Reply to creationist re: miracles and science

[EnemyPartyII]

there is evidence that the speed of light is changing, and has changed.

Not quite, there is evidence that there is a much higher speed of light, a second "C" if you will, that may occur when photons are induced into a hyper energised state, that hasn't occured naturally since shortly after the Big Bang. However, this is quite different from the idea that C as we know it has shifted as a constant... modern theories, by anyone reputeable anyway, consider that C is either 12 million miles a minute (ish) or something vastly more... but it can ONLY be those two speeds, and HAS only ever been those two speeds. To think of C as sort of sliding up and down a speed scale, like a car with different pressure on th accelerator, is not what any current theory seriously suggests.

In the case of redshift of observed stars, and the fact that the amount of redshift observed corresponds directly with the paralax AND cepheid variable deduced distance... C seems to be a constant, and it would requite much micromanagement and massage of the value of C to account for the observed facts if C is not constant.

 

[EnemyPartyII]

Ah I am sorry, I have seen no scientific evidence anywhere that the laws of physics have been violated. In the past few centuries where scientific discovery has been in vogue, I would expect many significant anomalies that are unexplainable by the scientific method.

waer to wine and the loaves and fishes clearly violate conservation of mass theories, unless you want to specifically hypothesise that Christ was a conduit for a truly massive amount of energy at the time, in the order of several hydrogen bombs worth... which seems like it raises more issues than it explains.

Walking on water, violates surface tension and Archimedian displacement co-efficients

healing the sick by laying of hands doesn't cporrespond to any KNOWN physical principles...

or am I missing the point?

 

[Deamiter]

Deamiter, not to distract, but eventually can you give me a hypothetical of what that scientific evidence might look like?

If miracles violate the laws of physics, you would expect to see inconsistancies in data -- particularly in statistical data. If prayer is effective in healing the sick, you would expect to see Christians -- or even a particularly devout (or whatever) subset of Christians stick out in even one of the many studies that have been done -- both with double-blind controls, and with pre-existing data.

In other areas -- if the speed of light had changed in the past, we would expect to see a shift in the spacing and strength of stars' emission lines, not a simple redshift. If the universe were created a mere 6000 years ago, we would expect to see all radioactive isotopes with half-lives of more than 20 years or so present, or at LEAST many more elements absent. That all elements with half-lives under 100,000 years or so (that aren't generated naturally) are missing, but all elements with half-lives over this number are present is rather telling!

I will never be one to claim that an absence of evidence is evidence of absense. It would be a logical fallacy to claim that a lack of evidence for miracles which violate the laws of physics is evidence that there are no miracles which violate the laws of physics. However, that the laws of physics hold in EVERY case that they are tested -- that prayer is NOT statistically relivent in healing and that people do NOT walk on water leads me to believe that God works in other ways.

Again, you can support your belief system purely with a LACK of evidence, but all you've constructed is a conspiracy complex. A belief in a God who creates a universe that looks like it's 13 billion years old is no different from belief in a pink unicorn that created the universe last Tuesday. In both cases, you've got a deity who went well out of its way to deceive us as we became advanced enough to investigate the universe it had created!

 

[Deamiter]

waer to wine and the loaves and fishes clearly violate conservation of mass theories, unless you want to specifically hypothesise that Christ was a conduit for a truly massive amount of energy at the time, in the order of several hydrogen bombs worth... which seems like it raises more issues than it explains.

Walking on water, violates surface tension and Archimedian displacement co-efficients

healing the sick by laying of hands doesn't cporrespond to any KNOWN physical principles...

or am I missing the point?

First of all, if any of these miracles were to happen today, they would be easily recorded. It would be easy to confirm that when a particular person laid hands on a believer that they had a higher chance than average of being healed, or that the barrel of water over there is now wine even though nobody touched it. In each of these cases, Jesus is demonstrating his divinity to the masses, and the miracle is, by necessity a violation of the laws of physics (or it wouldn't be very convincing).

Of course, none of these are observed today. So either Jesus enacted miracles which are not currently repeated, or the second and third-hand sources mis-reported the details (how many DID Jesus feed?). But the fact remains that in each of these cases, changing the way the universe works is central to the miracle.

In a global flood, changing the speed of light is not only unrelated to the flooding, but it requires the concurrent tweaking of the alpha constant, the nuclear forces -- even the mass of a neutron (or life would not exist on Earth). Instead of simply dumping a lot of water on the Earth, you'd have to suggest that God put water on the Earth, then laid sedement with progressively more complex organisms (in a pattern that curiously follows local evolutionary patterns as is evidenced by both morphology and genetics with ERVs). God must have decided not to allow the sedement to settle by itself, but to poof into existance extensive layers laid by marshes and forests on top of forests...

I won't go on, but the evidence against a global flood is much more than this pitiful summary! The claim is not simply that God added some water to the Earth in a physics-violating miracle, but that the entire universe was changed -- every constant and magnitude -- in order for the flood to produce all the effects that we now observe.

I guess I haven't been very clear in specifying where I deny that miracles violate physical laws. I do believe that they have and that they do on occasion. However, when I hear a young-earth creationist answer every evidence with, "what if God did THIS?" all I see is somebody using an absense of evidence to mentally support their position rather than looking at what we CAN know about the universe to inform their understanding of God's methods. Please forgive my apparent shifting of goalposts. My understanding of my beliefs have not changed here -- I have always believed that God can and has violated the laws of physics -- yet there is and has been no systematic violation of the rules God designed for the universe. I'm preparing a talk on femtosecond laser filamentation so I'm VERY busy and distracted these days, and the contradictions that you've noticed are me talking about different scales (violating EVERY law of physics simultaneously for no apparent reason vs. a demonstration of deity through feeding thousands). I'll try to shut up and not respond to threads like this in the future if I don't have the time to carefully qualify my statements.

 

[shernren]

Can you please tell us which miracle of Genesis you can detect using science alone?

#44:
Having said that, I agree with you that my tools aren't really sufficient to look at that just yet. As you can see I've already retreated from the area of the Big Bang (within this exploration) for now and given more research I might just back away from the origin of the earth, too. But: (quote snipped, you can go back and check if removing it changes the context)

The Flood is essentially the covering of the whole earth by deep water all simultaneously, is it not? This is a physical event. It has physical effects. Your own scientists have constructed contingent proofs saying that:

Since the Flood is such-and-such
therefore it caused this-and-that.

They rely on presently-known properties of water to deduce that hydrological sorting can explain an apparently evolutionary fossil record, and they rely on modern meteorology to deduce that the Flood could have caused an Ice Age which would have explained the evidence we see today for Ice Ages. They claim that if their findings are true, this validates the Flood.

Is it not fair, then, to say that if their findings are false, this would falsify the Flood?

#60:

When I talk about the Flood, I begin with some simple facts:

Water drowns people.
The reason water drowns is because it is polar and hence cannot dissolve enough oxygen to sustain human breathing. (If water could dissolve enough oxygen under stp - say 10%w/v, but I'm just throwing around a random figure - humans would be able to breathe underwater, OTOH.)
Once we establish "water is polar", we have established that at least electromagnetism and gravity were in operation during the Flood. Not only that, but they were in operation comparable to what we observe today, or else water would not drown people.
Now what? From here one has laid a valid presupposition, for if water was not the water we observe today, how can it drown people as the Flood requires it to? And yet we know that the water we observe today has very noticeable effects. The water we observe today cannot lay down paleosols (as AiG itself acknowledges, paleosols represent a major challenge to creationist geology), cannot hydrologically sort fossils to present an apparently evolutionary order, etc.
So in what way and where would water during the Flood be different from water today?

Or take the requirement to bring a pair of each animal onto the Ark.
This obviously presumes that animals perform sexual reproduction to reproduce. And sexual reproduction involves random reassortment of genetics in gametes and random recombination in fertilization.
Now what? The clear inference is that our modern genetics knowledge should apply to then. How were gametes or genes or organisms different during the Flood so that their offspring do not exhibit a massive genetic bottleneck effect?

These are questions the creationist has to answer. Either he has to show how water today and genes today can exhibit what we observe through a Flood story ... or he has to believe somehow that water during the Flood and genes during the Flood were different.

And yet there is no Biblical evidence, not a piece of textual clue, to tell us that they were any different.

And from #46:

And for dessert:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i3/paleosols.asp

Clearly Meert considers that paleosols have the potential to refute the global Flood. We agree! The concept of paleosols provides a good test for any biblical geological model. That we can use the Bible to develop a geological model that can be scientifically tested destroys the oft-repeated claim by evolutionists that ‘creation science’ is not science because it cannot be tested. We’re pleased that Meert acknowledges that biblical geology is a valid, scientific approach. But we do not agree that the biblical flood has been falsified.

... then read this:

http://gondwanaresearch.com/hp/walker.htm

And #51, a whole post quoted from creationist scientists about how their science detects miracles:

http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=27142139&postcount=51

These people seriously expect massive scientific evidence "for Genesis". What do they know that you and I don't?

 

[EnemyPartyII]

Yeah, gotta side with Shenren here... if the flood happened, there would be a bunch of evidence for it.