the problem of time

[rmwilliamsll]

The last week or so, we here have seen an YECist effort to propose to finese the problem of time.

Essentially what their argument is about:
Access to the distant past is impossible.
science can only talk about what it can manipulate on a laboratory bench, reproducible, in present time etc.
therefore all theories of origin, in particular evolution and creation are equally good ways to explain the data.

I'd like to address just the problem of time here. I have replied to several of their threads outlining the problem so if they are unaware of it they could do a little googling and respond. But thus far i haven't seen any responses so i'll be more systematic and address just that issue here.

i'll start with one of the messages i wrote on the topic

the problem of time is significant and it does the issue great injustice to just divide the sciences up into normal vs origins as does AiG or a little more sophisticated as here with process and historical. All sciences are a mixture of the two. What is the difference if something is 1 week old or 1 million years old? both are past. The 'brains in the vat' problem point at something very important about memories and the past. If you point out that you where here 1 week ago and your memories are authoritative to you, then all i have to do is move the marker to one day before you were born. if you want i can move the marker to 1 day before the oldest human alive now was born, the issue is still the same. memories, evidence, experiments all have a past and present component. Simply to classify geology as an historical science since it talks about the distant past is disingenuious for the techniques to investigate the past are present in all the physical sciences. The experiments i did in college chemistry are past, 25 years past, older than 1/2 of the human beings on earth and therefore in their history, not their 'present' accessible via their own memories. but that doesn't invalid the science i did at the lab bench. nor does the passage of time itself decrease the probability that something did or did not occur.

you don't doubt that that Lincoln wrote and delivered the Gettysburg address. how about it Washington stood up in full uniform in the middle of the night and rowed across the delaware? the question is evidence, interpretative technic, etc. not the mere passage of time.

these are big issues in philosophy and in the philosophy of science in particular, and it does no one a service to think you can finese the issues by neatly dividing the physical science into these two great domains, you can't.


btw
"it is impossible to prove creation or evolution wrong as we can't observe, repeat or test experimentally events that happened in the distant unobservable past without using circular reasoning."

proof is for maths and alcohol, science is inductive not deductive in its basic structure and never proves anything like math does, rather it shows something is beyond reasonable doubt in the manner of the legal system.

and yes you can demonstrate and persuade that creation is a bad theory based on the evidence and that evolution fits the data. using technics that have both historical and experimental basis. just because it is distant in time does not rule out sciences access to it, it decreases probability and increases uncertainity but not this brick wall AiG and their ilk would erect at some unknown point in time. btw exactly where is this barrier? at 6K creation? this is the problem of apparent age and God as a trickster we discuss on a regular basis.

from: http://www.christianforums.com/showthread.php?p=16009492#post16009492

the mistake that the YECists are consistently making and ignoring the consequences of is that last week is as much in the past as is 4 billion years ago as far as the claim that science must work reproducibly in the present. That's why i like the label 'last thursdayism' because it points so strongly at the fact that we must rely on memory to understand our world.

not just human memory, for as i pointed out that only at best gets us to the age of the oldest individual on earth. But the memory incorporated into books for instance. But the memory i want to address is the memory incorporated into rocks, into the substance of our world that display the great age of the earth and the universe.

I think that the YECist viewpoint can be summed up in the phrase:
"you weren't there, God was, therefore the eyewitness account of Gen trumps all science".

But this is a gross misunderstanding not just of geology but of the history of geology. in a nutshell, the history of geology is that Christians trying to prove the correctness of the Biblical account of the flood and a recent creation looked at the strata in England and were persuaded by the facts despite their desires and their initial framework that the earth was very much older than they had been lead to believe by the chronologies of Ussher.

But i want to look at the validity of geology, of deep geological time and the philosophy behind it.
uniformity of natural causes, is despite their protestions, a conclusion based on the data. like all scientific conclusions it comes back into play in the process of theorizing as a shaping principle. Thus allowing the radical cumulativeness of science (sure beats theology on this issue) where each generation stands on the shoulders of the giants before them. There is simply no evidence that the principles of uniformity are not valid back to the Big Bang. But i only need to go back 100k years (10 times the YECist age of the universe) to discredit their system entirely. I can do that with ice cores alone. C-14 back to 50K. tree rings back 20K. in all 3 cases there is NO evidence of a discontinuities that would challenge the principle of uniformity, ie NO universal world wide FLOOD.
so the principle stands over their proposed time scale.

Now there are lots of geological data: varves, radioactive dating, geological column etc etc. That are all convincing data to everyone but those who hold to a YECist system. And all their arguments against these things revolves around the single element--time. If you can't have placed a eyewitness there then you can't have validity of the data.

I believe that this is fundamentally a FUD campaign on the part of AiG and their ilk. (fear, uncertainity, doubt) For the problem of time is a well known philosophic problem. It does not have a solution. We can be no more certain of our memories from last week then we can about the memories in the million year old rocks. That is one reason that science never claims 100% certainty, that and the problem of induction for another instance. But AiG and the YECists in general don't have to do science, all they have to do is FUD. But by leading into the problem of memories, the problem of last thursdayism, the problem of the brains in the vat, they are ignoring the fact that these same issues are equally applicable to the Scriptures.

The exact same methods and techniques to investigate the geological column are used to do the archeology of the Bible. The exact same issues involved in the study of ancient texts and cultures are used to study the origin and transmission of the Scriptures. They are as suspect as the FUD YECists would propose on geology. You can not investigate the past since it is not accessible to us, it is not accessible to science. BAD philosophy of science, BAD theology.

What happens is a radical solipsism that proposes that i can only know what is in MY head NOW. a very high price to pay to create fear uncertainty and doubt that the world is very old and that YECism is as valid a science as is modern geology, for it leaves all of us with dust in our hands rather than a strong vigorous modern science. Essentially they would reduce science to zero so they can say---here see our creation science is just as valid as theirs. tearing down the opposition to your level. and that is bad epistemology.


btw
their technics destroy the basis of Christianity as easily and as completely as they propose it destroys the basis of modern science. for both systems have a similiar set of ideas in common and it is this set of ideas that they are attacking.

....

 

[shernren]

Actually the most logical conclusion (I hesitate to commit myself to saying "only") of this "remembered vs. experiential" false dichotomy is a logical system in which nothing exists unless it is observed. This is more or less Hinduism, except you don't have gods and goddesses on which to blame natural occurences you can't understand. In fact as far as I know, the current research on quantum physics is heading towards precisely that sort of paradigm, what with Schrodinger's Cat et al. I think that this is the real danger which science is holding in store for Christianity. I have seen many "layperson understanding" books for quantum physics: and I can say that almost all of them delve deeply into Far Eastern concepts, like comparing duality to a koan, change is all there is and true essence does not exist, there is no existence outside observation, etc. I have not yet seen any Christian paradigm for quantum physics. And that is the massive danger that faces Christianity as we can see in the resurgence of meditative / mystical "experience religions" such as yoga and New Age in the West. This is going to cause far more damage to the church than the silly evolution/creation tiff.

This is because the "remembered vs. experiential" dichotomy is essentially relativism. And, if the atheist cannot observe God, and is convinced that only what he observes is real (and taking your argument that we cannot know the past for sure, which includes seminal events like the Red Sea, the Decalogue, the Baptism and Transfiguration and Crucifixion and Resurrection ... ), how will you convince him that God is real?

Let's say I take three statements:

1. Sunlight was yellow a billion years ago.
2. Sunlight was yellow 8 minutes ago.
3. Sunlight is yellow.

AiG's dichotomy would separate statement 1 and 2 as "remembered" statements, and statement 3 as "experienced" statements. But I can easily show that statement 3 is equivalent to statement 2: for since the sun is 8 light-minutes away from the earth, anything we know about the sun now is only valid 8 minutes ago. I can take any "experienced" statement you can make and thus turn it into a "remembered" statement. Long live the pale ghost of science.

And to make things worse, our own cognitive machinery - the brain - often messes up time and causality to keep us sane. Two famous examples (you can also try to look up the "cutaneous rabbit" if you want). I put you in a room with a very sensitive clock, attach electrodes in your brain, and give you a red button to push. I ask you to note down the time when you decided to push the button. Let's say you record this time as 2:04:35. However from my electrode readings I would find that your brain actually sent the signal to your arm to push the button a few microseconds before 2:04:35! Why is your brain sending signals before it makes the decision that would send them?

Now, imagine a card with two LEDs, one on the left end and one on the right end, and both the same color. If I light the left LED and then quickly light the right one, you won't see two separate flashes but rather a bright dot traveling across the card from one LED to another. Now let's say I change the colours, make the LED on the left red and the LED on the right green. If I do the same thing, you would see a red dot start from the left, turn green halfway and end at the right. Now, let's say I took 0.1 seconds to light the green one. However, since the red dot turned green in the middle, your brain knew it was a green light at the other end 0.05 seconds before I turned it on!

The point I am trying to make is that it would be very dangerous to say "Okay, I'm observing this here and now so it must be real; whereas I did not observe this and that which happened a long time ago so I can say it wasn't real without being called a loony." The area of time perception is a dangerous minefield for Christianity and if we do not come up with a philosophical justification for these phenomena which does not conflict with Christianity, we will find ourselves falling yet farther behind in science instead of staying at the peak of it.

And the ironic thing is someone will then say: "But, that time when we started falling behind was in the past, so how do you know we really fell behind?"