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 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.
....
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
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.
....