin. The supposed "heel" demarcation is actually a crack that runs across the entire slab, beyond the boundary of the supposed print. The slight relief difference at this point is due to slight movement along the crack line (Conrad, 1981; Stokes, 1986).

Similar spall patterns are abundant in the Wheeler formation, as are slabs showing concentric oval shapes of varying color, sometimes with stair-step like relief. Several other of these oblong features have also been interpreted as possible human prints (Cook, 1970), but are even less convincing than the Meister specimen (Conrad, 1981). None occur in striding trails or otherwise meet the scientific criteria by which genuine human prints are reliably identified. The geochemical processes such as solution penetrations, spalling, and weathering which form such features in fissile rocks of the Wheeler formation was discussed in considerable detail by Stokes (1986).

Several such "pseudo-prints" from Antelope Springs were sent to me in the early 1980's by creationist biologist Ernest Booth. One showed both an ovoid spall pattern similar to the Meister print, and another a color-distinct ovoid pattern without topographic relief. Booth expressed dismay that his fellow creationists had not explained that such superficially print-like features were abundant at the site, and were products of geological phenomena and not real prints (Booth, 1982).

Some creationists have noted that the find was "confirmed" by "Dr. Cook." However, Dr. Cook was a metallurgist with little paleontological experience or knowledge. In his own report on the find Cook states, "...I am by no means an authority on fossils and footprints." He adds that the print seems to "speak for itself". However, upon close inspection, what the evidence says does not support Cook's conclusions.

In short, the trilobites in the specimen are real enough, but the "print" itself is dubious. After mainstream rebuttals of this find were published in the 1980's (Conrad, 1981; Stokes, 1986; Strahler, 1987), most creationists quietly and wisely ceased promoting this specimen. However, a few individuals continue to advocate it as an out-of-order fossil.

From...
http://members.aol.com/Paluxy2/meister.htm

Those few individuals who continue to advocate this as an out of date fossil --- Who got their credibility?

Nick?

 

[Jerry Smith]

Another quiet thread... Along with the "third set of teeth"... I notice the KS thread seems to have dropped the topic of KS fossils, too...
hmmm...

 

[LiveFreeOrDie]

Yep, I sure would have liked to have gotten an answer to this one:

"Show us where exclusion of the supernatural has proven to be needlessly narrow-minded and/or has led to erroneous conclusions. Show us where consideration of the supernatural would have allowed us to develop a more descriptive theory. Show us where elimination of the supernatural caused science to develop an incorrect theory."

 

[tcampen]

Why on Earth would you expect one?

 

[lucaspa]

I pointed out elsewhere that having an a-priori commitment to materialism forces you to look at evidence in a narrow-minded way.

Kuban's article, with the appropriate references, pretty well demolishes the "print" as genuine.

There are two types of materialism or naturalism: methodological and philosophical.

http://natcenscied.org/aladont.htm

"Science as practiced today is methodologically naturalistic: it explains the natural world using only natural causes. Science cannot explain (or test explanations about) the supernatural. There is also an independent sort of naturalism, philosophical naturalism, a belief (not science, but belief) that the universe consists only of matter and energy and that there are no supernatural beings, forces, or causes."

Methodoligical materialism arises out of how experiments are done. Science simply can't directly test supernatural causes; we can only test material causes. That is not to say that there are no supernatural causes, just that science is unable to directly test for them.

People with an a-priori commitment to material causes have no choice but to believe in evolution, because it's the only thing they can think of that would explain how we got here by material causes. So they cannot tolerate any evidence that contradicts their conclusions, and are required by their a-priori commitment to materialism to just toss out that contradictory evidence or explain it away -- even if they have no way to explain it away.

This is projection or, people in glass houses should not throw stones.

From the Institute for Creatoin Research:
"(1)The Bible is the written Word of God, and because we believe it to be inspired thruout, all of its assertions are historically and scientifically true in all of the original autographs. To the student of nature, this means that the account of origins in Genesis is a factual presentation of simple historical truths. (2) All basic types of living things, including man, were made bydirect creative acts of God during Creation Week as described in Genesis. Whatever biological changes have occurred since Creation have accomplished only changes within the original created kinds. (3) The great Flood described in Genesis, commonly referred to as the Noachian Deluge, was an historical event, world-wide in its extent and effect. "

So, the Bible is historically and scientifically true. This a priori commitment means that they have to toss out or explain contradictory evidence or explain it away, even when there is no explanation.

 

[Pete Harcoff]

This thread's over a year old. Please let it die.

 

[Cantuar]

Wow - I thought for a minute that Nick was back...