Creationism will only destroy science

I believe that Creationism will not destroy science. There are too many people in the field of science to have it stopped. More to the point, I don't wan't it to stop anyway. I see science as a great use of the gift God gave us. The ability to think and discover... to live.

Shane Roach said:

So, what's the problem then with the scientific community acknowledging that the speed of acceleration near the earth's surface or that metal will heat and glow if you run electrical current through a thin filament of it is more reliable knowledge than the ultimate origins of life the universe, and everything I always am left wondering...?

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The acceleration due to gravity was first measured by Galileo in the 16th century. A filament glowing when electricity passes through it was demonstrated by Humphrey Davy in 1801. It seems your idea of experimentally verifiable science doesn't bring your idea of reliable science much further than the end if the 18th century. That fits pretty well with the general tendency of YECs to reject scientific developments after that time, like geology and evolution, while accepting scientific revolutions from before that period, even if they that that turned bible interpretations upside down, like heliocentrism.

What you don't seem to realise is that real science has progressed beyond simply measuring g at the earth's surface, to Newtons laws and astronomers applying this quite happily to astronomy without any way of directly verifying their assumptions, at least before the 1950s. Einstein's revolutionary reformulation of the law of gravity was only really only confirmed in what you would describe as roundabout ways, but are the whole basis of science, making predictions and testing them. We have still never actually observed gravity itself, only measured its effects.

Your glowing filament has gone way beyond the Davy's pretty experiment, to discover what is actually happening in the wire. Thompson discovered the electron 1897 which completely reversed the previous convention of electricity flowing from + to -. Even with Thompson's measurement of its charge and mass, the electron was quite unobservable until very recently. We are still learning about how electric charge flows through a conductor.

The difference between evolution and measurements of g or glowing filaments, is that like the rest of science, evolution has progressed beyond these simple demonstrations over the last few hundred years.

theoddamerican said:

Evolution is truly a silly story and supported only on lies. I gave plenty of information through out this entire discussion and all people did was twist what I said. The truth of it is the only proof anyone ever gave me was evidence of variations between species, extict species that died during the flood and evidence of a common creator. The thing that all theist need to know is that they have a diferent gospel other that what the bible teaches. You say the earth and all in it was created in billions of years and in the bible God says otherwise(Exodus 20:11)If you believe this view then God can't figure out what he wants to say in genesis. What he says is The first day but in your view God stumbles with his words.

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Given that it actually says 'one day' rather than 'The first day', who is having problems figuring it out?

Your God is also different than the bible. The bible says that God is perfect, God is omnipotent, God is love, light and life. Gods work is described as very good and perfect. Your version of God is: For millions upon millions of years the earth was a raging cauldron of death, disease, violence, pain and suffering.

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Yet you have no problems with God inflicting 'a raging cauldron of death, disease, violence, pain and suffering' on every animal on the planet because of the actions of two members of a different species. So it would be terrible for God to create the world that way, but perfectly alright for him to punish the innocent along with the guilty, even though the punishment you say he inflicts on innocent animals is exactly the same what you complain about him creating.

And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.Gods word is perfect and mans word is falliable (evolution) When people try to make them agree, guess which one gets modified? In Romans 7:18-19 it says that man is a slave to sin because of the fall of Adam.

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In Romans 7:18-19 says nothing about Adam. Eve seemed just as liable to the desire of the flesh, and the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life 1John 2:16 as the rest of us. Gen 3:6 the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise. Odd that.

Death also came into the picture. Death did not come into the picture millions of years before this.

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Where does the bible say animal death is the result of the fall?

So when you get done rewriting your bible and actually see the truth for what it is and stop relying on your own intelligence and trust God that he is powerful enough to start life where he wants it I would love to talk again. But the God you serve is a mean clumsy sadistic evil God, because if the only way he could do it was through billions of years of death then that means we never had a chance in the beginning because death came before sin and God set it up that way and we were going to fall anyway whether or not God gave us a choice or not.I will not worship your God.

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We will all bow the knee before him, but I am sure you can apologise to him about this later

Assyrian said:

The acceleration due to gravity was first measured by Galileo in the 16th century. A filament glowing when electricity passes through it was demonstrated by Humphrey Davy in 1801. It seems your idea of experimentally verifiable science doesn't bring your idea of reliable science much further than the end if the 18th century. That fits pretty well with the general tendency of YECs to reject scientific developments after that time, like geology and evolution, while accepting scientific revolutions from before that period, even if they that that turned bible interpretations upside down, like heliocentrism.

What you don't seem to realise is that real science has progressed beyond simply measuring g at the earth's surface, to Newtons laws and astronomers applying this quite happily to astronomy without any way of directly verifying their assumptions, at least before the 1950s. Einstein's revolutionary reformulation of the law of gravity was only really only confirmed in what you would describe as roundabout ways, but are the whole basis of science, making predictions and testing them. We have still never actually observed gravity itself, only measured its effects.

Your glowing filament has gone way beyond the Davy's pretty experiment, to discover what is actually happening in the wire. Thompson discovered the electron 1897 which completely reversed the previous convention of electricity flowing from + to -. Even with Thompson's measurement of its charge and mass, the electron was quite unobservable until very recently. We are still learning about how electric charge flows through a conductor.

The difference between evolution and measurements of g or glowing filaments, is that like the rest of science, evolution has progressed beyond these simple demonstrations over the last few hundred years.

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Are you kidding me? I could have sworn light bulb technology was like... within my lifetime........

Seriously... address my actual point or just don't bother. I am talking about the reliability of knowledge, which is largely an epistemological question. Why do people even run experiments in the first place if knowledge is just as reliable if you believe things that you hypothesize from previous experiments? We might as well have stopped experimenting with things at all.

I could go on to the concept of meta-mathematics, the problem of actually knowing whether a model is even so much as internally consistent without external verification, and a lot of other things, but until the political wing of the evolution lobby drags itself back to terra firma and stops trying to compare experimentally verified fact with conjecture, there's really no sense in it.

Shane Roach said:

Are you kidding me? I could have sworn light bulb technology was like... within my lifetime........

Seriously... address my actual point or just don't bother.

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We have been addressing your point. Unfortunately your point is based on a misunderstanding of science that ground to a halt at the end of the 18th century.

Evolution only compares unfavourably in your eyes when you limit science to the form of demonstration in Humphrey Davy's lab. That was just the beginning of scientific research into electricity.

I am talking about the reliability of knowledge, which is largely an epistemological question. Why do people even run experiments in the first place if knowledge is just as reliable if you believe things that you hypothesize from previous experiments? We might as well have stopped experimenting with things at all.

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Which is what you want? Leave electricity with Davy's verifiable incandescent filament? What science does is test things that they hypothesize from previous experiments. That is why they experiment.

I could go on to the concept of meta-mathematics, the problem of actually knowing whether a model is even so much as internally consistent without external verification, and a lot of other things,

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Ah good old Godel. I would have though testing scientific theories and hypotheses was external verification, you know, see if it works in the real world. But if you want to come up with a way to apply Godel's theorem to the scientific method go ahead. But please come up with a method that applies to all the sciences, not just evolution.

but until the political wing of the evolution lobby drags itself back to terra firma and stops trying to compare experimentally verified fact with conjecture, there's really no sense in it.

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I thought they compared conjecture with repeatable experiment, but maybe I missed something.

Assyrian said:

We have been addressing your point. Unfortunately your point is based on a misunderstanding of science that ground to a halt at the end of the 18th century.

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I and thousands of other people do not have some desperate misunderstanding of what science is. That is a canard. Anyone capable of reading a sentence knows what science is. The fact that you so often return to what is basically nothing more than a personal attack in the face of your inability to answer a simple and straightforward question is eventually going to catch up to you. Your movement is lucky the vast majority of people do not consider it all that important to their lives.

Assyrian said:

Evolution only compares unfavourably in your eyes when you limit science to the form of demonstration in Humphrey Davy's lab. That was just the beginning of scientific research into electricity.

Which is what you want? Leave electricity with Davy's verifiable incandescent filament? What science does is test things that they hypothesize from previous experiments. That is why they experiment.

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Thank you... so, if you move from a test to the hypothesis that the origin of species is through evolution, then you turn around and do a test on a type of wheat, and it has nothing to do with the origin of species, but rather to do with the origin of a specific type of wheat coming from another type of wheat...? How is that verifying the concept of origin of species? it is verifying the original experiments, many of which indicate that there is adaptation in living things, but none of which verify the origin of species. You then misrepresent that experiement as having VERIFIED the HYPOTHESIS. But it has not. It is consistent with the hypothesis, indeed is the very reason FOR the hypothesis of the origin of species, but it does not verify the hypothesis.

Anything you discover is going to be consistent with the hypothesis. Why? Because it is simply not possible to verify or eliminate something that happened in the past. Period. Does that mean give up the hypothesis? As I have already said, no. A large enough cloud of various evidence could concievable be convincing. It would not be AS convincing as being able to demonstrate it over and over in a lab, but there are degrees of certainty to be had, and it is in those degrees of certainty that evolution loses its luster in comparison to established and repeateably demonstrable concepets such as electricity.

The fact that your movement so desperately attempts to deny THAT foundational fact of epistemology is the evidence that you all know good and well the theory is actually weak. If you had the sort of evidence to truly support it, you would trot it out rather than insisting without any real evidence that it is a strong theory with lots of support, and constantly bullying and insulting people with nonsense allegations like, "you don't know what science is," who question it.

Assyrian said:

Ah good old Godel. I would have though testing scientific theories and hypotheses was external verification, you know, see if it works in the real world. But if you want to come up with a way to apply Godel's theorem to the scientific method go ahead. But please come up with a method that applies to all the sciences, not just evolution.

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It doesn't apply to the sciences. It applies to the mathematical models used for advanced sciences which can't be confirmed through external verification. In short, you can't simply keep trotting out mathematical models that indicate something works as evidence that something actually works. At some point you have to externally verify.

Anything you discover is going to be consistent with the hypothesis. Why? Because it is simply not possible to verify or eliminate something that happened in the past. Period.


I felt really sick last week. Ought i to entertain the possibility that i died last monday evening? If everything is possible and nothing can be eliminated or verified that happened in the past, then it is a reasonable hypothesis to investigate.

Perhaps the undetermination of theory by the data does not actually mean that all hypothesis are potentially valid concerning past events or that it is impossible to verify past events.

rmwilliamsll said:

Anything you discover is going to be consistent with the hypothesis. Why? Because it is simply not possible to verify or eliminate something that happened in the past. Period.


I felt really sick last week. Ought i to entertain the possibility that i died last monday evening? If everything is possible and nothing can be eliminated or verified that happened in the past, then it is a reasonable hypothesis to investigate.

Perhaps the undetermination of theory by the data does not actually mean that all hypothesis are potentially valid concerning past events or that it is impossible to verify past events.

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I think you're perfectly fine as long as you don't expect ME to believe you were sick last week. If you want me to believe it, assuming I even care, you will need to produce some evidence of some sort in the here and now. This becomes more and more difficult to do the longer the time lapse between something happening and trying to find evidence for it happening. Just ask any forensic scientist.

In any event, this is not to the point since I also made it clear that I believe it is possible to acquire evidence to substantiate claims concerning the past. I simply stand by the statement that there are degrees of reliability and that the degree of reliability of evolutionary theory is substantially less than the degree of reliability of how to create and operate a light bulb, etc, which I have in turn stated is important to this conversation because many supporters of evolution try to pass it off as if it were as sure an understanding as any in science just because yes, it is part of the ongoing scientific inquiry of the world around us. This is a blatantly false characterization of the state of evolutionary theory, at least as far as it pertains to the origin of species.

I simply stand by the statement that there are degrees of reliability and that the degree of reliability of evolutionary theory is substantially less than the degree of reliability of how to create and operate a light bulb


how do you measure degrees of reliability?
how do you compare the reliability of TofE with the reliability of the theories used to create and operate a light bulb?

you have proposed experimentation as a process in verification. what other verification means are there?

rmwilliamsll said:

I simply stand by the statement that there are degrees of reliability and that the degree of reliability of evolutionary theory is substantially less than the degree of reliability of how to create and operate a light bulb


how do you measure degrees of reliability?
how do you compare the reliability of TofE with the reliability of the theories used to create and operate a light bulb?

you have proposed experimentation as a process in verification. what other verification means are there?

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Sometimes reliability is measured in terms of probability. I am afraid where TofE is concerned, it is probably a matter of using the old fashioned "reasonable man" theory of reliability one finds in law.

I never proposed experimentation as a process for verification. It was proposed before my time. Perhaps you would like to propose a different method for verification? The, "the authorities say it so it must be true," method perhaps?

Meh... I need to get back to the fellowship section for a while. I am getting downright sarcastic.

I believe there will come a day when we christians will not be fighting over YEC or OEC, because we will recognize that YEC is not a reality. OEC will prove itself out. I just think too many YEC use straw man arguments to get their proof.

Extirpated Wildlife said:

I believe there will come a day when we christians will not be fighting over YEC or OEC, because we will recognize that YEC is not a reality. OEC will prove itself out. I just think too many YEC use straw man arguments to get their proof.

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I doubt this will ever happen. We still have people that believe that the moon landings were a hoax. It's sad, but there will always be those that reject science no matter what evidence you provide.

Shane Roach said:

I simply stand by the statement that there are degrees of reliability and that the degree of reliability of evolutionary theory is substantially less than the degree of reliability of how to create and operate a light bulb, etc, which I have in turn stated is important to this conversation because many supporters of evolution try to pass it off as if it were as sure an understanding as any in science just because yes, it is part of the ongoing scientific inquiry of the world around us. This is a blatantly false characterization of the state of evolutionary theory, at least as far as it pertains to the origin of species.

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Certainly it is true that ideas in science have different levels of support, but I think some distinctions should made here. First, you seem to be comparing a science (evolutionary biology) with a technology (light bulbs), which I find a little confusing. Building a lightbulb just requires a recipe, not scientific understanding -- but lots of scientific understanding underlies the recipe.

More to the point, different components of evolution have different levels of support. The common ancestry of, say, all mammals has an extremely high level of support, and I would say that it does have comparable certainty to the physics that underlies light bulbs (not that there is any way of quantifying that certainty). Exactly how and why species changed and split to produce modern mammals is much less certain, and many of the details are unrecoverable from the data available to us.

That's my opinion on the relative strengths of the two theories, anyway, and I think my opinion reflects that of most scientists in those fields.

sfs said:

Certainly it is true that ideas in science have different levels of support, but I think some distinctions should made here. First, you seem to be comparing a science (evolutionary biology) with a technology (light bulbs), which I find a little confusing. Building a lightbulb just requires a recipe, not scientific understanding -- but lots of scientific understanding underlies the recipe.

More to the point, different components of evolution have different levels of support. The common ancestry of, say, all mammals has an extremely high level of support, and I would say that it does have comparable certainty to the physics that underlies light bulbs (not that there is any way of quantifying that certainty). Exactly how and why species changed and split to produce modern mammals is much less certain, and many of the details are unrecoverable from the data available to us.

That's my opinion on the relative strengths of the two theories, anyway, and I think my opinion reflects that of most scientists in those fields.

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I don't have a lot to say about that except that I will never have as much faith in something I cannot see demonstrated as I do in things that I can.

That's just me though. Funny thing to hear from someone who believes in Jesus being raised from the dead perhaps...

On the other hand, after the initial act of faith in believing, I feel as if I have had Christ's reliability demonstrated to me again and again, so I do not see my faith as an entirely blind thing, as many Christians seem to, or at least as some claim.

I'll tell you when people like myself will be convinced of evolution. IF we manage to survive as a people and over the course of thousands of years we eventually observe speciation, folks like me will believe.

The fact that we have been breeding things like dogs and plants for centuries and have yet to see anything like speciation really does tend to dampen my faith in the concept. I think even if I were an absolute atheist I would wonder why more attention is not paid to the idea that perhaps what happened was that there was an initial spate of wildly varied life forms, and through the ages they have been pared down rather than slowly increasing.

There is a big black hole where the initial spawning of life is concerned in science. If it is every filled, that will settle a lot of things. The fact that there is all this pressure to accept evolution despite the lack of certain fundamental knowledge is just very offputting to me from a philosophical viewpoint.

Speciation has been observed.

Melethiel said:

Speciation has been observed.

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To add to this, do a simple survey of scientific literature. There are thousands of papers on speciation being observed. My guess is, you'll reply with, "But they're still the same kind!"

Talk Origins said:

Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).

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The fact that we have been breeding things like dogs

dogs interbreed freely with wolves and coyotes.
even hybrids with foxes, jackals, dingos.

where is the species boundary lines if you define them to be no interbreeding?

the point is that canids haven't become completely separated breeding populations despite being classified as a family.

Pats said:

. Frankly, considering your grasp of grammar, it is not surprising that you have no grasp of science. Your total inability to consider theology that does not match yours also shows a severe lack of willingness to even attempt to participate in these discussions.

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If it doesn't match up with what the bible says, then I don't want any part of it. My grasp of grammar is not important. If I want to use big words that make me sound more intelligent than another, that is just a pride issue.

Here is a list of over 600 scientist who agree with me and think that evolution is silly. They see that evolution is only supported by ones opinion and view point.
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660

True evolutions laugh at your beliefs because they know that the bible and evolution can't go together.

If you want to believe in evolution go ahead but you are believing a lie and I hope that you will all see that it is you who keeps evolution alive. Evolution is a stumbling block that satan uses to cause good Christians to question all they believe. All the evidence of evolution that you think that you have is completely useless. If you would only look at the evidence and look at both sides and not just the one.

God loves you and I love you. I hope that you will someday see Gods true character, and not your own understanding.