Vance,
We are not talking about science that deals with the present in these debates. Let me define my position:
All the achievements of science, such as modern medicine, electricity and computers, and so on, involve doing experiments in the present, making inferences from these results and doing more experiments to test those ideas. Here, the inferences, or conclusions, are closely related to the experiments and there is often little room for speculation. This type of science is called process, or operational, science.
However, there is another type of science that deals with the past, which can be called historical, or origins, science. When it comes to working out what happened in the distant past, science is very limited because we cannot do experiments directly on past events, and history cannot be repeated. In origins science, observations made in the present are used to make inferences about the past. The experiments that can be done in the present that relate to the distant past are often quite limited, so the inferences require a deal of guesswork. The further back in the past the event being studied, the longer the the chain of inferences involved, the more guesswork, and the more room there is for non-scientific factors to influence the conclusions - factors such as the religious belief (or unbelief) of the scientist.
Therefore, what may be presented as "science" regarding the past may be little more than the scientist's own personal world-view. The conflicts between "science" and "religion" occur in this historical science, not in process science. Both evolutionists and creationists have the same science to use, the same scientific evidence - yet they come to different conclusions about the origin of a given evidence or object. Why is this? They all use the same things, but they have different presuppositions (different underlying belief systems called "world-views"). A scientist's conclusion about the origin of the evidence is governed by his bias or presuppositions, or what the scientist initial believes and takes for granted.
Unfortunately, the respect earned by the successes of operational science confounds many into thinking that the conjectural claims arising from origins science carry the same authority. It is my conviction that you may not totally understand how much a scientist's presuppositions affect their conclusions when dealing with stuff from the very distant unobservable stuff -- i.e. this debate.
With this knowledge, we'll analyse your argument carefully and see which part of science you are talking about:
YECs will insist that science also starts with preconceived concepts, such as the basic tenets of evolution, or of gravity, or hundreds of other building blocks upon which they do their current work.
Notice, you bring up evolution and gravity.
What part of science is molecule to man evolution in? Historical science, which implies that assumptions and preconcieved beliefs will be used (see above defintion of historical science and associated consequences. It is an easy task to understand that no scientist was present over the millions of years to witness the supposed evolutionary progression of life from the simple to the complex. No living scientist was there to observe the first life forming in some primeval sea. No scientist was there - no human witness was there to see these events occurring. They certainly cannot be repeated today! The observations that can be done that indirectly relate to the past are filled with holes and unknowns that assumptions must fill.
What part of science is gravity in? Process science. We can test the idea of gravity and experiment with it. We also observe how it works and that it exists. No assumptions based on religious bias or preconcieved assumptions are needed.
Both your examples are in two different areas or types of science. You can't have it both ways if you wish to make a comparison between two vastly different things...
We can observe and test the idea of gravity, but we cannot observe nor test the idea of organisms evolving from the simple to the complex over eons of years - in fact, 2nd law of thermodynamics implies the other direction - nor can we test the idea that life came from lifeless chemicals without assumptions (because we don't know the conditions as we were not there).
IF, however, you're refering to the simple changes we observe in nature today, then creationists have no problem with that. All changes observed turn out to reduce the information in a creature (information = specified complexity) which strongly fits the creationary "varriation within a kind" model.
1. These theories or concepts first arose *from* the physical evidence and data, not the interpretation of the data from a conclusion. YECist preconceptions arose from a particular reading of Scripture (and one that *only* YECs accept).
As has been proven time and time again, the evidence can't speak - it has no voice. The conclusions about what the evidence means or it's origin are the direct result of an interpretation of the scientist.
It's often interesting to watch the CSI shows (although I prefer Medical Investigation myself) when they say something along the lines of, "The evidence tells us," in response to "What makes you think that?" More interesting still, the evidence typically "tells" them that a particular person did it, then, near the end of the show it turned out that the person that they accused was innocent all along! If the evidence told them that the original person was guilty, then it MUST have lied! No, the CIS people misinterpreted it.
For example, DNA on a particular object, A. Let's examine this:
* The evidence: - A person's DNA is on A.
There are two possible interpretations:
- The person touched A.
- The person is being framed and someone else who put his DNA on A.
Notice, this is what the CSI shows do NOT tell you. They assume that the first interpreation is true if there is no reason to believe that the person is being framed. Many times, the first interpretation is the most logical and the one most likely to be correct -- but it an interpretation based on logic and rational thinking...
Of course, as mentioned above, the further back in the past the more open to interpretation the evidence becomes and more assumptions are need to fill the ever present unknowns and gaps. These assumptions are based on a scientist's underlying belief system.
This isn't an overly hard concept to understand.
2. The entire scientific community is set up to encourage challenges and criticisms of theories and concepts. THat is why there are always arguments, fights, debates, etc. No one just accepts an idea in order to "toe the party line". The YEC community states right up front that their preconceived starting points (an old earth, some limitation on Gods ability to create through evolution) are not up for debate.
And the TEs and OECs have their own presuppositions. According to Halton Arp, the scientific community is not as clear and in pursuit of the truth as you are implying. He wrote a book called Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science because his work did not get published in the scientific journals. Since the big bang is the current astronomical orthodoxy, it is no surprise that Arp and others with similar views have encountered unrelenting, often unreasonable, opposition in publishing their findings.
Even National Geographic has been criticized by evolutionists. Storrs L. Olson, the Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian Institution said this about National Geographic in their relentless attempt to try and factualise dino-bird evolution:
The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age---the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.
Radiometric dates that are out of the "correct ball park" are often discarded as Dr Richard L. Mauger says:
In general, dates in the "correct ball park" are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are discrepancies fully explained.
Notice, all these areas that we have discussed are in the distant unobservable, untestable, and unrepeatable, past -- these are all apart of historical science - not process science.
3. Scientific theories will be abandoned if and when there is sufficient evidence and cogent analysis which shows that it can not be true. In short, the scientific community will go wherever the overwhelming evidence leads them, even if the path is not what they expected or if it upsets their comfort zones. The YEC community has placed a very specific line where they will not go, no matter what the evidence says.
Many times it takes years. For instance, scientists knew that the Ernst Hackael drawings of the embryos were a fraud since the 1960s, but I am willing to bet quite a lot of money that I do not have that I would easily be able to find it written in modern biology textbooks as "evidence for evolution". Galileo also went up against stiff opposition, although his was in process science. The problem with historical science, is that it is so closely linked to what we believe deep down in side and it heavily affects what we believe to be true about a number of issues and also in many times affects how we behave.
4. Lastly, there IS no common worldview among all in the scientific community. There are Christians and non-Christians, those who fully accept the supernatural and those who reject it. For an idea to be accepted it must run the gauntlet of critique from thousands of scientists from a wide variety of worldviews.
Common worldview: that everything can be explained by natural processes and that the universe is old...
I may have missed out a few words between several words, so I will apologise in advance -- I'm a little tired for some reason, even though I had a good night's sleep.
God Bless you Vance,
Delta One.
We are not talking about science that deals with the present in these debates. Let me define my position:
All the achievements of science, such as modern medicine, electricity and computers, and so on, involve doing experiments in the present, making inferences from these results and doing more experiments to test those ideas. Here, the inferences, or conclusions, are closely related to the experiments and there is often little room for speculation. This type of science is called process, or operational, science.
However, there is another type of science that deals with the past, which can be called historical, or origins, science. When it comes to working out what happened in the distant past, science is very limited because we cannot do experiments directly on past events, and history cannot be repeated. In origins science, observations made in the present are used to make inferences about the past. The experiments that can be done in the present that relate to the distant past are often quite limited, so the inferences require a deal of guesswork. The further back in the past the event being studied, the longer the the chain of inferences involved, the more guesswork, and the more room there is for non-scientific factors to influence the conclusions - factors such as the religious belief (or unbelief) of the scientist.
Therefore, what may be presented as "science" regarding the past may be little more than the scientist's own personal world-view. The conflicts between "science" and "religion" occur in this historical science, not in process science. Both evolutionists and creationists have the same science to use, the same scientific evidence - yet they come to different conclusions about the origin of a given evidence or object. Why is this? They all use the same things, but they have different presuppositions (different underlying belief systems called "world-views"). A scientist's conclusion about the origin of the evidence is governed by his bias or presuppositions, or what the scientist initial believes and takes for granted.
Unfortunately, the respect earned by the successes of operational science confounds many into thinking that the conjectural claims arising from origins science carry the same authority. It is my conviction that you may not totally understand how much a scientist's presuppositions affect their conclusions when dealing with stuff from the very distant unobservable stuff -- i.e. this debate.
With this knowledge, we'll analyse your argument carefully and see which part of science you are talking about:
YECs will insist that science also starts with preconceived concepts, such as the basic tenets of evolution, or of gravity, or hundreds of other building blocks upon which they do their current work.
Notice, you bring up evolution and gravity.
What part of science is molecule to man evolution in? Historical science, which implies that assumptions and preconcieved beliefs will be used (see above defintion of historical science and associated consequences. It is an easy task to understand that no scientist was present over the millions of years to witness the supposed evolutionary progression of life from the simple to the complex. No living scientist was there to observe the first life forming in some primeval sea. No scientist was there - no human witness was there to see these events occurring. They certainly cannot be repeated today! The observations that can be done that indirectly relate to the past are filled with holes and unknowns that assumptions must fill.
What part of science is gravity in? Process science. We can test the idea of gravity and experiment with it. We also observe how it works and that it exists. No assumptions based on religious bias or preconcieved assumptions are needed.
Both your examples are in two different areas or types of science. You can't have it both ways if you wish to make a comparison between two vastly different things...
We can observe and test the idea of gravity, but we cannot observe nor test the idea of organisms evolving from the simple to the complex over eons of years - in fact, 2nd law of thermodynamics implies the other direction - nor can we test the idea that life came from lifeless chemicals without assumptions (because we don't know the conditions as we were not there).
IF, however, you're refering to the simple changes we observe in nature today, then creationists have no problem with that. All changes observed turn out to reduce the information in a creature (information = specified complexity) which strongly fits the creationary "varriation within a kind" model.
1. These theories or concepts first arose *from* the physical evidence and data, not the interpretation of the data from a conclusion. YECist preconceptions arose from a particular reading of Scripture (and one that *only* YECs accept).
As has been proven time and time again, the evidence can't speak - it has no voice. The conclusions about what the evidence means or it's origin are the direct result of an interpretation of the scientist.
It's often interesting to watch the CSI shows (although I prefer Medical Investigation myself) when they say something along the lines of, "The evidence tells us," in response to "What makes you think that?" More interesting still, the evidence typically "tells" them that a particular person did it, then, near the end of the show it turned out that the person that they accused was innocent all along! If the evidence told them that the original person was guilty, then it MUST have lied! No, the CIS people misinterpreted it.
For example, DNA on a particular object, A. Let's examine this:
* The evidence: - A person's DNA is on A.
There are two possible interpretations:
- The person touched A.
- The person is being framed and someone else who put his DNA on A.
Notice, this is what the CSI shows do NOT tell you. They assume that the first interpreation is true if there is no reason to believe that the person is being framed. Many times, the first interpretation is the most logical and the one most likely to be correct -- but it an interpretation based on logic and rational thinking...
Of course, as mentioned above, the further back in the past the more open to interpretation the evidence becomes and more assumptions are need to fill the ever present unknowns and gaps. These assumptions are based on a scientist's underlying belief system.
This isn't an overly hard concept to understand.
2. The entire scientific community is set up to encourage challenges and criticisms of theories and concepts. THat is why there are always arguments, fights, debates, etc. No one just accepts an idea in order to "toe the party line". The YEC community states right up front that their preconceived starting points (an old earth, some limitation on Gods ability to create through evolution) are not up for debate.
And the TEs and OECs have their own presuppositions. According to Halton Arp, the scientific community is not as clear and in pursuit of the truth as you are implying. He wrote a book called Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science because his work did not get published in the scientific journals. Since the big bang is the current astronomical orthodoxy, it is no surprise that Arp and others with similar views have encountered unrelenting, often unreasonable, opposition in publishing their findings.
Even National Geographic has been criticized by evolutionists. Storrs L. Olson, the Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian Institution said this about National Geographic in their relentless attempt to try and factualise dino-bird evolution:
The idea of feathered dinosaurs and the theropod origin of birds is being actively promulgated by a cadre of zealous scientists acting in concert with certain editors at Nature and National Geographic who themselves have become outspoken and highly biased proselytizers of the faith. Truth and careful scientific weighing of evidence have been among the first casualties in their program, which is now fast becoming one of the grander scientific hoaxes of our age---the paleontological equivalent of cold fusion.
Radiometric dates that are out of the "correct ball park" are often discarded as Dr Richard L. Mauger says:
In general, dates in the "correct ball park" are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are discrepancies fully explained.
Notice, all these areas that we have discussed are in the distant unobservable, untestable, and unrepeatable, past -- these are all apart of historical science - not process science.
3. Scientific theories will be abandoned if and when there is sufficient evidence and cogent analysis which shows that it can not be true. In short, the scientific community will go wherever the overwhelming evidence leads them, even if the path is not what they expected or if it upsets their comfort zones. The YEC community has placed a very specific line where they will not go, no matter what the evidence says.
Many times it takes years. For instance, scientists knew that the Ernst Hackael drawings of the embryos were a fraud since the 1960s, but I am willing to bet quite a lot of money that I do not have that I would easily be able to find it written in modern biology textbooks as "evidence for evolution". Galileo also went up against stiff opposition, although his was in process science. The problem with historical science, is that it is so closely linked to what we believe deep down in side and it heavily affects what we believe to be true about a number of issues and also in many times affects how we behave.
4. Lastly, there IS no common worldview among all in the scientific community. There are Christians and non-Christians, those who fully accept the supernatural and those who reject it. For an idea to be accepted it must run the gauntlet of critique from thousands of scientists from a wide variety of worldviews.
Common worldview: that everything can be explained by natural processes and that the universe is old...
I may have missed out a few words between several words, so I will apologise in advance -- I'm a little tired for some reason, even though I had a good night's sleep.
God Bless you Vance,
Delta One.
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