Why can't creationists distinguish between science and nonscience?
Fencingsax
all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
Bobby D. Bryant
> What about the proposed marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
Constitutional ammendments are 'constitutional' by definition.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
R Brown
"Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com...
limiting it to the natural world but also including Biblical miracles and
acts of God as empirical evidence. In short, they appear to be campaigning
for a re-definition of science that would allow for the inclusion of
Christian mythology (and, I guess, anyone else's for that matter). This
requires a total warping of the meaning of a testable hypothesis that leads
one to total logical gridlock: is there anything that God, god or gods can't
do? Also, since there is no way a person of faith can accept any possible
falsification of their deity then there really is no "science" as we
currently know the meaning and usage of the word unless we can convince
everyone else to adopt a new meaning of what science is. I have not been
able to get a clear understanding of what this would be - creationists are
very fuzzy on this one - but I gather it's rather like: "so long as it
supports my particular religious beliefs such that I may impose them on
others, it works for me".
Thore "Tocis" Schmechtig
> Please, Creationism
> is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
1. The babble is true.
2. go to 1.
> Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
> marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
1. The babble is true.
2. go to 1.
There now, it's easy, isn't it? That's why people believe such bullshit -
their feeble brains are incapable to grasp anything more complex than that.
--
Regards
Thore "Tocis" Schmechtig
Frank J
> all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> on comparative religion.
The professional anti-evolution strategists would have a problem with
that. But the "debate" is for the most part, not there yet. The public
mostly hears complaints of "unconstitutional" and "sneaking in God,"
and not how ID/creationism misrepresents science, and therefore is
inappropriate for science class. So the public is mostly convinced
that we are the "censors" who object to "fairness," when the reverse
is true.
> (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
The best deal for students is to:
1. Teach the real scientific controversies in science class. None of
these controversies involve common descent or the general timeline of
life's history, and all accept evolution in the general sense. This is
already done at the college level, but if introduced in high school,
anti-evolution strategists would have to drop at least their "teach
the controversy" line.
2. Teach the pseudoscientific challenges in a religion or other
non-science class. Before anything note that there are many mutually
contradictory "creationist" accounts (they are not theories) and an
"intelligent design" strategy that tries to cover up how the
creationist accounts all failed. Then have a "critical analysis" of
these accounts and strategies. Include how scientists involved in the
real scientific controversies are routinely taken out of context.
Even without 1 and 2, though, students already have all the "equal
time" they want. All they need to do is browse the Talk Origins
Archive (schools and libraries have internet access). The TOA easily
links to *all* the mutually contradictory anti-evolution positions and
strategies, whereas anti-evolution sites do not have easy access to
contrasting positions. That anti-evolution strategists rarely if ever
mention the TOA shows that they are the ones who are for censorship
and against fairness.
VoiceOfReason
> all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
I think the majority of Creationists don't have the
education/objectivity to understand what is and isn't good science.
In their defense, a number of less-than-honest groups have preyed on
the lack of knowledge, to include pseudoscience authors/con-men and
dishonest politicians. Thus Creationists get mixed messages that play
to their own ignorances and superstitions.
> Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
> marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
I think many Creationists/Fundies believe in selective application of
the Consitution (i.e., a double standard). Many of them are all for
pressuring children to pray in school (to Fundamentalist Christian
interpretation of things) yet will just as quickly deny "commies" the
right to demonstrate.
It's no surprise that fundamentalism has its power base in rural areas
that don't have much interaction with the wide diversity of citizens
in the U.S.
T Pagano
<chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>English).
Pagano replies:
The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
one has produced them.
This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
[Side Bar: Methodological Naturalism as used by secularists in this
forum only permits the examination of observable events; however,
modern secular scientific theories about cosmology, earth history,
abiogenesis and evolutionary biology contain UNobservables. The
bedrock presupposition of secular science is Philosophical
Naturalism.]
>The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
>conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb.
Pagano replies:
How do we know that the unscientific claim of modern secular science
(that is, that all events in space time are explanable with reference
to only matter and its properties) is not a myth? Fencingsax never
says.
The bedrock presupposition of modern secular science is impotent to
explain the very existence of matter an its properties. It is
impotent to explain the initial conditions of the purported cosmic
singularity of Big Bang. It is impotent to explain the initial
conditions for the orbits of the planets in our solar system. It is
impotent to explain abiogenesis.
The First Amendment was written to protect the people from their
government establishing a religion not prevent the people from
introducing religion into public life and public discourse.
Furthermore the three part test introduced by the Supreme Court
decision of 1971 to see if the First Amendment has been violated
doesn't prevent the introduction of metaphysical presuppositions of
any flavor into the classroom. The First Amendent nor the Court's
three part concoction were intended to stiffle inquiry into the nature
of our world.
>Please, Creationism
>is not a science.
Pagano replies:
If creationism is tainted with metaphysical components and is ruled
non science then so is modern secular science. Modern Secular Science
is likewise tainted with its bedrock metaphysical presupposition.
> And if it is what is its Scientific method?
Pagano replies:
Exactly the same. Modern secular geologists hypothesize that earth
history was made up of "calm," globabl-like flooding over eons.
Creationists hypothesize that earth history was punctuated by a short
term catastrophic world wide flood about 6000 years ago.
Creationists may determine the empirical consequences of their flood
and search the geologic record for those consequences just like the
secularists. The theories are slightly different but the method for
testing them is substantially the same. Fencingsax doesn't know what
he's talking about.
>
>Also, you want gagging the first amendment?
Pagano replies:
One wonders if Fencingsax knows any more about the US Constitution
than he/she does about "science."
> What about the proposed
>marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
Pagano replies:
Fencingsax can develp a close personal relationship with a small farm
animal but that doesn't make it marriage.
Finally the Framers included a mechanism for amending the
Constitution. If the constitution is successfully amended then the
marriage amendment will be "constitutional." Sheesh....
Regards,
T Pagano
Alexander
> all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
Well ok ... first of all it's not really about science at all. It's about
what is perceived to be true.
At the most superficial level when looking at Biblical creationism what you
are discussing is a literal interpretation of the Bible. A literal
interpretation precludes, by definition, any alternatives. So when science
starts describing both the 'how' and 'why' of our biological origins the
literalists start to get a little panicky.
Not only are you defining away their rationale for the creation of the
world, but if you challenge this cornerstone of literalism then it calls
into question the entire ideology of their literal Bible as well. This
means their identity, values, morals and ethical constructs are being called
into question. A literal Bible means just that, it must be a de facto
description of the world and God must have created it in such a way as to be
described by the Bible otherwise none of it can be true.
Therefore the Bible is not an allegorical tale and guide for life, but an
actual record of events. If this is so then Darwinian science and
methodology cannot _also_ be true. Hence, to a Creationist, evolution is
neither true nor scriptural, and if that is the case it cannot be morally
correct either (otherwise it would be Biblical, natch).
So the challenge to demonstrate evolution as 'religion' and a faith based
position is an attempt to claw back the ground lost over the sheer weight of
evidence available to most biologists, palaeontologists, cosmologists etc.
who are, according to the creationist, challenging the authority of God.
This isn't about mispresenting science as far as they are concerned, it's
about an actual fight between good and evil. The terms and definitions
being deployed are those that, the Creationists see, are the words of the
enemy who are out to deceive them. Their guidance is not in definitions of
the secular world, but from 'elsewhere' and no matter how frustrating it is
to keep pointing out how incorrect their usage and application of terms are,
they will not listen to us as we represent the immoral source of their
adversary.
I would challenge that most creationists are 'stupid' or even 'willfully
ignorant', despite the spicy flavours of trolls we have to sample here. I
would accept 'blinded by faith' however, as that seems most apt.
So - it really isn't about creationists understanding our own, technical,
definitions of science, method or practice, it's about their preconceptions
of belief, faith and how to challenge and witness to the unsaved. Taking
down Darwinian models has more to do with evangelism than anything else.
Like I said, a superficial reading as a lot more is tied into Creationists
needing to ringfence their identity referents and what might lie behind
that. Just look at Pagano's post to see what I mean.
Bob Casanova
appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Fencingsax"
<chris...@aol.com>:
>I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
>conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
>is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
There isn't any, nor (IMHO) is one even possible; when
"Goddidit" is an acceptable answer to literally *any*
question it's a bit difficult to analyze data for cause and
effect (at least, it's difficult to actually *learn*
anything). Most Creationists believe (or claim to believe,
which is operationally identical) that science is just
another belief system, and that conclusions reached via the
methods of science are no more valid a description of
reality than the "truth" written by long-dead nomads after
being passed down as oral tradition for dozens of
generations.
>Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
>marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
You want even worse gagging of the 1st Amendment, the "free
speech" and "free press" clauses of which were written
*specifically* to guarantee freedom of political discourse?
Check out the "60-day gag" provisions of McCann-Feingold,
and reflect on the fact that the SCOTUS approved it.
--
Bob C.
Reply to Bob-Casanova @ worldnet.att.net
(without the spaces, of course)
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
- Isaac Asimov
Bob Pease
"Bob Casanova" <nos...@buzz.off> wrote in message
news:6vqhi059uln596de5...@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), the following
> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Fencingsax"
> <chris...@aol.com>:
>
> which is operationally identical) that science is just
> another belief system, and that conclusions reached via the
> methods of science are no more valid a description of
> reality than the "truth" written by long-dead nomads after
> being passed down as oral tradition for dozens of
> generations.
My experience is that Creationists , if also Fundies, believe that
scientific conclusions are NOT a valid description of reality if they
contradict the conclusions reached by their method.
RJ P
---
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Rubystars
> all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
They start with the premise that miracles occur and God does this. This has
the status of axiom. It needs not be supported with evidence or demonstrated
objectively. It's accepted as absolute truth on faith.
They see the scientific method as inaccurate because it looks for physical,
natural, causes only, and would apparently not acknowledge "supernatural"
causes even if they were the true causes. If a scientist didn't find a
natural cause, he would continue looking for one, and not use "God of the
gaps." In other words, he would not allow for supernatural explanations
even when he couldn't find a natural one, but would continue pursuing a
natural cause.
They apply this to creationism in the following manner:
They believe a literal reading of the book of Genesis is a true history of
the world. They not only believe it, but they think that they *know* this
beyond all doubt.
Enter the scientific method, with its unrelenting empiricism. Because of the
way the scientific method is structured, it can not acknowledge that God
made man from dust, God made the universe from nothing, or any other
supernatural events. Instead it must seek natural physical explanations for
these things. Creationists view this as a tangent or wild goose chase.
If God can't be acknowledged as creating people, then the scientific method
must find a "natural" explanation, therefore the result is, from the
creationist view, that scientists had to scramble to find another
explanation based on whatever "empirical" evidence they could piece
together.
They listen to scientists talk about common ancestry with apes, and even
more oddly, with plants. They hear them speak about the Big Bang, and solar
discs, and plate tectonics. They listen to the talk about abiogenesis, about
complex life having an origin deep in the past from non-living chemicals.
They listen, and they laugh. They think it all the greatest nonsense. "Why,"
they think, "must the scientists go through all this when the truth is so
much simpler."
They believe that the scientific method, as it is, is too limiting. That
it's useful for explaining some things, but that it completely ignores the
very real miracles and supernatural events in the world. They believe that
scientists prefer complex fabrications over simple truths, and ignore the
plainest explanations in favor of futile and desperate efforts to explain
things through physical means alone.
Hugh Ross on one of his radio programs gave an analogy. He said that if a
man were shot in the back, but the police were limited to only explaining
deaths by "natural causes" that they would have to come up with a pretty
wild scenario to explain it. He said they'd have to say that meterorites of
a certain size must have hit him in the back. He claims that the scientific
method would benefit by allowing supernatural explanations because he feels
sometimes those are the most straightforward and make the most common sense.
This is the mindset we're at war with. We can try to explain why the
scientific method must remain the same. For example, we can tell them that
allowing for supernatural explanations discourages further investigation
because when an easy natural explanation is not found, a supernatural one
could be plugged in, thus solving the "problem" but coming up with the wrong
answer. We can give them examples of things that were given supernatural
explanations by the public that were actually found by scientists to have
natural causes, such as disease, mental illness, and thunderstorms. None of
this makes a bit of difference to them.
They can not see the value in the scientific method as it is, so they seek
to change it to conform with their pre-conceived notions.
I hope this explanation was helpful.
-Rubystars
catshark
<wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
[...]
>Hugh Ross on one of his radio programs gave an analogy. He said that if a
>man were shot in the back, but the police were limited to only explaining
>deaths by "natural causes" that they would have to come up with a pretty
>wild scenario to explain it. He said they'd have to say that meterorites of
>a certain size must have hit him in the back. He claims that the scientific
>method would benefit by allowing supernatural explanations because he feels
>sometimes those are the most straightforward and make the most common sense.
I haven't read much of Ross' stuff but I though he was smater than *that*.
Did he really try to deny that human actions are "natural causes"? (Ignore
that the *law* uses the terminology "homocide" or "natural causes". The
law ain't science. And anyway, the law has no category for "deicide" or
"demoncide".) The only other option appears to be that Ross is saying that
we should consider human action supernatural.
Or maybe he was just trying to slide a bit of rhetoric by based on legal
terminology.
[...]
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
[T]o shut our eyes against facts, and to take from nature no response
but such as suits our fanatical belief of what nature ought to be . . .
must do deadly mischief to the causes of inductive truth.
- Adam Sedgwick -
Frank J
> "Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com...
> > I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>
> Well ok ... first of all it's not really about science at all.
Agreed.
> It's about
> what is perceived to be true.
That may be true for the creationist-on-the-street, but many, possibly
most, anti-evolution activists don't care what's true or not; they
only care to exploit those who do.
>
> At the most superficial level when looking at Biblical creationism what you
> are discussing is a literal interpretation of the Bible.
But even creationists dispute among themselves which of the mutually
contradictory interpretations should be taken literally. Enter the ID
strategy, which tries to defer or downplay this question. I am in fact
convinced that most professional IDers privately believe that the only
correct one is the one that includes an old earth, common descent and
evolution.
> A literal
> interpretation precludes, by definition, any alternatives.
Only for those classic creationists who are willing to challenge other
creationist accounts. But they seem to be a dying breed. For IDers,
the only thing precluded is their caricature of "Darwinism," and even
then not necessarily its "results" (whatever that means).
> So when science
> starts describing both the 'how' and 'why' of our biological origins the
> literalists start to get a little panicky.
No they don't. They love the opportunity to reach into their semantic
bag of tricks.
>
> Not only are you defining away their rationale for the creation of the
> world, but if you challenge this cornerstone of literalism then it calls
> into question the entire ideology of their literal Bible as well. This
> means their identity, values, morals and ethical constructs are being called
> into question. A literal Bible means just that, it must be a de facto
> description of the world and God must have created it in such a way as to be
> described by the Bible otherwise none of it can be true.
>
> Therefore the Bible is not an allegorical tale and guide for life, but an
> actual record of events. If this is so then Darwinian science and
> methodology cannot _also_ be true. Hence, to a Creationist, evolution is
> neither true nor scriptural, and if that is the case it cannot be morally
> correct either (otherwise it would be Biblical, natch).
Again, many creationists-on-the-street may think that way, and
professional creationists and IDers exploit that to the max. But most
religions have moved on and agree that many of the "what happened an
when" are just allegories, and that the "thou shalts" are what counts.
Although it may take some time (membership issues?) before religions
themselves proclaim it, many religious individuals have accused
creationists and IDers of bearing false witness.
>
> So the challenge to demonstrate evolution as 'religion' and a faith based
> position is an attempt to claw back the ground lost over the sheer weight of
> evidence available to most biologists, palaeontologists, cosmologists etc.
> who are, according to the creationist, challenging the authority of God.
> This isn't about mispresenting science as far as they are concerned, it's
> about an actual fight between good and evil.
Actually, it's both. The activists believe that they need to
mispresenting science to "the masses" to win the culture war:
http://reason.com/9707/fe.bailey.shtml
> The terms and definitions
> being deployed are those that, the Creationists see, are the words of the
> enemy who are out to deceive them. Their guidance is not in definitions of
> the secular world, but from 'elsewhere' and no matter how frustrating it is
> to keep pointing out how incorrect their usage and application of terms are,
> they will not listen to us as we represent the immoral source of their
> adversary.
>
> I would challenge that most creationists are 'stupid' or even 'willfully
> ignorant', despite the spicy flavours of trolls we have to sample here. I
> would accept 'blinded by faith' however, as that seems most apt.
>
> So - it really isn't about creationists understanding our own, technical,
> definitions of science, method or practice, it's about their preconceptions
> of belief, faith and how to challenge and witness to the unsaved. Taking
> down Darwinian models has more to do with evangelism than anything else.
>
> Like I said, a superficial reading as a lot more is tied into Creationists
> needing to ringfence their identity referents and what might lie behind
> that. Just look at Pagano's post to see what I mean.
I am not sure where Pagano stands, whether he is seriously deluded, or
just trying to exploit those who are, but anti-evolutionists come in
all flavors, from YECs, to OECs who accept common descent, from
totally clueless to the multi-PhD William Dembski, from hopelessly
fundamenalist to agnostics who criticize religion (e.g. Charlie
Wagner). The only thing they have in common is a willingness to spread
misinformation about evolution.
>
(snip)
J McCoy
Nonsense. Evolution shouldn't be in the schools. Nobody has seen
any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents. This is sheer
speculation, outside the scope of science. Nobody has ever seen
non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
intelligence create complicated things. This puts random chance at a
disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
complex things as complex as a computer. No, you cannot observe that.
Do you know what that means?
Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
movement and accomplish nothing.
JM
Steven J.
"T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> >English).
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> one has produced them.
>
O. Wilson, Wilson contemplates, and indeed opines for the probable truth of,
the possibility that there are aspects of "events in space-time" that
science will *never* enable us to understand. This is not a particularly
exotic or controversial view among "modern secularists." Pretty obviously,
it's hard to insist that "matter and its properties" account for all
phenomena, if we're simultaneously insisting that we don't know and may
never know what accounts for *all* phenomena.
Rather, the question is, what sort of causes can actually *explain* any sort
of phenomenon? To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
than some other conceivable way -- a cause has to have some sort of
discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts. One must be able
to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
particular cause. Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
cause.
We've gone over this before. For example, a global flood in which the
waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics as observed today
would be a natural phenomenon, and its effects would be detectable by the
methods of geology and archaeology, and it would function as an explanation
for, e.g. why we find ruined cities and human bones under the jumble of
dinosaur and whale fossils in the flood deposits. Except, of course, that
geologists and archaeologists *don't* find such an arrangement of fossils,
or any of the other expected evidence of a global flood.
One could, of course, posit that the Designer intervened repeatedly and in
unfathomable ways for unguessable purposes in the course of a flood, so that
its empirical consequences were not at all what we would expect from a
global flood -- or even were exactly what we would expect from millions of
centuries of local, more "uniformitarian" causes. But one could not
differentiate the expected empirical results of one Designer's interventions
from those of another, rival Designer, or from the effects of mindless but
currently unknown causes. That is because such a Designer, as described,
has no knowable "nature" and His actions cannot be predicted or tested for.
>
> This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
> class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
> necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
> know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
>
As noted, you've identified the wrong bedrock; "modern secular science"
depends on testability, not atheism. The problem with the "creationist
presupposition" is that it offers no clue as to *how* the "supernatural
creator" is supposed to explain some events in space-time. The standard
creationist behavior is to identify some real or imagined problem in science
and simply stuff a God into that gap, with no clue as to why God would make
the world or part of it that way.
>
> [Side Bar: Methodological Naturalism as used by secularists in this
> forum only permits the examination of observable events; however,
> modern secular scientific theories about cosmology, earth history,
> abiogenesis and evolutionary biology contain UNobservables. The
> bedrock presupposition of secular science is Philosophical
> Naturalism.]
>
It has been repeatedly explained to you (indeed, on occasion you seem even
to have dimly grasped the point, before forgetting it again) that there is
such a thing as indirect observation. Indeed, there is scarcely anything
*except* indirect observation; even in "direct" observation one *directly*
observes only the influence of various phenomena on one's nervous system.
One makes and tests inferences about directly unobservable phenomena based
on their more directly observable effects. This is the case whether one is
trying to study atoms, or electromagnetic fields, or evolution.
>
> >The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> >conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> >gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> How do we know that the unscientific claim of modern secular science
> (that is, that all events in space time are explanable with reference
> to only matter and its properties) is not a myth? Fencingsax never
> says.
>
How do we know that "modern secular science" makes any such claim? I
assert, against your own assertion, that "modern secular science" makes only
the claim that testable explanations are the only real explanations of any
physical phenomenon. Ask a more interesting question: how would one test
between either [a] rival "supernaturalistic" theories (e.g. scientific
biblical creationism and scientific Ymirism), or [b] between an intelligent
designer of unknown and unguessable nature, and *unknown* "law" and "chance"
operations?
If you can't do the former, you can't say whether the Designer you want to
stuff in the gaps really wants the sort of worship and service you propose
to offer, or indeed has any interest in our spiritual or physical welfare at
all. If you can't do the latter, then Dembski's filter is a bit of
flimflam, prone to both the false negatives that Dembski concedes and the
false positives he pretends are impossible.
>
> The bedrock presupposition of modern secular science is impotent to
> explain the very existence of matter an its properties. It is
> impotent to explain the initial conditions of the purported cosmic
> singularity of Big Bang. It is impotent to explain the initial
> conditions for the orbits of the planets in our solar system. It is
> impotent to explain abiogenesis.
>
Actually, there exist at least incipient theories for all those matters,
although obviously it's easier to propose theories for the formation of the
solar system, or even life (in a universe where known physical laws already
operated), than to explain the origins of the universe itself. But again,
you keep assuming that if you can find a gap in current scientific
explanations, your particular theology is just the thing to stuff the gap
with. You don't seriously consider either the possibility of unknown
regularities of nature, or known regularities working in unknown ways, or
that we just never will find an explanation for some phenomena, and science
will just have to live with that.
>
> The First Amendment was written to protect the people from their
> government establishing a religion not prevent the people from
> introducing religion into public life and public discourse.
> Furthermore the three part test introduced by the Supreme Court
> decision of 1971 to see if the First Amendment has been violated
> doesn't prevent the introduction of metaphysical presuppositions of
> any flavor into the classroom. The First Amendent nor the Court's
> three part concoction were intended to stiffle inquiry into the nature
> of our world.
>
But where "the people" propose to act as or through the government (e.g. in
government-run, compulsory schools) to introduce "scientific" teachings
whose only discernable merit is that they support those people's theology,
that does rather tend to establish a religion. As has been repeatedly
pointed out, few things are more prone to stifle inquiry into the natural
world than a tendency to invoke a miracle ("intelligent design!") wherever a
"naturalistic" explanation is not immediately at hand ("Dawkins can't, off
the top of his head, explain every step in the evolution of the bacterial
flagellum!").
>
> >Please, Creationism
> >is not a science.
>
> Pagano replies:
> If creationism is tainted with metaphysical components and is ruled
> non science then so is modern secular science. Modern Secular Science
> is likewise tainted with its bedrock metaphysical presupposition.
>
You have not managed to correctly describe that "bedrock," which is an
epistomological, not metaphysical, presupposition, or to demonstrate how
science would be done in its absence.
>
> > And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> Exactly the same. Modern secular geologists hypothesize that earth
> history was made up of "calm," globabl-like flooding over eons.
>
I am unfamiliar with the term "global-like." Given that 70+% of the Earth's
surface is currently covered by water, are we currently in the middle of a
"calm, global-like" flood?
>
> Creationists hypothesize that earth history was punctuated by a short
> term catastrophic world wide flood about 6000 years ago.
> Creationists may determine the empirical consequences of their flood
> and search the geologic record for those consequences just like the
> secularists. The theories are slightly different but the method for
> testing them is substantially the same. Fencingsax doesn't know what
> he's talking about.
>
Around 200 years ago, devout Christian geologists like Adam Sedgwick gave up
on a literal global flood in human history. They did indeed determine the
expected empirical effects of such a flood, look for it -- and failed to
find it. I think this would be the fate of any actual, testable hypothesis
of a global Noachic flood. Were YECism true, for example, I would expect to
find cetaceans in the same strata and formations as plesiosaurs and
ichythosaurs, or modern shorebirds alongside _Icthyostega_. I would *not*
expect different strata to consistently yield different isochron dates.
Modern flood geologists seem to try something very different -- look for
anomalies and unsolved problems, and declare that these falsify mainstream
theories and somehow confirm modern "flood geology." Or, they cherry-pick
and misrepresent the data, cobble together assorted half-assed explanations
(e.g. differential mobility, or "grass runs faster than velociraptors"),
and, faced with contrary evidence, point out that the Creator might, for
unknown reasons, have intervened in natural processes to produce exactly
that result.
>
> >
> >Also, you want gagging the first amendment?
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> One wonders if Fencingsax knows any more about the US Constitution
> than he/she does about "science."
>
> > What about the proposed
> >marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>
> Pagano replies:
> Fencingsax can develp a close personal relationship with a small farm
> animal but that doesn't make it marriage.
>
This does not seem strictly responsive.
>
> Finally the Framers included a mechanism for amending the
> Constitution. If the constitution is successfully amended then the
> marriage amendment will be "constitutional." Sheesh....
>
That is, oddly enough, responsive and correct. You *can* think coherently,
if the results are congenial to you. Now, if you could just extend this
talent to cases where the results might force you to rethink some of your
conclusions....
>
> Regards,
> T Pagano
>
-- Steven J.
Jose
You've described the situation very clearly. It is also helpful to
look at Craig Nelson's "rusty hand grenade" analogy at
http://php.indiana.edu/~nelson1/NSTA2.html
That is, what are the consequences if evolution is true? For
creationists, the truth of evolution would necessarily mean that
Genesis is wrong, and therefore not God's word. By accepting, on
faith, that a literal interpretation of the Bible is the only valid
interpretation, they can't wiggle out of inconsistencies the way that
more flexible Christians can do. Therefore, either Genesis (and by
extension the entire Bible) is correct, or it is not. If it is not,
then eternal salvation can't exist, and our moral code won't exist,
and the forces of evil will rule the world.
Worse, what if they accept evolution and thereby (in their minds)
reject God's word? There might be no consequence if God doesn't
really exist and if the Bible was really written by Man...but what if
the Bible really IS right? Rejecting God's word would result in
eternal damnation.
It's not an issue of the validity of scientific data. It's about a
real moral crisis. The penalty of accepting evolution *might* be too
severe, so it is necessary to build walls of defense--even if this
means refusing to look at the evidence (or looking, but refusing to
see). It would be a very difficult position to be in. One might
begin to get a little panicky as the supportive data pile higher and
higher.
--JB
Dale
Rubystars
"catshark" <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3p3ii0hdva40g4mn2...@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 19:38:08 +0000 (UTC), "Rubystars"
> <wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >Hugh Ross on one of his radio programs gave an analogy. He said that if a
> >man were shot in the back, but the police were limited to only explaining
> >deaths by "natural causes" that they would have to come up with a pretty
> >wild scenario to explain it. He said they'd have to say that meterorites
of
> >a certain size must have hit him in the back. He claims that the
scientific
> >method would benefit by allowing supernatural explanations because he
feels
> >sometimes those are the most straightforward and make the most common
sense.
>
> I haven't read much of Ross' stuff but I though he was smater than *that*.
> Did he really try to deny that human actions are "natural causes"?
I think he was just trying to make an analogy. Basically he was saying that
if forensic science were limited to only non-human caused types of death,
that they would have to come up with elaborate explanations for things like
shooting deaths and stabbings. In the same way, he makes the point that if
scientists say we can only consider non-God causation, that we have to come
up with elaborate explanations for how a God-caused thing was caused rather
than simply accepting the truth.
-Rubystars
Earle Jones
mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy) wrote:
*
McCoy: You have just been awarded five more points in the contest
to see whether there is anyone here dumber than Murphy. Keep up the
good work!
You are right that I have never seen an ape turn into a man. I did
see a man turn into a drugstore once.
earle
*
--
__
__/\_\
/\_\/_/
\/_/\_\ earle
\/_/ jones
Fencingsax
evidence of everything being spontaneousley by God. I have also seen
you not answer my question. Why should RELIGION be taught in a SCIENCE
class? THAT is my big query. I repeat; Why should RELIGION be taught
in a SCIENCE class? I don't give a damn about what you think about the
TOE. (personally I think it's science) I want to know why a
non-science should be taught with science. Particularly YOUR
nonscience. Why no Hindu, or Eskimo?
Bobby D. Bryant
> But on no day can you show random forces creating complex things as
> complex as a computer.
Show us your metric for complexity, and then we can talk about it.
Craig Franck
> Pagano replies:
> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> one has produced them.
Science must use forms of reason that are by themselves not determinable
to be scientifically true. This does not result in myths the way myths are
generally defined.
From "Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits," by Bertrand Russell, we
have under Postulates of Scientific Inference:
It is frequently possible to form a series of events such that from
one or two members of the series something can be inferred as to
all the other members.
To be scientific, you must use this type of inference.
1) the solar system is held together by gravity
2) there is no reason to believe this has not always been the case;
3) therefore, the solar system shall be considered to have always been
held together by gravity and shall until something arises to cause a
revision of this belief.
This does not make gravity a myth.
This form of reasoning makes non-gravity a myth:
1) the solar system is held together by gravity
2) there is no reason to believe this has *** always been the case;
3) therefore, the solar system shall be considered *not* to have always
been held together by gravity and shall until something arises to cause a
revision of this belief.
These are two polar-opposites of reasoning.
> This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
> class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
> necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
> know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
We know naturalistic events occur. Is it not reasonable to believe that the
universe is "closed under" naturalistic events until a verifiable super-naturalistic
event is shown to occur? Not having a naturalistic explanation is no reason
to invent an entirely new set of supernatural events.
> Pagano replies:
> How do we know that the unscientific claim of modern secular science
> (that is, that all events in space time are explanable with reference
> to only matter and its properties) is not a myth? Fencingsax never
> says.
We know because believing this is not a type of mythological thinking. It's
a form of scientific inference. Mythological inference is a different kind of
thing.
--
Craig Franck
craig....@verizon.net
Cortland, NY
Bobby D. Bryant
> "T Pagano" opined:
>
>> This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
>> class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
>> necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
>> know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
>
> We know naturalistic events occur. Is it not reasonable to believe that
> the universe is "closed under" naturalistic events until a verifiable
> super-naturalistic event is shown to occur?
Or at the very least, defined...
T Pagano
<sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>"T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
>news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
>> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
>> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>> >English).
>>
>>
>> Pagano replies:
>> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
>> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
>> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
>> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
>> one has produced them.
>>
>You are mistaken here. In _Consilience_, a book by professed atheist Edward
>O. Wilson, Wilson contemplates, and indeed opines for the probable truth of,
>the possibility that there are aspects of "events in space-time" that
>science will *never* enable us to understand.
Pagano replies:
You seem to be of the mistaken idea that the following two statements
are equivalent:
1. Matter and its properties are not sufficient to explaim all events
in space-time
2. There are aspects of "events in space-time" that science will
never enable us to understand.
Statement (1) tells us something about where we might not find an
explanation to an event. Statement (2) tells us that we may not find
the explanation to every event. Statement (2) makes no claim where
explanations are sought.
In other words Wilson is simply stating the obvious; that is, man will
never be omniscient. Wilson is hardly denying that he or his
secular/atheist contemporaries would be looking anywhere but where
Naturalism guides them to look. For example, secularists/atheists
presume that the explanation for abiogenesis lies in the class of
purely naturalistic explanations yet it is still unsolved and may
remain forever unsolved. This doesn't mean they have or will look
outside the class of purely naturalistic explanations.
>This is not a particularly
>exotic or controversial view among "modern secularists."
Pagano replies:
Wilson's claim that man may never know everything has been know for
several thousand years and is hardly a revelation. In any event,
what has this to do with WHERE secularists search for answers? The
fact that secularists may not find the explanation to a particular
event does not mean they have looked beyond the class of explanation
required by the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism.
> Pretty obviously,
>it's hard to insist that "matter and its properties" account for all
>phenomena, if we're simultaneously insisting that we don't know and may
>never know what accounts for *all* phenomena.
Pagano replies:
It is not I who insist that only matter and its properties can be used
to account for events in space time; it is the modern secularists in
the scientific community and the secularists in this forum.
While Steven J is obviously confused I know that Edward O. Wilson
understands well that "matter and its properties" is not an
explanation for any specific event, but represents a particular class
of explanations (purely naturalistic ones). This class contains a
very large number of specific "member" explanations for any number of
specific events in space-time.
While the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism quides its
secular/atheist adherents to limit their search for explanations to
purely naturalistic ones Naturalism never guarranteed that its
adherents could or would find every explanation. In other words it
is hardly inconsistent (or contradictory) of Wilson to limit his
search for explanations to the class of purely naturalistic solutions
and at the same time admit that we may never find all the answers
within that class even if they existed there.
snip
Regards,
T Pagano
Von Smith
> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> >English).
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time.
Really? I thought it was that space-time and its properties were
sufficient to explain all events in matter. Oh well, you learn
something new every day. But of course, science depends on no such
myth. It is sufficient that the physical universe *might* contain
sufficient information to explain any event you might name to justify
looking there. Subsequent justification comes from finding
information that strongly suggests a particular explanation.
There is a great deal of information in the morphology of living
things, in their DNA, in their geography and ecology, in their
development, and in the fossil record, to indicate that the living
things of the this world descended with gradual modification from a
common ancestor over billions of years, and that processes such as
mutation, selection, and drift have decisively shaped the course of
that descent. There is no evidence that any supernatural or
intelligent mechanism was needed, nor even that one was available.
> This
> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> one has produced them.
You are right, Tony. There are no scientific tests of the claim that
scientific tests will always work. There are no scientific tests of
the claim that their results will mean anything; of course, even if
there were such tests, there would be no way to scientfically test the
claim that the results of *those* tests mean anything, and so on ad
infinitum...
And yet those wacky "secular scientists" insist on using them and
respecting their results anyway.
Seriously, though, what assumption do you think science ought to use
instead. How, for example, should a Chinese, Japanese, or Indian
scientist with no background or interest in Christianity assess the
claims of a creationist?
>
> This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
> class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
> necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
> know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
>
>
> [Side Bar: Methodological Naturalism as used by secularists in this
> forum only permits the examination of observable events; however,
> modern secular scientific theories about cosmology, earth history,
> abiogenesis and evolutionary biology contain UNobservables.
All science contains unobservables. We killed about 200,000 people at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki with unobservables. Science must be *based* on
observations, and all the sciences you name are. But if all science
did was record and report those observations, it wouldn't be science.
The whole point is to figure out what more there is out there than
meets the eye. We can do this because there is no reason to assume
that the physical world changes dramatically at the boundary of our
ability to observe it, and so the things we can see ought to contain
information about the things we can't. If we were wrong about this,
we should have had some sort of come-uppance before now. Creationists
and other science-haters are still hoping that this come-uppance will
come yet.
> The
> bedrock presupposition of secular science is Philosophical
> Naturalism.]
Whereas the bedrock presupposition of creation science is
philosophical onanism.
>
>
>
> >The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> >conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> >gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> How do we know that the unscientific claim of modern secular science
> (that is, that all events in space time are explanable with reference
> to only matter and its properties) is not a myth? Fencingsax never
> says.
Is it a myth that the orbital mechanics of the solar system is
explainable with reference only to matter and its properties?
Is it a myth that combustion is explainable with reference only to
matter and its properties?
Is it a myth that the workings of Pagano's computer is explainable
with reference only to matter and its properties?
How do *you* know when it is not a myth?
>
> The bedrock presupposition of modern secular science is impotent to
> explain the very existence of matter an its properties. It is
> impotent to explain the initial conditions of the purported cosmic
> singularity of Big Bang. It is impotent to explain the initial
> conditions for the orbits of the planets in our solar system. It is
> impotent to explain abiogenesis.
"Modern secular science" has leads in all of these areas and is
following up on them. OTOH, when it comes to telling us anything
about its designer, how, or when it designed and how or when it
implemented its designs, ID has no leads, nor the prospect nor even
intention of ever looking for any. Where "modern secular science" is
supposedly impotent, ID has amputated its genitals in a fit of
religious ecstasy.
Von Smith
Fortuna nimis dat multis, satis nulli.
Steven J.
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:20:25 +0000 (UTC), "Steven J."
> <sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
> >"T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
> >news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
>
>
> >> Pagano replies:
> >> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> >> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
> >> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> >> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> >> one has produced them.
> >>
> >You are mistaken here. In _Consilience_, a book by professed atheist
Edward
> >O. Wilson, Wilson contemplates, and indeed opines for the probable truth
of,
> >the possibility that there are aspects of "events in space-time" that
> >science will *never* enable us to understand.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> You seem to be of the mistaken idea that the following two statements
> are equivalent:
> 1. Matter and its properties are not sufficient to explaim all events
> in space-time
> 2. There are aspects of "events in space-time" that science will
> never enable us to understand.
>
understanding, to someone (presumably humans), of why things are one way
rather than another. If you acknowledge that something has no explanation
at all, you implicitly acknowledge that it has (a fortiori) no explanation
in terms of "matter and its properties." If you'd written what you actually
meant, and what I should have realized you meant -- that secularism assumes
that "matter and its properties" are the only possible causes (whether there
are explanations that incorporate those causes or not) -- I might have
skipped over this part.
>
> Statement (1) tells us something about where we might not find an
> explanation to an event. Statement (2) tells us that we may not find
> the explanation to every event. Statement (2) makes no claim where
> explanations are sought.
>
where scientists can understand the causes they invoke well enough to say
why they should produce one effect rather than another. "No explanations
are possible" includes, among other possibilities, truly "supernatural"
events -- interventions by a higher intelligence whose motives and methods
are entirely mysterious to us. It includes, presumably, possibilities we
can't even imagine to the extent that we can imagine an entirely mysterious
higher intelligence. That was my main point: if there could be a scientific
theory involving miracles, at least the portion of the miracles that
provided the actual explanation would not be "supernatural," but purely
naturalistic.
>
> In other words Wilson is simply stating the obvious; that is, man will
> never be omniscient. Wilson is hardly denying that he or his
> secular/atheist contemporaries would be looking anywhere but where
> Naturalism guides them to look.
>
individual human being will be omniscient is fairly obvious; the human brain
probably can't hold, and certainly can't keep track of, all the fundamental
regularities of nature and their interplay. But it is less obvious either
that explanations are infinitely reducible to even more basic explanations
(so that science can never reach the "bottom,"), or that the universe's
fundamental laws are infinitely various and complex, or that human minds are
so intrinsically limited that that they can't grasp all the basic
regularities of nature. None of these things are obvious, but I suppose any
of them might be true, and Wilson rests his suggestion on the last-mentioned
possibility. As he argues, it is unlikely that our brains evolved to
precisely the level and in precisely the way needed to fully understand the
universe that produced them.
>
> For example,
secularists/atheists
> presume that the explanation for abiogenesis lies in the class of
> purely naturalistic explanations yet it is still unsolved and may
> remain forever unsolved. This doesn't mean they have or will look
> outside the class of purely naturalistic explanations.
>
credit for this -- you mark your snips). "Naturalistic," in this context,
simply means operating according to a discoverable nature. It makes sense
that scientists (or anyone else) should seek explanations that, well,
actually *explain* things, and ignore possibilities that *can't* yield
explanations (e.g. that the abiogenesis resulted from forces causes we can
never understand and whose distinctive empirical effects we can never
predict, and which are not operating in the universe currently anyway). One
can do research in biochemistry; one can't do research in miracles. And, as
I noted, one can't do research predicated on the notion that no course of
action will ever result in an explanation.
You yourself have argued on many occasions that ID is not a theory of either
evolution or creation. It does not and (by its proponents' own account)
never will provide any testable model of how or why life aquired the
features it has -- it merely asserts that somehow, at some level some where
at some time, intelligence and some unguessable purpose were involved. And
full-blooded creationism, of course, asserts that the processes used by the
Creator to create life are no longer at work in the universe. Neither
option suggests any course of research, so what would you have abiogenesis
researchers do? Simply take your word for it that there *is* no
naturalistic explanation? Even if they did, why should they accept your
particular "supernaturalistic" explanation, rather than some other
supernaturalistic explanation or no explanation at all?
>
>
> >This is not a particularly
> >exotic or controversial view among "modern secularists."
>
> Pagano replies:
> Wilson's claim that man may never know everything has been know for
> several thousand years and is hardly a revelation. In any event,
> what has this to do with WHERE secularists search for answers? The
> fact that secularists may not find the explanation to a particular
> event does not mean they have looked beyond the class of explanation
> required by the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism.
>
You seem to be concentrating a great deal on one portion of my post, and
entirely ignoring the larger point. How exactly would one test a
supernaturalistic hypothesis, or determine which of two or more rival
supernatural hypotheses to prefer? To the extent that these hypotheses make
testable predictions, the forces involved in them are as "natural" as
"secular" science could possibly want. To the extent that they do not,
science has no way of addressing them.
>
>
> > Pretty obviously,
> >it's hard to insist that "matter and its properties" account for all
> >phenomena, if we're simultaneously insisting that we don't know and may
> >never know what accounts for *all* phenomena.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> It is not I who insist that only matter and its properties can be used
> to account for events in space time; it is the modern secularists in
> the scientific community and the secularists in this forum.
>
And my point, of course, was that "modern secularists" can't be making that
claim, and if you say they are, you either misrepresent them (or, at best,
represent the views of some of them as the views of all of them), or
misunderstand them (with the same result).
>
> While Steven J is obviously confused I know that Edward O. Wilson
> understands well that "matter and its properties" is not an
> explanation for any specific event, but represents a particular class
> of explanations (purely naturalistic ones). This class contains a
> very large number of specific "member" explanations for any number of
> specific events in space-time.
>
Tony, you really ought not to complain that other people are obviously
confused, particularly when your own obfuscations, verbosity, and evasions
have produced that effect in them.
>
> While the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism quides its
> secular/atheist adherents to limit their search for explanations to
> purely naturalistic ones Naturalism never guarranteed that its
> adherents could or would find every explanation. In other words it
> is hardly inconsistent (or contradictory) of Wilson to limit his
> search for explanations to the class of purely naturalistic solutions
> and at the same time admit that we may never find all the answers
> within that class even if they existed there.
>
I believe we've already covered this point. Do you have any response to the
rest of my post, or would you prefer to go on evading the issue?
>
> snip
catshark
<wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
Well, I guess that is a little better.
Needless to say, I don't see how positing *within* science (or law for that
matter) an untestable and unknowable being, who humans cannot reach even a
consensus on the existence of, much less its abilities or nature,
occasionally doing something by untestable and unknowable means, is
"simpler" than searching for explanations in the forces and causes we can
test and know.
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
In the name of the bee
And of the butterfly
And of the breeze, amen
- Emily Dickinson -
catshark
wrote:
>> . . . modern secular science is impotent to
>> explain the very existence of matter an its properties. It is
>> impotent to explain the initial conditions of the purported cosmic
>> singularity of Big Bang. It is impotent to explain the initial
>> conditions for the orbits of the planets in our solar system. It is
>> impotent to explain abiogenesis.
>
>"Modern secular science" has leads in all of these areas and is
>following up on them. OTOH, when it comes to telling us anything
>about its designer, how, or when it designed and how or when it
>implemented its designs, ID has no leads, nor the prospect nor even
>intention of ever looking for any. Where "modern secular science" is
>supposedly impotent, ID has amputated its genitals in a fit of
>religious ecstasy.
Chez Watt!
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
"Intelligent Design" is the proposition
that God can be caught in a mousetrap.
- from Frank J. -
Robert in Fernie
Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
that is the defenition of science is to observe. Since no part of
evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
I suppose you might say the same can be said of creation! however we
can use the laws of science create models to demonstrate how things
like the global flood produced fossals, rock strata, the grand canyon
and other features on the planet. Simple math can also show that
things are very young rather than millions of years old. For example
the earth gets 20 tons of dust from space every day, if the earth was
billions of years old it would be thousands of times larger than it is
now. The big bang is another non scientiftic idea,if everything came
out the explosion, all the paticals would have moved away from each
other in a radial pattern very fast and never could have returned or
collided in any way to have become planets and the like, remember the
law that states a body in motion tends to stay in motion and in that
direction unless somthing acts on it. If you look close at the theries
given by evolutionists you will allways find they violate all of the
laws of science. I found hundreds of good and yes scientific reasons
to reject the evolutionary cause for the universe,and allmost every
one them by it self can cancel out and make evolution non workable.
Robert Gentry is a fine scientist, he disscovered that granite, the
foundation rock of the earth had to be solid in less than three
minutes, and if it were not so, then traces of elements would not show
they were ever present in the rock. His resurch also shows that
granite could never have been molten or it would not be granite but
rather bassalt. For more info go to the creation encyclapedia web
site,you can about Robert gentry and other people who made big
disscoverys for creation and show just how foolish it is to believe
that everything we happend through happenstance. Good luck in your
search for the truth.
Eros
> "T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
> news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
> > On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
> > <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> > >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > >English).
> >
> >
> > Pagano replies:
> > The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> > properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
> > is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> > claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> > one has produced them.
Of course Pagano's idea of what constitutes "modern secular science"
is a twisted caricature of reality. Science simply claims that the
natural universe can be explained *without* the need to resort to
magic or the supernatural. Why? Because science simply could not
operate otherwise... the scientific method would break down if there
was the slightest possibility that, at any moment, the laws of nature
(that science has revealed) could suddenly be suspended or changed at
the whim of a deity.
Both sides of the 'debate' agree;-
"We do not know how the creator created, what processes He used, for
He used processes which are not now operating in the natural universe.
This is why we refer to creation as Special Creation. We cannot
discover by scientific investigation anything about the creative
processes used by the creator. (Duane Gish, Creation Life Publishers,
1979, p. 40.)
"The claim that the universe, the earth, and life were made by an
undetectable Creator using supernatural powers falls outside of
science. It makes no predictions that can be tested. It cannot be
negated by science. If it had any real possibility of negation, it
would lose many of the advantages that it offers to its adherents. It
is mythology serving to buttress a religion." -- (Professor Robert
Shapiro, "Origins: A skeptic's guide to the creation of life on earth"
pp. 262-263)
[snip Paganoism]
EROS.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"SETI is based on the simple assumption that nature operates elsewhere
the same way it does here. ID is based on the assumption that nature
doesn't even work here."
Earle Jones
mini...@monarch.net (Robert in Fernie) wrote:
[...]
>
> Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
> creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
> main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
> that is the defenition of science is to observe. Since no part of
> evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
> we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
> I suppose you might say the same can be said of creation! however we
> can use the laws of science create models to demonstrate how things
> like the global flood produced fossals, rock strata, the grand canyon
> and other features on the planet.
*
Robert:
(A newcomer in the 'Dumber than Murphy' contest.)
Here's five points for your recent posting. You are now in third
place behind a couple of Pros. We are seeking the winner of the
contest to determine whether there is anyone posting here dumber
than the poster known as 'Murphy in Ohio'. J. McCoy is in the Silver
Medal slot.
You might get an extra point for your (mis)spelling and another for
run-on sentences. But that type of stuff is not important to you,
right?
Here's to 'defenition' and especially, 'fossals'. Those are truly
original and worth a few dumbness points.
A period at the end of your posting takes away a point.
Keep up the good work.
Kermit
> "Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message news:<cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com>...
> > I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
> >
> > Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
> > marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>
> Nonsense. Evolution shouldn't be in the schools. Nobody has seen
> any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents.
Humans *are apes. Nobody's ever seen a mountain worn down by the rain,
either. are you saying *erosion doesn't happen? Please say erosion
doesn't happen.
> This is sheer
> speculation, outside the scope of science.
I guess nobody has explained this to you before, but there is as yet
no widely accepted theories of natural abiogensis, altho there are
several hypotheses which are respected and one will likely when out as
the most likely.
> Nobody has ever seen
> non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
> intelligence create complicated things. This puts random chance at a
> disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
>
Are you saying that all of life was created by humans?
> Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
> complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
> complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
> complex things as complex as a computer. No, you cannot observe that.
> Do you know what that means?
>
> Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
> movement and accomplish nothing.
>
> JM
Curiously, I've never seen any living thing made by dust in a special
creation. Everything I've ever seen that lived was either born,
hatched, or grown from seed. They all came from earlier living things,
by natural means, following natural laws.
Kermit
Kermit
More than that. Biblical literalists believe that the bible is
literally true (they actually see much of it as allegaory, but they
won't admit that to themselves). If parts of it are not literally
true, then none of it is trustworthy. That means that maybe they won't
live forever.
When anyone casts doubt on any part of the bible as they understand
it, what many of them hear is "You are going to die."
We are threatening them with death by asking them to accept science in
science classes.
Kermit
Terry Rigby
Are you aware that most, if not all, of your post has been refuted, in
some cases (dust from space) decades ago. Please go through
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-youngearth.html
ps explain 'angular unconformities' using YEC.
Terry Rigby
mel turner
mini...@monarch.net [Robert in Fernie] wrote...
Hmmm, no previous posting history. Is Murphy back, or a real Loki
troll?
>Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote in message news:
<6vqhi059uln596de5...@4ax.com>...
[snip]
>Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
>creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type,
That's something of a bad start.
by
>main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
Few or no mainstream scientists would say any such thing,
since it's not true.
>that is the defenition of science is to observe.
Even if evolution were truly too slow to observe, we can of course
still observe and study the evidence for it.
Since no part of
>evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
>we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
Since your premises are simply false, we can. Do check out the
excellent t.o. FAQs archive, where objections and false claims
like yours are covered quite well:
http://www.talkorigins.org/
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/outline.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-mustread.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-intro-to-biology.html
http://evolution.mbdojo.com/evolution-for-beginners.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/other-links-gensci.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/other-links.html#evolution
http://evolution.berkeley.edu
Loki I think [and hope], but rather a nice try.
If you _are_ sincere, do check out those FAQs.
cheers
Alexander
"Frank J" <fn...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:38c5d0dd.04082...@posting.google.com...
> "Alexander" <alexande...@virgin.net> wrote in message
> news:<Gx6Wc.712$IX2...@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net>...
>> "Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message
>> news:cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com...
>> > I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>> > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>> > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>> > English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
>> > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>> > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
>> > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>>
>> Well ok ... first of all it's not really about science at all.
>
> Agreed.
>
>> It's about
>> what is perceived to be true.
>
> That may be true for the creationist-on-the-street, but many, possibly
> most, anti-evolution activists don't care what's true or not; they
> only care to exploit those who do.
I would be inclined to agree at some level, but this is a nearly impossible
thing to demonstrate when we are discussing issues of faith. If you look at
the televangelists who've variously fallen by the wayside then said that
'God has forgiven me so why can't you?' are they sincere in their repentance
or not? The cynic in me says no, but it's a possibility that can't be
discounted.
I would certainly agree when you look at the deliveries by Ham, Hovind and
the screed at Discovery Institute and Dembski's own site they are using
their position of authority to determine a socio-political outcome. They
are certainly using people in that sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean
they cannot firmly believe in what they are doing,either as a matter of
absolute faith or in the more jaded 'ends justifies the means' fashion.
>
>>
>> At the most superficial level when looking at Biblical creationism what
>> you
>> are discussing is a literal interpretation of the Bible.
>
> But even creationists dispute among themselves which of the mutually
> contradictory interpretations should be taken literally. Enter the ID
> strategy, which tries to defer or downplay this question. I am in fact
> convinced that most professional IDers privately believe that the only
> correct one is the one that includes an old earth, common descent and
> evolution.
Absolutely - I did say it was a superficial examination. I can go into a
deeper assessment of the discourse but I was rambling on enough as it was.
I think you're right about the assessment of where most ID'ers are coming
from. The divide between YEC position and ID (of the non Johnson variety)
shows an interesting gap between ideologies that have the same overall
objective but desiring widely divergent outcomes. However, the Discovery
Institute also advocates 'cultural' change and although it's not as radical
as some of the demands from the YEC crowd, they show a degree of
partisanship ingrained within their science which is concerning.
>
>> A literal
>> interpretation precludes, by definition, any alternatives.
>
> Only for those classic creationists who are willing to challenge other
> creationist accounts. But they seem to be a dying breed. For IDers,
> the only thing precluded is their caricature of "Darwinism," and even
> then not necessarily its "results" (whatever that means).
Not sure about 'dying'. The OEC was the favoured argument at the Scopes
trial and 'day-age' theories were certainly the most prevalent during that
time (it was the theory favoured by Bryan when he was challenged by Darrow).
We seem to have acquired more YEC's as time has gone on, not less. Even
after the Butler Act was repealed in 1967 we see the slow rise of
organisations like ICR and AIG, not their dissolution.
The concern, with the 'success' of ID seems to be that more people from the
YEC crowd are advocating it as part of the wedge strategy and covering for
their actual motivation which is to introduce YEC as a valid alternative
alongside ID. AIG and ICR have both declared that ID as a tool to be used
but not to be embraced by the faithful
>
>> So when science
>> starts describing both the 'how' and 'why' of our biological origins the
>> literalists start to get a little panicky.
>
> No they don't. They love the opportunity to reach into their semantic
> bag of tricks.
In fairness, if they weren't concerned they wouldn't reach for the bag of
tricks would they? 'Panicky' may be too strong, but there is a degree of
hysteria with the far right advocates of Creationism that maintains that
supporting Darwinian methodology is the same as inviting Satan to come and
party on earth. I would describe their attitude as 'panicky' but then
they've always seemed a bit jumpy.
>
>>
>> Not only are you defining away their rationale for the creation of the
>> world, but if you challenge this cornerstone of literalism then it calls
>> into question the entire ideology of their literal Bible as well. This
>> means their identity, values, morals and ethical constructs are being
>> called
>> into question. A literal Bible means just that, it must be a de facto
>> description of the world and God must have created it in such a way as to
>> be
>> described by the Bible otherwise none of it can be true.
>>
>> Therefore the Bible is not an allegorical tale and guide for life, but an
>> actual record of events. If this is so then Darwinian science and
>> methodology cannot _also_ be true. Hence, to a Creationist, evolution is
>> neither true nor scriptural, and if that is the case it cannot be morally
>> correct either (otherwise it would be Biblical, natch).
>
> Again, many creationists-on-the-street may think that way, and
> professional creationists and IDers exploit that to the max. But most
> religions have moved on and agree that many of the "what happened an
> when" are just allegories, and that the "thou shalts" are what counts.
> Although it may take some time (membership issues?) before religions
> themselves proclaim it, many religious individuals have accused
> creationists and IDers of bearing false witness.
I agree in principle, but it is the YEC crowd that are influencing the
school boards in Kansas and Ohio and Texas and elsewhere. Evangelism is, by
its own account, a grass roots organisation so the rank and file are just as
well versed in scripture as the 'professional' creationist. For them there
is more at stake than just the issue of evolution. We tend to get blinkered
as we deal with only the one segment of their ideology but it's not a
balkanized thing for the YEC who are also in the process of challenging one
of any number of things that offend their sensibilities.
Again I think it's a mistake to characterise the YEC crowd as a bunch of
sheep bleating around Ham and Morris et al without a brain between them.
This is a fairly medieval view of religious activity and the contemporary
movements are far more dynamic. This means that while they are united in
common cause they can be quite formidable, but without a cri de coeur they
are more likely to settle back into bitter infighting.
>
>>
>> So the challenge to demonstrate evolution as 'religion' and a faith based
>> position is an attempt to claw back the ground lost over the sheer weight
>> of
>> evidence available to most biologists, palaeontologists, cosmologists
>> etc.
>> who are, according to the creationist, challenging the authority of God.
>> This isn't about mispresenting science as far as they are concerned, it's
>> about an actual fight between good and evil.
>
> Actually, it's both. The activists believe that they need to
> mispresenting science to "the masses" to win the culture war:
>
> http://reason.com/9707/fe.bailey.shtml
Thanks for the link - excellent site and a very well written piece. I
couldn't see where the claim that activists 'need' to misrepresent science
was though. He does make the case for certain neo-cons manipulating social
events, or believing that it needs to be controlled but this is not the same
as saying they are doing so from purely real-politik motivations. If
anything Kristol and others seem to be making the case for more religion not
less and are driven by that desire. I can't imagine most YEC's would be
bothered if a strong leader stepped in advocating a return to Biblical
literalism so this point is a little lost on me. I can certainly see people
being used, I can see society being manipulated by certain groups, what I
can't see is where these people actively lack faith in a Christian solution
to the country but are saying it anyway to gain power.
I agree that many YEC/ID'ers may well have a 'means to an end' approach, but
this doesn't necessarily mean they themselves aren't convinced of how right
they are or that their followers (for want to a better phrase) aren't
capable of understanding the implications of their suggestions.
He's an odd one certainly. His writing does demonstrate someone trying
rather hard though, one way or another. He manages to fit in most major
fallacies in a single post and epitomises the hit 'n' run tactics along with
the usual evasion and obfuscation. The fact that he is also clearly an
articulate and quite well read person makes him something of an interesting
case study
but anti-evolutionists come in
> all flavors, from YECs, to OECs who accept common descent, from
> totally clueless to the multi-PhD William Dembski, from hopelessly
> fundamenalist to agnostics who criticize religion (e.g. Charlie
> Wagner).
I agree - it was only an overview, but thanks for clarifying those points
Richard Forrest
methodological naturalism
> is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
> main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
Not true. Evolution has been observed and studied extensively
> that is the defenition of science is to observe.
Observation is only a part of science.
> Since no part of
> evolution can be reproduced in any way
Not true. We can reproduce it in the laboratory and observe it in
nature
> and we can't see it happening,
It has been observed and recorded inumerable times
> we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
We can argue from the position of overwhelming evidence that it
happened, and until someone can come up with a better explanation for
the evidence be confident that it did happen.
> I suppose you might say the same can be said of creation!
No we can't because it can't be observed
> however we
> can use the laws of science create models to demonstrate how things
> like the global flood produced fossals,
The 'laws of science' show conclusively that there was no global
flood, and that a global flood would not in any case produce the
fossil record
> rock strata,
Can not be produced by a global flood model - hydrodynamic sorting
can't produce a stratigraphic column
> the grand canyon
The grand canyon relies for it's formation on the uplift on the
earth's crust. The flood model for it's formation it relies on water
flowing uphill.
> and other features on the planet.
Such as?
> Simple math can also show that
> things are very young rather than millions of years old. For example
> the earth gets 20 tons of dust from space every day, if the earth was
> billions of years old it would be thousands of times larger than it is
> now.
Simple maths shows that the addition of 20 tons a day (wherever that
figure came to a mass of 5425920000000000000000 tons has an
insignificant effect.
> The big bang is another non scientiftic idea,
How so?
> if everything came
> out the explosion, all the paticals would have moved away from each
> other in a radial pattern very fast and never could have returned or
> collided in any way to have become planets and the like, remember the
> law that states a body in motion tends to stay in motion and in that
> direction unless somthing acts on it.
All this demonstrates is your ignorance of science. There are robust
predictive models which demonstrate how this works.
> If you look close at the theries
> given by evolutionists you will allways find they violate all of the
> laws of science.
How so?
> I found hundreds of good and yes scientific reasons
> to reject the evolutionary cause for the universe,and allmost every
> one them by it self can cancel out and make evolution non workable.
Start with the first and we'll see how sound it is. If you are relying
on creationist sites for such information, be prepared to find that
you have been lied to.
> Robert Gentry is a fine scientist, he disscovered that granite, the
> foundation rock of the earth had to be solid in less than three
> minutes, and if it were not so, then traces of elements would not show
> they were ever present in the rock.
And his research has been thoroughly refuted.
> His resurch also shows that
> granite could never have been molten or it would not be granite but
> rather bassalt. For more info go to the creation encyclapedia web
> site,you can about Robert gentry and other people who made big
> disscoverys for creation and show just how foolish it is to believe
> that everything we happend through happenstance. Good luck in your
> search for the truth.
You won't find the truth on creationist web sites, or in their
literature. All you will find is a load of lies and distortions,
RF
Alexander
"Kermit" <unrestra...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:2b38d8c5.04082...@posting.google.com...
> jbo...@bio.indiana.edu (Jose) wrote in message
> news:<a4fb79f0.04082...@posting.google.com>...
>> "Alexander" <alexande...@virgin.net> wrote in message
>> news:<Gx6Wc.712$IX2...@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net>...
>> > "Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message
>> > news:cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com...
<snipped earlier bits>
>
> More than that. Biblical literalists believe that the bible is
> literally true (they actually see much of it as allegaory, but they
> won't admit that to themselves). If parts of it are not literally
> true, then none of it is trustworthy. That means that maybe they won't
> live forever.
>
> When anyone casts doubt on any part of the bible as they understand
> it, what many of them hear is "You are going to die."
>
> We are threatening them with death by asking them to accept science in
> science classes.
>
> Kermit
>
That's quite a succint way of putting it. If not a literal 'death' of the
YEC movement and a reminder of mortality then a metaphorical 'death' of
their ideological foundation. The struggle for a literalist is to maintain
their identity in the face of overwhelming physical data and the easiest way
to cope with this cognitive dissonance or anomie is to simply deny it.
Science, as we accept and understand it, is so prevalent that the literalist
narrative cannot ignore or bypass it. They have to either reduce
evolutionary science to the level of being a 'faith' or raise Creationism to
the same level of acceptable science practice (as we know this is really
what ID is all about).
They can't ignore the way in which science is practiced and need to
incorporate it into regular science classes otherwise they will be
marginalised in social terms. If Creationism is taught as 'religion' as
opposed to a fact based 'truth' then they lose all claims to legitimacy
through absolute authority. After all, how many religions are taught in
religious classes? This is anathema to the Creationists mindset so getting
into science classes legitimises their beliefs as a 'fact' based doctrine,
worthy of being taught as 'science' (unlike all those other 'pretend' faiths
who can make no such claim).
One of the main difficulties of attacking any form of fundamentalism is that
by removing one plank of their agenda, they fall back to another. So if we
defend evolutionary models to the extent that AiG and others fold it still
won't stop the 'moral' crusade continuing and after they've gone away to
lick their wounds we'll see YEC advocates sneak back into the public light
after a short while has elapsed. This is what happened after Scopes and the
eventual move through the 50's to a much more robust science programme in
the US. Nothing really happened again until the 70's/80's.
The only way I've fond of understanding the YEC position is to drop anything
you've learnt about science and then start thinking like a literalist. It's
a scary dark place but it does allow you to deconstruct the argument from
their own rather unique cultural perspective.
TomS
<3p3ii0hdva40g4mn2...@4ax.com>, catshark stated..."
>
>On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 19:38:08 +0000 (UTC), "Rubystars"
><wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>>Hugh Ross on one of his radio programs gave an analogy. He said that if a
>>man were shot in the back, but the police were limited to only explaining
>>deaths by "natural causes" that they would have to come up with a pretty
>>wild scenario to explain it. He said they'd have to say that meterorites of
>>a certain size must have hit him in the back. He claims that the scientific
>>method would benefit by allowing supernatural explanations because he feels
>>sometimes those are the most straightforward and make the most common sense.
>
>I haven't read much of Ross' stuff but I though he was smater than *that*.
>that the *law* uses the terminology "homocide" or "natural causes". The
>law ain't science. And anyway, the law has no category for "deicide" or
>"demoncide".) The only other option appears to be that Ross is saying that
>we should consider human action supernatural.
Isn't "act of God" a legal term?
Although I'd guess that most of us would say that an "act of God",
in the legal sense, is a "natural cause".
>
>Or maybe he was just trying to slide a bit of rhetoric by based on legal
>terminology.
>
>[...]
>
--
---Tom S.
"All theories -- scientific, philosophical, and religious -- ... seek to explain
experiences ... ask certain specific sorts of kinds of questions ... obey
certain definite rules or 'canons.'"
Langdon Gilkey, "Creationism on Trial" (Winston Press, 1985), page 108
catshark
Fernie) wrote:
[...]
The American judge scores it a 9.45.
There was a few too many misspellings of common words.
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
Bludgeoning moribund Equidae for fun and profit.
TomS
<446a3899.04082...@posting.google.com>, Robert in Fernie stated..."
[...snip...]
>Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
>creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
>main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
>that is the defenition of science is to observe. Since no part of
>evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
>we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
Welcome to talk.origins. As a newcomer to any newsgroup, it is
often a good idea to take a look at any FAQs which exist. They might
help you to get over a few bumps at the start. (One of the bumps
will be people who will get irritated with you for not having looked
at the FAQs. Actually, I think that regulars in talk.origins are
more willing to overlook this lapse than people in a lot of other
newsgroups.) Anyway, others have pointed out some slips in this part
of your post, so I'll skip over that ...
The first difficulty for those people who think that creation
is an alternative to evolutionary biology is that there are a great
many of people of faith in their Creator who also accept the
evidence for evolutionary biology. Creation is not in conflict
with evolution.
Another difficulty is that, for those people who *do* think
that creation (or "design") can serve as an alternative, scientific
explanation of facts about the world of life -- this difficulty is
that there is no "scientific theory of creationism".
For example, is there anything definite that any of the
creationists can tell us about what it means to be a creature of
God? How being a creature of God is different from being the
product of natural causes (such as evolution)?
VoiceOfReason
> > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
> >
> > marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>
Evolution is a major part of Biology. Are you against Biology being
taught in schools? Science in general? Do you want less educated
Americans?
> Nobody has seen
> any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents.
Poor example, but let's work with it anyway. I have never seen the
moon complete a circuit around the Earth, yet I can infer it from an
overwhelming body of evidence.
> This is sheer
> speculation, outside the scope of science.
Speculation is nothing. Evidence is everything. Evolution of
species, including speciation events, has such an overwhelming body of
evidence that it's been treated as a fact for 200 years.
> Nobody has ever seen
> non-intelligent forces create complex organisms.
My dog reproduced; and he's dumber than a box of rocks.
> Everyone has seen
> intelligence create complicated things. This puts random chance at a
> disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
I create complicated things. Does that mean I'm God? Besides,
evolution is not random. See the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology
FAQ at www.talkorigins.org.
> Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
> complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
> complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
> complex things as complex as a computer.
Evolution has taken billions of years to create complex organisms. By
comparison, a computer is a tinkertoy.
> No, you cannot observe that.
> Do you know what that means?
It means you're arguing against something you don't understand. See
the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology FAQ at www.talkorigins.org.
> Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
> movement and accomplish nothing.
Your point?
Johnny Bravo
wrote:
>Nonsense. Evolution shouldn't be in the schools. Nobody has seen
>any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents.
Nobody saw Jeffry Dahlmer kill anyone either, doesn't mean that
science wasn't used to prove he did.
>This is sheer
>speculation, outside the scope of science.
Just like the speculation that you actually had
great-great-great-grandparents? Did your great-great grandparents
just sprung up from the ground one day?
>Nobody has ever seen
>non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
>intelligence create complicated things.
Has anyone seen intelligence create a complex organism? Don't shift
the goal posts in between sentences, it's dishonest.
>This puts random chance at a
>disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
Chemistry is not random, apparently you don't know enough about
science to make intelligent comments about it.
>Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
>complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
>complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
>complex things as complex as a computer.
A tree is complex, let's see you make one from scratch.
--
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P. Lovecraft
Rubystars
> Needless to say, I don't see how positing *within* science (or law for
that
> matter) an untestable and unknowable being, who humans cannot reach even a
> consensus on the existence of, much less its abilities or nature,
> occasionally doing something by untestable and unknowable means, is
> "simpler" than searching for explanations in the forces and causes we can
> test and know.
They solve that problem quite easily. They already "know."
-Rubystars
Rubystars
Creationists believe that the creation week in Genesis is a true and literal
history of the world's origins.
Therefore, they believe that there can never be any TRUE scientific
discovery that contradicts that. They believe that Genesis has overriding
authority, since it is part of God's word, and therefore can not be a lie.
Science makes assumptions, such as "we can observe the world and draw
meaningful conclusions from it." Creationists add their own assumptions
including Biblical literalism into the mix.
Therefore the answer to the origins question in "science" has already been
answered to them. They allow the "evidence" of Scripture to suffice as
support. Since others don't automatically feel satisfied by Scripture alone,
they use "observations" of the world to try to come up with more "evidence"
to convince the skeptics.
For example, they make the claims about the bombadier beetle not being able
to be evolved, or that the Grand Canyon could have been carved by the Flood
waters.
They believe this is all "scientific" because it's backed up by the
overriding evidence of Genesis.
Yes, this is circular: "Genesis says so, so Genesis is true."
I hope my post wasn't too confusing.
-Rubystars (ex-creationist)
Bob Casanova
appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Bob Pease"
<robe...@dropthospartrobertjp.cnc.net>:
>
>"Bob Casanova" <nos...@buzz.off> wrote in message
>news:6vqhi059uln596de5...@4ax.com...
>> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), the following
>> appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Fencingsax"
>> <chris...@aol.com>:
>>
>. Most Creationists believe (or claim to believe,
>> which is operationally identical) that science is just
>> another belief system, and that conclusions reached via the
>> methods of science are no more valid a description of
>> reality than the "truth" written by long-dead nomads after
>> being passed down as oral tradition for dozens of
>> generations.
>My experience is that Creationists , if also Fundies, believe that
>scientific conclusions are NOT a valid description of reality if they
>contradict the conclusions reached by their method.
True, but that's to be expected in a perceived "war of
belief systems". Perhaps I should have said "...no more
inherently valid...".
Bob Casanova
appeared in talk.origins, posted by mini...@monarch.net
(Robert in Fernie):
All of which makes it such a shame that evolution has been
directly observed, both in the lab and in nature. How does
that go again...? "A beautiful hypothesis destroyed by
inconvenient fact.".
And BTW, science isn't about "truth"; it's about observation
and synthesis. And despite the yammerings of such scientific
illiterates as McNameless and others like him, "observation"
includes the evidence left from past events, and from events
involving that which cannot be directly observed; direct
observation of the events themselves or the entities causing
them isn't required. (If you find this difficult to accept,
try looking up "electronics", "particle physics" or "main
sequence"; you may find the concepts enlightening.) Come
back after you actually study some of the relevant
disciplines yourself and stop taking the word of
fundamentalists with religious agendas.
Thomas H. Faller
<snipping Bob Casanova's original message for brevity>
>
>
> Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
> creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
> main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
> that is the defenition of science is to observe. Since no part of
> evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
> we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
Okay, this qualified you as troll in several people's minds. It's pretty
classic and well-worn, so I'm just going to hit some parts of the
next mega-paragraph for the interested bystanders. I hate when people
trod with muddy boots on my area...
>
> I suppose you might say the same can be said of creation! however we
> can use the laws of science create models to demonstrate how things
> like the global flood produced fossals, rock strata, the grand canyon
> and other features on the planet.
Geology depends on physics and chemistry for its effects. There is a
qualitative difference between sediments that were eroded and
deposited quickly and those eroded slowly. Energetic erosion can
move bigger particles and it sorts and deposits them differently. If
there was a global flood, we would be able to find its evidence in the
rock strata, just as we find evidence of real catastrophes. But the
geologic and fossil evidence contains evidence of huge periods of
time passing, millions of times more than can be explained by
a global flood.
> Simple math can also show that
> things are very young rather than millions of years old. For example
> the earth gets 20 tons of dust from space every day, if the earth was
> billions of years old it would be thousands of times larger than it is
> now.
Simple math doesn't have to be simple minded. The whole earth is
over six thousand million million million tons. The entire mass of
the dust argued is thirty million million tons. That's one part in
2,000,000,000 of the mass of the earth. One two-billionth bigger than
it was originally. Your assertion is off by a factor of two trillion.
You don't understand big numbers, so you can't check something
simple like this for yourself.
> The big bang is another non scientiftic idea,if everything came
> out the explosion,
There was no explosion. Everything moved apart.
> all the paticals would have moved away from each
> other in a radial pattern very fast and never could have returned or
> collided in any way to have become planets and the like,
Unless gravity, electromagnetism or the nuclear forces, each
attractive on their own scale, could have clumped matter together
again. You don't understand explosions or the Big Bang at all.
> remember the
> law that states a body in motion tends to stay in motion and in that
> direction unless somthing acts on it.
Which the four fundamental forces do. The Milky Way and the Andromeda
Galaxy are pulling each other closer by the force of gravity, and
eventually they will pass through each other. We see galaxies do
this all the time. We see comets drawn into orbit around the sun
and pulled around by planets. We've watched a comet sucked into
Jupiter just by gravity. we see particles from the sun drawn into our
magnetic field to become auroras. Gravity and electromagnetic
attraction unite atoms in free space to become complicated molecules,
like amino acids.
> If you look close at the theries
> given by evolutionists you will allways find they violate all of the
> laws of science. I found hundreds of good and yes scientific reasons
> to reject the evolutionary cause for the universe,and allmost every
> one them by it self can cancel out and make evolution non workable.
If they all cancel out, why don't they make the rest of science unusable?
I think what you're reading are hundreds of contradictory "excuses"
why creationism has to be right.
>
> Robert Gentry is a fine scientist, he disscovered that granite, the
> foundation rock of the earth had to be solid in less than three
> minutes, and if it were not so, then traces of elements would not show
> they were ever present in the rock.
If granite, the foundation of the continents (and not the oceans, who
are grounded in basalt) had solidified in three minutes, it would look
like black glass, like obsidian, with no grains visible and no grain
structure. Granite takes a huge amount of time to differentiate from
the material in the crust (which would solidify into basalt otherwise,
as it does when it emerges at mid-ocean ridges and volcanoes).
Crystals, such as you see in granite, or rock candy or snow, take
time to form, and the crystals in granite show its chemical past and
its thermal history. We have two granite domes within forty minutes
of my house (Stone Mountain and Panola Mountain, just outside
of Atlanta) that show very different histories, which even show up in
their physical appearance and the properties of the stone, which have
affected whether they were quarried for building stone.
We have a science of rock chemistry and temperatures called petrology.
It's a part of first year geology courses, and is easily and routinely
verified in laboratories around the world. It explains why we see
certain rocks in certain places, and it puts constraints on the energy
and duration of geologic events like metamorphism, tectonics, continent
building, faulting and mountain building. Geology isn't just rock
collecting, it's a way to tie together the earth's past with its present
appearance.
Gentry may be trying to explain away trace elements in granite. Well,
they've been covered already by others, and his explanations have the
killing fault that they make everything else he's trying to prop up
invalid. 3-minute granite has some serious implications, and he ignores
them to prop up an unworkable theory. That's not the act of a "fine
scientist".
> His resurch also shows that
> granite could never have been molten or it would not be granite but
> rather bassalt.
Molten granite still exists today. It is not basalt. Do you have an
explanation for this, or any idea that it was true before you repeated
that assertion?
> For more info go to the creation encyclapedia web
> site,you can about Robert gentry and other people who made big
> disscoverys for creation and show just how foolish it is to believe
> that everything we happend through happenstance. Good luck in your
> search for the truth.
Your problem with your truth is that you've never had to use it for anything
but arguments. You've never had to figure out what a rock was telling
you, or why the stars are where and what they are, or how to tell what a
fossil was the remains of or how old it was. Science is a tool, not a
religion, and it has to work or we'd have given it up, just like we gave
up Olympus and Valhalla as causes for things.
Tom Faller
Mitch Alsup
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> >English).
>
>
> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
> one has produced them.
Science is perfectly happy in being able to describe everything that
happens which is observable, and remains perfectly happy when things
that are not observable happen.
Matter and its properties are not sufficient to explain space-time
itself (yet) and therefore not all events within space-time itself.
Any scientist claiming otherwise has exceeded the bounds of science.
J McCoy
> In article <3f355ee.04082...@posting.google.com>,> > news:<cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com>...
> > > I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> > > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
> > >
> > > marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
> >
> > speculation, outside the scope of science. Nobody has ever seen
> > non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
> > disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
> >
> > complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
> > complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
> > Do you know what that means?
> >
> > movement and accomplish nothing.
> >
>
> *
> McCoy: You have just been awarded five more points in the contest
> to see whether there is anyone here dumber than Murphy. Keep up the
> good work!
>
> You are right that I have never seen an ape turn into a man. I did
> see a man turn into a drugstore once.
Just goes to show, Earle, that evolutionists aren't comprehensive
readers. I never said that anyone hadn't seen an ape turn into a man.
I never said that. I said that nobody has seen an ape in millions of
descendents turn into a man. You've just called me "dumber than
Murphy" and so I have to admit that I now even question whether your
assertion about Murphy is correct. By the way, your misreading my
message was dumb.
JM
>
> earle
> *
J McCoy
> mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy) wrote in message news:<3f355ee.04082...@posting.google.com>...
> > "Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message news:<cg95j5$1...@odbk17.prod.google.com>...
> > > I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
> > > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > > English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> > > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
> > >
> > > Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
> > > marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
> >
> > Nonsense. Evolution shouldn't be in the schools. Nobody has seen
> > any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents.
>
> Humans *are apes. Nobody's ever seen a mountain worn down by the rain,
> either. are you saying *erosion doesn't happen? Please say erosion
> doesn't happen.
>
> > This is sheer
> > speculation, outside the scope of science.
>
> I guess nobody has explained this to you before, but there is as yet
> no widely accepted theories of natural abiogensis, altho there are
> several hypotheses which are respected and one will likely when out as
> the most likely.
You've called abiogenesis a "theory". There are no observations and
therefore it cannot be called a theory.
>
> > Nobody has ever seen
> > non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
> > intelligence create complicated things. This puts random chance at a
> > disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
> >
>
> Are you saying that all of life was created by humans?
I'm saying that all life is too complicated for even humans with
current knowledge, skills and intelligence to create. Are you saying
that rational human beings can create life now?
>
> > Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
> > complex things. Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
> > complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
> > complex things as complex as a computer. No, you cannot observe that.
> > Do you know what that means?
> >
> > Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
> > movement and accomplish nothing.
> >
> > JM
>
> Curiously, I've never seen any living thing made by dust in a special
> creation. Everything I've ever seen that lived was either born,
> hatched, or grown from seed. They all came from earlier living things,
> by natural means, following natural laws.
That is correct Kermit. But all these are birthed by creatures who
ALREADY are complex, who have complex DNA within. Nobody has seen the
original prototypes of each creature. Who ever made these prototypes
had to be very intelligent. When was the last time you ever saw a
computer make software? You haven't? I thought so.
JM
>
> Kermit
Tim Norfolk
>> Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
>> movement and accomplish nothing.
Finally, a chance to use a little of the Bible that I learned (from memory, so
probably a little off):
"Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin. Yet
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as fine as these."
Jon Fleming
wrote:
>You've called abiogenesis a "theory". There are no observations and
>therefore it cannot be called a theory.
Life has been observed. The early Universe has been observed, and
there was no possibility of life.
Nonetheless, it's only in your deluded excuse for a mind that a theory
requires observations to be a theory.
--
Replace nospam with group to email
catshark
wrote:
>"On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 21:28:10 +0000 (UTC), in article
><3p3ii0hdva40g4mn2...@4ax.com>, catshark stated..."
>>
>>On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 19:38:08 +0000 (UTC), "Rubystars"
>><wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>>Hugh Ross on one of his radio programs gave an analogy. He said that if a
>>>man were shot in the back, but the police were limited to only explaining
>>>deaths by "natural causes" that they would have to come up with a pretty
>>>wild scenario to explain it. He said they'd have to say that meterorites of
>>>a certain size must have hit him in the back. He claims that the scientific
>>>method would benefit by allowing supernatural explanations because he feels
>>>sometimes those are the most straightforward and make the most common sense.
>>
>>I haven't read much of Ross' stuff but I though he was smater than *that*.
>>Did he really try to deny that human actions are "natural causes"? (Ignore
>>that the *law* uses the terminology "homocide" or "natural causes". The
>>law ain't science. And anyway, the law has no category for "deicide" or
>>"demoncide".) The only other option appears to be that Ross is saying that
>>we should consider human action supernatural.
>
> Isn't "act of God" a legal term?
;-) Yeah.
>
> Although I'd guess that most of us would say that an "act of God",
>in the legal sense, is a "natural cause".
It mostly applies to things like storms, earthquakes, lightning strikes
. . . you know, all the things we can't begin to explain.
[...]
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
Nunc Id Vides, Nunc Ne Vides
- Unseen University Motto -
Johnny Bravo
<wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
>
>"Fencingsax" <chris...@aol.com> wrote in message
>news:cgbcau$d...@odak26.prod.google.com...
>> I'm sorry, what? I have seen EVIDENCE of evolution. I have seen no
>> evidence of everything being spontaneousley by God. I have also seen
>> you not answer my question. Why should RELIGION be taught in a SCIENCE
>> class? THAT is my big query. I repeat; Why should RELIGION be taught
>> in a SCIENCE class? I don't give a damn about what you think about the
>> TOE. (personally I think it's science) I want to know why a
>> non-science should be taught with science. Particularly YOUR
>> nonscience. Why no Hindu, or Eskimo?
>
>Creationists believe that the creation week in Genesis is a true and literal
>history of the world's origins.
>
>Therefore, they believe that there can never be any TRUE scientific
>discovery that contradicts that. They believe that Genesis has overriding
>authority, since it is part of God's word, and therefore can not be a lie.
All you have to do is point out that there are two entirely
different creation weeks listed in Genesis. If one of them is a true
and literal history of the world's origins, the other is a lie. As
soon as they can determine which one is the lie we can move on to the
fact that there are lies in the bible. :)
VoiceOfReason
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> >English).
>
>
> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
BUZZ. Not so. Science deals with what is measurable. Everything
else that may exist outside of the set of measurable phenomenon is
ignored.
> This bed rock presupposition of modern secular science is in the same
> class as the creationist presupposition that a supernatural creator is
> necessary to explain some events in space time. How does Fencingsax
> know which unscientific presupposition is true? He never says...
BUZZ. Science deals with evidence. Creationism deals with myths.
> [Side Bar: Methodological Naturalism as used by secularists in this
> forum only permits the examination of observable events; however,
> modern secular scientific theories about cosmology, earth history,
> abiogenesis and evolutionary biology contain UNobservables. The
> bedrock presupposition of secular science is Philosophical
> Naturalism.]
Multiple BUZZes. There's so much wrong in that paragraph it's hard to
know where to start.
> >The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
> >conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> >gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> How do we know that the unscientific claim of modern secular science <...>
Please explain how science is unscientific?
> The bedrock presupposition of modern secular science is impotent to
> explain the very existence of matter an its properties.
Matter exists. How much explanation do you need???
> The First Amendment was written to protect the people from their
> government establishing a religion not prevent the people from
> introducing religion into public life and public discourse.
> Furthermore the three part test introduced by the Supreme Court
> decision of 1971 to see if the First Amendment has been violated
> doesn't prevent the introduction of metaphysical presuppositions of
> any flavor into the classroom. The First Amendent nor the Court's
> three part concoction were intended to stiffle inquiry into the nature
> of our world.
True. The framers of the Constitution took pains to ensure that no
religion would force its views on others via government institutions,
including public schools. Forcing Creationism into a science
classroom would violate the Constitution, which has been demonstrated
in several Supreme Court decisions.
> >Please, Creationism
> >is not a science.
>
> Pagano replies:
> If creationism is tainted with metaphysical components and is ruled
> non science then so is modern secular science.
So you think if you sling enough mud at science, you'll make it look
as bad as Creationism? That's a pretty sorry approach, isn't it?
> Modern Secular Science
> is likewise tainted with its bedrock metaphysical presupposition.
This has yet to be demonstrated - it's just silly handwaving.
> > And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> Exactly the same. Modern secular geologists hypothesize that earth
> history was made up of "calm," globabl-like flooding over eons.
> Creationists hypothesize that earth history was punctuated by a short
> term catastrophic world wide flood about 6000 years ago.
> Creationists may determine the empirical consequences of their flood
> and search the geologic record for those consequences just like the
> secularists. The theories are slightly different but the method for
> testing them is substantially the same.
And the complete lack of evidence for a worldwide flood 6,000 years
ago pretty much emasculates Creationism.
> Fencingsax doesn't know what
> he's talking about.
Fencingsax has a handle on how science works. Pagano is clueless on
science, as he has adequately demonstrated.
<snip lame ad hominems>
Fencingsax
I have another question. Since YOU (ie pagano, mccoy, and the newbie
moron) believe creationism should be taught in science class, I want to
know why judeo-xtian is the only vald creationism. Why not, as I asked
somewhere earlier, Hindu, Norse, or Eskimo, or Scientologist
creationism. I mean, how can it not be just as valid? Heck, it has
the same amount of evidence. And the same amount of science.
So tell me, Why YOUR creationism?
Rubystars
"Johnny Bravo" <n...@nospam.com> wrote in message
news:p76li0hisbvh12424...@4ax.com...
That's not entirely accurate. There are two different versions of it written
down that differ a bit on the details but that doesn't mean they were two
different weeks entirely. The order is just changed around a bit as I
recall, and one goes into more detail than the other.
-Rubystars
Severian
<wind...@swbell.net> wrote:
If the order is changed around a bit, doesn't this make them
inconsistent and unsupportable as "divine truth?"
I'm just asking: although I've read the bible three or four times,
I've been neither a literalist nor a creationist. I thought the
stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and Babel were fairy tales
when I was five (even though I was being raised as a Christian).
And Parables? They're even called PARABLES! How do the fundies
"literally interpret" those?
--
Sev
Rubystars
"Severian" <seve...@chlamydia-is-not-a-flower.com> wrote in message
<snip>
> If the order is changed around a bit, doesn't this make them
> inconsistent and unsupportable as "divine truth?"
No. There are minor differences between the four gospels too. It doesn't
make them invalid. Having more accounts just gives a broader picture.
> I'm just asking: although I've read the bible three or four times,
> I've been neither a literalist nor a creationist. I thought the
> stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and Babel were fairy tales
> when I was five (even though I was being raised as a Christian).
>
> And Parables? They're even called PARABLES! How do the fundies
> "literally interpret" those?
Since they're actually spelled out to be parables they're not usually taken
literally.
-Rubystars
Severian
So they're hoist by their own petard? There's no such thing as a true
literalist: they must needs interpret according to some preconception,
correct?
--
Sev
Wakboth
They are not inconsistent, because the Genesis is not inconsistent;
therefore, it is completely supportable as "divine truth". See how
easy it is? :)
> I'm just asking: although I've read the bible three or four times,
> I've been neither a literalist nor a creationist. I thought the
> stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark and Babel were fairy tales
> when I was five (even though I was being raised as a Christian).
Just about every Christian in the world sees them as allegories and/or
mythical fables.
> And Parables? They're even called PARABLES! How do the fundies
> "literally interpret" those?
By assuming that they are literally parables, of course...
The basic tenets of Biblical literalism can be easily summed:
1. The Bible (as interpreted by your local pastor, although we don't
speak about the i-word) Is Literally Correct.
2. If someone happens to point out that some things in the Bible are
impossible, demonstrably untrue or contradictory, Bible Still Is
Literally Correct.
-- Wakboth (It's the antithesis of logical thinking. I think St.
Thomas of Aquine is rolling in his grave...)
Richard Forrest
I'm rather puzzled by the psalms, which I think Glenn insisted we
should interpret literally.
Take the 23rd Psalm:
"The Lord is my shepard" must mean that the writer of the psalm is
employing the Lord to look after his sheep. It seems a curious
inversion of the normal social order.
"therefore shall I lack nothing" certainly implies that the Lord is a
very good shepard, capable to looking after the writers flocks well
and making a good return on his investment.
"He shall feed me in green pastures" is puzzling: is the Lord feeding
his employer? Again a rather strange inversion of the social order.
Perhaps the Lord was so grateful for the opportunity of employment
that he laid on a picnic for the writer of the psalm.
"and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort". The identity of the
"waters of comfort" must be the key to the interpretation of this
phrase. Obviously it refers to a geographical location - the psalm
must be interpreted literally, after all - but where? "Waters of
comfort" sounds rather like a spa, perhaps a mineral spa renowned for
it's comforting and healing properties. No doubt some archaeologist
will uncover the remains of a spa dating from biblical time. However,
the interpretation of the phrase again raises a number of issues. Why
did the Lord not lead the writer to this spa, but rather to a place
beside the spa? Why not the spa itself?
It is tempting to interpret this as some sort of hidden message. By
leading his employer *beside*, rather than *to* the spa, the Lord is
dropping the hint that he must find comfort somewhere else, perhaps?
The question is, where?
I find this business of literal interpretation of the bible hard work,
and seem to end up more confused than when I started. All I end up
with is more questions. Perhaps someone can enlighten me?
RF
Thomas H. Faller
Well, no - there are two different stories that were written by different
authors and mean different things. It's not just a question of details. One
was written by someone who viewed the Creator as a personalized, humanistic
deity, who formed things with his hands as we would. The other saw the
creation proceeding from the Word, which wasn't a big parent figure. The
two accounts were later mixed together so that it looks like one story
with some repetition. There are other creation stories mixed in the OT in
odd places. God has to defeat the Leviathan to create dry land. There's
another Babylonian myth floating around in there too, in Proverbs or Psalms.
There's more to the background of separate accounts in Genesis, and a book
on the four authors of the "books of Moses" would go into how these accounts
were discovered and the authors teased out. The whole thing is full of two
accounts of the same event, sewn together, with later chapters added by
a priest and by another source and editor. It makes sense out of a lot of
otherwise contradictory and confusing passages. There are three or four
versions of the (approximately) Ten Commandments, for instance. This
has been an ongoing research effort by Christian and Jewish Bible scholars
for well over 100 years, and it's pretty well laid out and documented by now.
There isn't a word of it that leaks out to the general congregations, which
isn't too odd, but you can find books in most bookstores that go into it.
Tom Faller
Andrew Arensburger
> And Parables? They're even called PARABLES! How do the fundies
> "literally interpret" those?
See the scene in "Life of Brian" where Brian has to
impersonate a preacher. He starts telling a parable about a man who
had two servants. People in the audience wanted to know what their
names were.
Clearly they were expecting a literal parable.
--
Andrew Arensburger, Systems guy University of Maryland
arensb.no-...@umd.edu Office of Information Technology
Around here we do *precision* guess work!
J McCoy
Actually every American student since grade school has been taught the
method of science, as science is a method. Science is often mistaken
for naturalism and the belief and presupposition that all nature is
self-guided from the beginning.
The actual definition of the scientific method begins with
observation.
1. Observation. You notice patterns in nature, for instance objects
dropping to the ground.
After numerous observations of objects dropping the ground, you
HYPOTHESIZE that there is a force in nature, and you call it gravity.
Gravity pulls objects down is your hypothesis.
2. After further observation your hypothesis becomes a theory, as a
theory is a hypothesis that has repeated observation.
3. Finally you theory is fully confirmed and becomes a law of science,
hence, the Law of gravity.
As further evidence that evolutionists are trying to destroy the
scientific method so as to rend it more compatible with their
non-provable speculations, just reread your post, Jon, and see how
you've written that abiogenesis is scientific without any evidence or
observation whatsoever. In your mind you think and it becomes theory.
In science you must have observation or your thoughts just remain
what they are: unproven suppositions.
Floyd
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000, Fencingsax wrote:
>
> > What about the proposed marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>
Not necessarily. For example, the clause in the 21st Amendment
providing for different minimum drinking ages for men and women was
found (in Craig v. Boren) to be a violation of the equal protection
clause (section 1) of the 14th Amendment. True, that was only one
clause of the amendment, rather than its entirety, but it does
demonstrate that an amendment can potentially be enacted and later
found to conflict with other amendments. In such a case, one (or
more) of the two (or more) amendments must be unconstitutional, by
definition.
Fencingsax's suggestion that the proposed marriage amendment violates
the First Amendment is mistaken, however. It would almost certainly
violate the fourteenth, but not the first.
One could, hypothetically, make a case that marriage is necessarily a
religious ceremony, and that any form of marriage (polygamy, incest,
man and faithful sheep, etc.) is therefore beyond the sphere of
influence of the legislature under the First Amendment. This would
not be a particularly strong case, however, as it would by implication
nullify all civil marriages, therefore effectively prohibiting
atheists from marrying, and thus again conflict with the Fourteenth
Amendment. (The First Amendment would have priority, legally, and the
Fourteenth would then have to be nullified, but I doubt that such a
case would ever even be heard, as its implications are patently
ridiculous.)
Perhaps Fencingsax suggested that there is a First Amendment issue for
the proposed marriage Amendment because the particular sectarian
beliefs of a few of our elected officials were part of the inspiration
for the proposal. If so, I can assure Fencingsax and others that this
is not the case. The source of inspiration for a given bill is not
considered in determining its constitutionaity. One can get an idea
from one's religion, from one's reading of a good book, from a
malaria-induced fever dream, or from any other source and propose it.
It's not the source of inspiration that renders the proposed marriage
amendment unconstitutional; it's the conflict between that proposal
and other amendments that have already been enacted that does so.
Section one of the Fourteenth Amendment presents a much stronger case
against the proposed marriage act than any other aspect of the US
Constitution, IMO.
(Caveat: I am not a lawyer, so I'm really being rather rectoloquatious
here.)
-Floyd
Floyd
[snip]
> Nobody has ever seen
> non-intelligent forces create complex organisms.
Michael Behe was under the impression that the bacterial flagellum was
"irreducably complex", and yet "baby" bacteria produce such flagella
simply by inheriting the genes for them from their "parent" bacteria.
So, your options are as follows:
1) bacteria are intelligent
2) flagella are not complex
3) non-intelligent organisms can build "complex" organisms
Please let me know which choice you prefer.
Rubystars
taken
> >literally.
>
> So they're hoist by their own petard? There's no such thing as a true
> literalist: they must needs interpret according to some preconception,
> correct?
You can tell a story about someone telling a story. The story they told
doesn't have to be literally true, just the fact they told it.
-Rubystars
Jon Fleming
wrote:
>Jon Fleming <jo...@fleming-nospam.com> wrote in message news:<bn5li09nutid63vaq...@4ax.com>...
>> On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 23:02:49 +0000 (UTC), mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy)
>> wrote:
>>
>> >You've called abiogenesis a "theory". There are no observations and
>> >therefore it cannot be called a theory.
>>
>> Life has been observed. The early Universe has been observed, and
>> there was no possibility of life.
>>
>> Nonetheless, it's only in your deluded excuse for a mind that a theory
>> requires observations to be a theory.
>
>Actually every American student since grade school has been taught the
>method of science, as science is a method. Science is often mistaken
>for naturalism and the belief and presupposition that all nature is
>self-guided from the beginning.
>
>The actual definition of the scientific method begins with
>observation.
That's one way, but not the only way, to define the scientific method.
E.g. your pal Lambert Dolphin disagrees:
<http://www.ldolphin.org/SciMeth2.html>.
>1. Observation. You notice patterns in nature, for instance objects
>dropping to the ground.
>
>After numerous observations of objects dropping the ground, you
>HYPOTHESIZE that there is a force in nature, and you call it gravity.
>Gravity pulls objects down is your hypothesis.
>
>2. After further observation your hypothesis becomes a theory, as a
>theory is a hypothesis that has repeated observation.
>
>3. Finally you theory is fully confirmed and becomes a law of science,
>hence, the Law of gravity.
>
>As further evidence that evolutionists are trying to destroy the
>scientific method so as to rend it more compatible with their
>non-provable speculations, just reread your post, Jon, and see how
>you've written that abiogenesis is scientific without any evidence or
>observation whatsoever. In your mind you think and it becomes theory.
> In science you must have observation or your thoughts just remain
>what they are: unproven suppositions.
You ignored the two major relevant observations that I listed in my
message. I could have listed thousands more, but those are the
biggies.
Bobby D. Bryant
> "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote in message
> news:<pan.2004.08.22....@mail.utexas.edu>...
>
>> Constitutional ammendments are 'constitutional' by definition.
>
> Not necessarily. For example, the clause in the 21st Amendment
> providing for different minimum drinking ages for men and women was
> found (in Craig v. Boren) to be a violation of the equal protection
> clause (section 1) of the 14th Amendment.
Strange. I thought the more recent amendment would trump anything
earlier, including the original.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
John Wilkins
> (Caveat: I am not a lawyer, so I'm really being rather rectoloquatious
> here.)
You speak rightly? As opposed to versoloquacious, speaking in verse?
--
John S. Wilkins jo...@wilkins.id.au
web: www.wilkins.id.au blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com
God cheats
Chris Krolczyk
Two points:
1) The fact that you didn't get Earle's joke - an old, old
joke, for that matter - proves you have absolutely no sense
of humor.
2) What is the difference between "not seeing an ape turn
into a man" and "not seeing an ape in millions of descendents
(sic) turn into a man", precisely? Both are varieties of the
"were you *there*?" nonsense we've seen coming out of the
mouths of YECs *ad nauseum*, and it's still so much of
a non-argument it's not even worth being called stupid
anymore.
> You've just called me "dumber than
> Murphy" and so I have to admit that I now even question whether your
> assertion about Murphy is correct.
Haven't read Murph's posts for that legendary
comprehension you've been whining about, have you?
Murph was a troll. Period.
The fact that you can't distinguish between a
legitimate poster and an obvious troll says
a lot about you.
> By the way, your misreading my
> message was dumb.
You're worse than dumb, John.
I would call you worse than retarded, but that'd be
slandering the mentally handicapped. Unlike you, they
can't blame *themselves* for their condition.
-Chris Krolczyk
T Pagano
<sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>"T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
>news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
>> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
>> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>> >English).
>>
>>
>> Pagano replies:
>> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
>> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
>> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
>> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
>> one has produced them.
>>
>You are mistaken here. In _Consilience_, a book by professed atheist Edward
>O. Wilson, Wilson contemplates, and indeed opines for the probable truth of,
>the possibility that there are aspects of "events in space-time" that
>science will *never* enable us to understand. This is not a particularly
>exotic or controversial view among "modern secularists." Pretty obviously,
>it's hard to insist that "matter and its properties" account for all
>phenomena, if we're simultaneously insisting that we don't know and may
>never know what accounts for *all* phenomena.
>
>Rather, the question is, what sort of causes can actually *explain* any sort
>of phenomenon?
Pagano replies:
Modern secularists have decided a priori that they will limit what
causes can be considered in accordance with the guidance provided by
the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism. There is nothing
necessarily devious about this decision; scientists have always
employed their metaphyscial world views to guide their search for
answers. However, they must be prepared to accept criticism of this
world view (Naturalism) and show that it is superior to others.
>To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
>than some other conceivable way
Pagano replies:
To explain an event is to show that given a set of intial conditions
conjoined to some causitive action (forces, chemical reactions,
introduction of energy, etc.) that "only" that event will occur.
>-- a cause has to have some sort of
>discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts.
Pagano replies:
This is a metaphysical claim about nature not a first order claim of
science. In fact our background knowledge contains very few
regularities. While there may be some regularities in nature Steven
J's metaphysical notion that every event in space-time is the result
of some regularity of nature is uniformitarianism which is also a
metaphysical claim about nature not a first order testable claim of
science.
It is also a very weak metaphysical view which secularists employ
heavily but (like Naturalism) deny once its isolated from their
theories.
>One must be able
>to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
>particular cause.
Pagano replies:
An "empirical consequence" is an observable state of affairs left
after an event has occurred. "Empirical consequences" will be found
only if our theory about the event is correct and gives us a clue
where to look.
Unfortunately if our metaphysical world view about nature arbitrarily
limits where we may look for theories (that is, what theories we will
permit to be considered) then we may well not predict the correct
consequences and not look in the right place. This is precisely the
problem. Naturalism excludes a whole class of possibilities and
secularists have yet to offer much of a rebuttal for the criticism of
this unscientific philosophy. Things are even a little more sticky
for Steven J.
Origins investigations; that is, Big Bang, Cosmogonies, abiogenesis
and evolutionary biology are historical investigations involving
unique, non recurring, unobservable and experimentally unreproducible
events not the search for regularities. As a result
secularists/atheists have relied even more heavily on naturalism,
uniformitarianism, the Copernican principle, and the anthropic
principle. All are unscientific metaphysical claims about nature.
But so is supernaturalism.
>Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
>*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
>cause.
Pagano replies:
What on earth is a "methodologically natural" cause?
As used recently by secularists "methodological naturalism" is the
doctrine of restricting our investigations, theories and tests to
those events, initial conditions, and forces which are "directly"
observable. This is the ostensible "sword" used to eliminate
supernaturalism, but unfortunately it eliminates a whole host of
theories which secularists/atheists hold sacrosanct.
Once backed into this corner "methodological naturalism" is then
modified to include unobservable forces which have empirical
consequences. Unfortunately this includes supernatural action which
can have empirical consequences. Backed into another corner.
In philsophy "methodological naturalism" is the metaphysical child of
Naturalism. It is the doctrine wherein knowledge can only be obtained
by investigating natural objects. Of course this throws mathematics
and other disciplines out the window. Steven J really has nowhere to
hide.
snip
Regards,
T Pagano
T Pagano
>of phenomenon? To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
>than some other conceivable way -- a cause has to have some sort of
>discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts. One must be able
>to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
>particular cause. Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
>*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
>cause.
>
>We've gone over this before. For example, a global flood in which the
>waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics....
Pagano replies:
What "laws of physics?" There are the three Laws of Thermodynamics,
there are Newton's laws of motion, Keplers Laws of motion, and there
are a few law-like generalizations but there are no "laws of physics"
as far as I know. Furthermore events are rarely if ever reducible to
these laws let alone to the methodology of physics. The strict sort
of reductionism advocated by Steven J isn't even in vogue among
secularist/atheist scientists because it has largely been discredited.
Fluid mechanics and sedementology which are the applicable
disciplines, and while they are not in their infancy, they haven't
solved all their problems either. Fluid mechanics and sedementology
are not merely a deduction of Newton's laws of motion or any
conjunction of the other laws we know of.
>For example, a global flood in which the
>waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics as observed today
>would be a natural phenomenon, and its effects would be detectable by the
>methods of geology and archaeology, and it would function as an explanation
>for, e.g. why we find ruined cities and human bones under the jumble of
>dinosaur and whale fossils in the flood deposits.
Pagano replies:
Here Steven J is referring to the "empirical consequences" of some
global flood not the event itself. Modern secular geologists began as
pure uniformitarians but discovered too many problems. Then they
punctuated their uniformitarian theories with catastrophies. When
will the pendulum shift closer to Noahic Flood?
Secular geologists are still uniformitarians with regard to flooding.
Their theories hypothesize that prehistory was filled with calm,
global like flooding over eons. The Noahic Flood hypothesizes about a
catastrophic, global flood lasting about a year which was initiated
about 6000 years ago. BOTH hypotheses have empirical consequences
which are not equivalent and both can be sought in the record.
Noahic Flood theorists make no metaphysic presuppositions other than
the fact that a supernatural God set up the conditions necessary for
the initiation of such a flood. Secularists/atheists make the
demonstrably false presuppositions of superposition, faunal succession
and uniformitarianism.
Finally fossilization requires very special conditions to occur. The
calm flooding proposed by uniformitarian geologists doesn't seem to
meet the qualifications. We have observed almost no fossilization
occuring by so-called "calm" flooding. But we have observed river
flooding create tremendous damage and rapid sedementation over short
periods of time.
>Except, of course, that
>geologists and archaeologists *don't* find such an arrangement of fossils,
>or any of the other expected evidence of a global flood.
Pagano replies:
Uniformitarian geologists are plagued by stratigraphic layers out of
order too large to be explained away by over thrusts; fossils found
out of sequence with faunal succession...
snip
Regards,
T Pagano
Eros
> > all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
> > on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
> > conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
> > gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
> > is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
> >
> > Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
> > marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>
> Nonsense. Evolution shouldn't be in the schools. Nobody has seen
> any ape turn into a man over millions of descendents. This is sheer
> speculation, outside the scope of science.
Obviously nobody can live long enough to see an "ape turn into a man
over millions of descendents". That's why scientists use the fossil
record and genetic information and a whole host of other evidence to
trace the descent of man and other living things. Do you seriously
believe that you have to see something happen before you can believe
it to be true? Surely not... else how could you justify your own
religion, which is based *entirely* on the unseen?
> Nobody has ever seen
> non-intelligent forces create complex organisms. Everyone has seen
> intelligence create complicated things. This puts random chance at a
> disadvantage and puts the concept of a creator in a much better light.
Like all scientifically ignorant creationists, you tend to use a
"common sense" approach to everything. Unfortunately, as any scientist
will tell you, "common sense" is not common, nor does it often make
much sense.
Have you ever seen the Creator create? Has anyone? Why would an
"intelligent creator", repeatedly use designs that are at best far
from perfect, and at worst totally inadequate to cope with rapidly
changing environments? 99% of all species your Creator has "designed"
have gone extinct.
"The fossil record -- and I can give you specific examples – is
characertized best by sequences of appearances and disappearances. Now
think what that means. What that means is that the characteristic
that best describes the intelligent designer who would have designed
this fossil record is incompetent because everything the intelligent
designer designed, with about one percent exceptions, has immediately
become extinct. Intelligent design has no explanation for the
successive character in the fossil record, evolution has a perfect
explanation, and that is the appearance of new forms and the
extinction of others." -- Eugenie Scott in "Resolved: That
evolutionists should acknowledge creation", _Firing Line_, 4 December
1997, p. 22.
> Everyday you can scientifically prove that intelligence can create
> complex things.
So can random changes combined with selection. I take it you've never
heard of genetic algorithms used to generate complex circuits.
> Everyday you can show that complicated beings create
> complex things. But on no day can you show random forces creating
> complex things as complex as a computer. No, you cannot observe that.
> Do you know what that means?
It means you are just not up with the latest technology, McCoy. I
suggest you investigate how genetic algorithims (based on the very
evolutionary mechanisms you so arrogantly deny) are being used to
randomly produce complex things all the time.
> Crystals and snowflakes are not complex. They don't create complex
> movement and accomplish nothing.
Yet both form spontaneously from liquid water in total disobedience of
the Creationist version of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which states
that things naturally go from order to disorder... go figure!
EROS.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is no wording in the Constitution that says "separation of
church and state." That's in the Soviet Constitution, to which you
wish you belonged. But as I said, since the word "an" is in the
Constitution, regarding, "an" establishment of religion, and since
"creationism" is not a product of "an" establishment of religion, but
really started by individual creationists such as Henry Morris et al,
and since Henry Morris et al, are not ministers, nor do they operate
churches, therefore their work isn't a product of any denomination of
religion. Henry Morris is an individual. He isn't an "establishment"
of religion." -- J. McCoy (Talk.Origins 2004-05-18)
catshark
wrote:
>> > What about the proposed marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>>
>> Constitutional ammendments are 'constitutional' by definition.
>
>Not necessarily. For example, the clause in the 21st Amendment
>providing for different minimum drinking ages for men and women was
>found (in Craig v. Boren) to be a violation of the equal protection
>clause (section 1) of the 14th Amendment.
I think this is a little garbled. Here is the text of the 21th Amendment:
Twenty-First Amendment - Repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment
Section 1. The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution
of the United States is hereby repealed.
Section 2. The transportation or importation into any State,
Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use
therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof,
is hereby prohibited.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have
been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in
the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven
years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the
Congress.
While I have only skimmed Graig v. Boren, it is about overturning an
Oklahoma statute having different ages for selling "near beer" to males and
females and the 21st is only mentioned for the support it might give to the
right of a state to regulate sales of alcohol.
Generally, when there are alleged conflicts between contitutional
provisions, the courts try to interpret them in such a way as they are
compatable. When push comes to shove, though, the more recent and/or more
specific provision wins. The probable holding on the marriage amendment,
should it be adopted, would be that it trumps the 14th and the rest.
Depending on the wording, however, the court might well fashion some
requirement to give all the legal rights of marriage to all, just without
the name.
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
LAWYER, n.
One skilled in circumvention of the law.
- Ambrose Bierce -
Gary Bohn
news:1gj2gh0.rrjanmee7u9bN%john...@wilkins.id.au:
> Floyd <far...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> (Caveat: I am not a lawyer, so I'm really being rather
>> rectoloquatious here.)
>
> You speak rightly? As opposed to versoloquacious, speaking in verse?
I think he's doing his Jim Carey impersonation.
--
apatriot #23, aa #1779, Grand Poobah (Pubbah)(Hell! head honcho), EAC
Department of Oxygen Deprivation Responsible for brain damage
everywhere!
Gary Bohn
Conservatism is not about tradition and morality, hasn't been for many
decades...It is about the putative biological and spiritual superiority
of the wealthy.
Greg Bear
Greg G
That only holds for Biblical passages. I think an amendment would have
to be repealed before another could contradict it without
constitutional ramifications.
--
Greg G.
I do begin to have bloody thoughts. --Shakespeare
Michael Siemon
catshark <cats...@yahoo.com> wrote:
.....
> ... The probable holding on the marriage amendment,
> should it be adopted, would be that it trumps the 14th and the rest.
> Depending on the wording, however, the court might well fashion some
> requirement to give all the legal rights of marriage to all, just without
> the name.
Not if Scalia has anything to say in the upshot [mutter, mutter,
mutter...]
T Pagano
<sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>"T Pagano" <not....@address.net> wrote in message
>news:apagano-10jhi0l6396fr...@4ax.com...
>> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), "Fencingsax"
>> <chris...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> >I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>> >all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>> >on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>> >English).
>>
>>
>> Pagano replies:
>> The central myth of modern secular science is that matter and its
>> properties are sufficient to explain all events in space-time. This
>> is NOT a first order claim of science but an UNSCIENTIFIC metaphysical
>> claim about nature. If there are scientific tests of this claim no
>> one has produced them.
>>
>You are mistaken here. In _Consilience_, a book by professed atheist Edward
>O. Wilson, Wilson contemplates, and indeed opines for the probable truth of,
>the possibility that there are aspects of "events in space-time" that
>science will *never* enable us to understand. This is not a particularly
>exotic or controversial view among "modern secularists." Pretty obviously,
>it's hard to insist that "matter and its properties" account for all
>phenomena, if we're simultaneously insisting that we don't know and may
>never know what accounts for *all* phenomena.
>
>Rather, the question is, what sort of causes can actually *explain* any sort
>of phenomenon? To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
>than some other conceivable way -- a cause has to have some sort of
>discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts. One must be able
>to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
>particular cause. Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
>*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
>cause.
>
>We've gone over this before. For example, a global flood in which the
>waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics as observed today
>would be a natural phenomenon, and its effects would be detectable by the
>methods of geology and archaeology, and it would function as an explanation
>for, e.g. why we find ruined cities and human bones under the jumble of
>dinosaur and whale fossils in the flood deposits. Except, of course, that
>geologists and archaeologists *don't* find such an arrangement of fossils,
>or any of the other expected evidence of a global flood.
>
>One could, of course, posit that the Designer intervened repeatedly and in
>unfathomable ways for unguessable purposes in the course of a flood,...
Pagano replies:
Scripture is creationism's source. Genesis documents God's
interactions with the world and reports them to have occurred in
SPECIFIC AND LIMITED INSTANCES FOR KNOWN PURPOSES.
So the supernatural forces were NOT introduced repeatedly or for
unguessable reasons and are NO LESS unfathomable than are the occult
forces introduced by secularists in the hypothesis of Big Bang.
Had Steven J bothered to read Genesis he wouldn't make such obvious
falsehoods. Or even worse he knows what's in Genesis and he makes
intentional falsehoods anyway.
>...so that
>its empirical consequences were not at all what we would expect from a
>global flood
Pagano replies:
First the history of science has shown that most of the time our
expectations are wrong. Second, what expectations is Steven J
referring to? Third the secular/atheist model proposes global like
flooding.
>-- or even were exactly what we would expect from millions of
>centuries of local, more "uniformitarian" causes.
Pagano replies:
The problem is that there is no such scientific principle of the
uniformity of nature. And there are so many anomolies crying against
it that one wonders why secularists cling to it as tightly as any
religious dogma.
>But one could not
>differentiate the expected empirical results of one Designer's interventions
>from those of another, rival Designer,
Pagano replies:
Again Steven J creating more straw men. What other model of earth
history involving a designer exists besides the Noahic Flood? None,
so the problem of distinquishing between rival Designers is a figment
of his imagination.
>or from the effects of mindless but currently unknown causes.
Pagano replies:
But we can, in principle, distinquish between the Noahic Model and the
uniformitarian model. The empirical consequences are not the same.
Furthermore the uniformitarian model has yet to solve many of the more
difficult problems. The stratigraphic layers out of sequence and the
finding of so-called index fossils out of sequence is unsolved. The
ad hoc solutions exist only to stave off refutation.
>>That is because such a Designer, as described,
>has no knowable "nature" and His actions cannot be predicted or tested for.
Pagano replies:
We don't have to know the Designer's nature any more than we have to
know the nature of supernatural action employed to intiate a world
wide, short term, catastrophic flood. All that can be sought now for
either the secular model or the Noahic model are empirical
consequences and the consequences of the Noahic Flood are not the same
as those of the secular model. The Noahic Flood model does not suffer
from the stratigraphic layer problem or the index fossil problem.
Steven J should remember that neither does he or anyone else know the
nature of the forces or the nature of anything in the purported cosmic
singularity yet this bothers no one. And it shouldn't so long as the
theory entails empirical consequences which can be sought.
snip
Regards,
T Pagano
J McCoy
> On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:49:57 +0000 (UTC), mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy)
> wrote:
>
> >Jon Fleming <jo...@fleming-nospam.com> wrote in message news:<bn5li09nutid63vaq...@4ax.com>...
> >> On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 23:02:49 +0000 (UTC), mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy)
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> >You've called abiogenesis a "theory". There are no observations and
> >> >therefore it cannot be called a theory.
> >>
> >> Life has been observed. The early Universe has been observed, and
> >> there was no possibility of life.
> >>
> >> Nonetheless, it's only in your deluded excuse for a mind that a theory
> >> requires observations to be a theory.
> >
> >Actually every American student since grade school has been taught the
> >method of science, as science is a method. Science is often mistaken
> >for naturalism and the belief and presupposition that all nature is
> >self-guided from the beginning.
> >
> >The actual definition of the scientific method begins with
> >observation.
>
> That's one way, but not the only way, to define the scientific method.
> E.g. your pal Lambert Dolphin disagrees:
> <http://www.ldolphin.org/SciMeth2.html>.
Tossing a red herring isn't going to let you off the hook, Jon. The
fact is that science is a method. It's clearly defined in every
elementary school book up to high school and college. You should try
reading it sometime. If you want to define science you know the
method, because the method is the science. The fact is science is
observation, hypothesis, observation, experimentation, etc. If you
don't have something tangible to deal with, like observations, you
don't have science. It's just that one day creationists came along
and pointed out that evolutionary beliefs are not based on direct
observation as is science or indirect writings that involve history.
Therefore you rely on speculation based on interpretation of data that
are inconclusive regarding origins. That frustrates those who are
interested in empirical data. The fact remains that evolution, more
specifically, macro-evolution, is not scientific.
>
> >1. Observation. You notice patterns in nature, for instance objects
> >dropping to the ground.
> >
> >After numerous observations of objects dropping the ground, you
> >HYPOTHESIZE that there is a force in nature, and you call it gravity.
> >Gravity pulls objects down is your hypothesis.
> >
> >2. After further observation your hypothesis becomes a theory, as a
> >theory is a hypothesis that has repeated observation.
> >
> >3. Finally you theory is fully confirmed and becomes a law of science,
> >hence, the Law of gravity.
> >
> >As further evidence that evolutionists are trying to destroy the
> >scientific method so as to rend it more compatible with their
> >non-provable speculations, just reread your post, Jon, and see how
> >you've written that abiogenesis is scientific without any evidence or
> >observation whatsoever. In your mind you think and it becomes theory.
> > In science you must have observation or your thoughts just remain
> >what they are: unproven suppositions.
>
> You ignored the two major relevant observations that I listed in my
> message. I could have listed thousands more, but those are the
> biggies.
As usual you've failed, like countless other unsuccessful
evolutionists, to prove that evolution is scientific, when it clearly
is not.
JM
Steven J.
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:20:25 +0000 (UTC), "Steven J."
> <sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>
> >Rather, the question is, what sort of causes can actually *explain* any
sort
> >of phenomenon?
>
> Pagano replies:
> Modern secularists have decided a priori that they will limit what
> causes can be considered in accordance with the guidance provided by
> the unscientific philosophy of Naturalism. There is nothing
> necessarily devious about this decision; scientists have always
> employed their metaphyscial world views to guide their search for
> answers. However, they must be prepared to accept criticism of this
> world view (Naturalism) and show that it is superior to others.
>
you wish to propose. If you propose a generic "supernaturalism," you really
ought to address my question (which is neither original nor unique to me, of
course) of how one would distinguish between two rival supernatural
hypotheses. If you mean, specifically, "creation science based on the
Christian Bible," the question arises, why the Bible, and why your
interpretation of it, over rival scriptures and interpretations?
>
> >To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
> >than some other conceivable way
>
> Pagano replies:
> To explain an event is to show that given a set of intial conditions
> conjoined to some causitive action (forces, chemical reactions,
> introduction of energy, etc.) that "only" that event will occur.
>
we may never have sufficiently detailed information about the "initial
conditions" and "causitive factors" to limit our predictions to a single,
narrowly specified outcome (think of the oft-cited example that did not
suffice to falsify Newtonian celestial dynamics -- Uranus being slightly off
its predicted position due to the influence of the then-undetected planet
Neptune), we may need to specify that "only" some event within a particular
class of phenomena will result.
>
> >-- a cause has to have some sort of
> >discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts.
>
severely modifies its meaning. In short, your paragraph below is critiquing
a quote out of context, essaying a rebuttal to a point other than the one I
was trying to make.
>
> Pagano replies:
> This is a metaphysical claim about nature not a first order claim of
> science. In fact our background knowledge contains very few
> regularities. While there may be some regularities in nature Steven
> J's metaphysical notion that every event in space-time is the result
> of some regularity of nature is uniformitarianism which is also a
> metaphysical claim about nature not a first order testable claim of
> science.
>
regularity of nature. My claim is that every *explained* event is
explicable only in terms of such regularities. Note, for what it's worth,
that I don't claim that those causes must be confined to this universe, but
only that they must act in this universe with discoverable regularities *if
we are to figure out that, in fact, they are the causes of the events we are
trying to explain*. I was offering a claim about what sorts of causes can
serve as explanations, not what sort of causes can exist.
>
> It is also a very weak metaphysical view which secularists employ
> heavily but (like Naturalism) deny once its isolated from their
> theories.
>
views? By what criterion are they stronger? Why do you assume I deny the
very principles I go to the trouble of explaining? Now, I deny some of the
views you ascribe to me -- but that is a different matter.
>
> >One must be able
> >to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
> >particular cause.
>
> Pagano replies:
> An "empirical consequence" is an observable state of affairs left
> after an event has occurred. "Empirical consequences" will be found
> only if our theory about the event is correct and gives us a clue
> where to look.
>
provoked theories which are devised to explain them. One thinks of Steno
trying to explain the strata and fossils of the Italian hills. And, of
course, any theory can be tested to see if the predicted state of affairs
actually exists to be observed. It may not, in which case the data
contradict the theory -- which is, of course, one possible consequence of
testing theories. Come to think of it, your statement here -- which you
seem to have made simply to post a response, without thinking very clearly
about what you were saying -- contradicts your own oft-repeated statement
that every false theory in the history of science has some corroborations.
That would imply that some incorrect theories indicated that certain
actually existent empirical consequences would be in the places where they
induced researchers to look.
>
> Unfortunately if our metaphysical world view about nature arbitrarily
> limits where we may look for theories (that is, what theories we will
> permit to be considered) then we may well not predict the correct
> consequences and not look in the right place. This is precisely the
> problem. Naturalism excludes a whole class of possibilities and
> secularists have yet to offer much of a rebuttal for the criticism of
> this unscientific philosophy. Things are even a little more sticky
> for Steven J.
>
proponents who didn't think their analogies through (or hoped their readers
would not think them through). For example, one writer compared
"naturalistic" researchers to a sheriff who only sought Black suspects for
some murder, ignoring all possible white suspects. Of course, exactly the
same "naturalistic" methods (e.g. fingerprints or DNA comparisons) could be
used to investigate a possible white suspect. It's not at all clear what
sort of methodologies one might use to test a hypothesis involving a cause
whose empirical effects were, by definition, entirely unknown and perhaps
entirely unpredictable.
Again, if you are suggesting that the causes "secularists" refuse to
consider would, indeed, have predictable empirical effects, then they
*would*, by definition, be "natural" causes. You could save everyone a
great deal of trouble if you just specified what those effects were, and
where we should look for them, and how we should distinguish among the
effects of different possible causes in the class of possibilities rejected
by "secularists." But I suspect that what you mean by "naturalism excludes
a whole class of possibilities" is that, e.g. geologists do not stay up
nights trying to piece together a theory that will somehow reconcile the
evidence they actual have to a global flood within the last hundred
centuries. Indeed, they do not, anymore than meteorologists burn the
midnight oil trying to show that clouds might, indeed, be the splattered
brains of the primordial frost giant Ymir. Can you give some reason why it
would profit them to do so?
>
> Origins investigations; that is, Big Bang, Cosmogonies, abiogenesis
> and evolutionary biology are historical investigations involving
> unique, non recurring, unobservable and experimentally unreproducible
> events not the search for regularities. As a result
> secularists/atheists have relied even more heavily on naturalism,
> uniformitarianism, the Copernican principle, and the anthropic
> principle. All are unscientific metaphysical claims about nature.
> But so is supernaturalism.
>
First of all, the Big Bang *is* a cosmogony; if you use terms as though you
don't know what they mean, people will be less likely to take your arguments
seriously. Second, abiogenesis research is conducted on the assumption that
it, in fact, involves *repeatable* events -- that is, that the stages of
abiogenesis could, in principle, take place in the present day under present
laws of nature, given the right conditions. Evolutionary biology, likewise,
is concerned with recurring phenomena, like reproduction, mutation, and
changes in gene frequencies in populations under various selective regimes.
Evolution and its processes is going on now.
Now, of course, the specific course of evolution is not repeatable (although
that is not a requirement of science -- the *observations* of evidence
resulting from an event must be repeatable, not the event itself). A
speciation event occurring in a lab is different from any speciation event
occurring before, whether ten years or a billion years earlier. Natural
selection in the Galapagos today acts on different organisms and yields
different results from natural selection acting on the shores of the
Niobrara Sea a million centuries back. And no abiogenesis researcher
expects to reconstruct the *exact* sequence of events leading to the LUCA.
But then, "naturalistic" and "uniformitarian" methods are used to
investigate all sorts of events that are not specifically repeatable. Even
if the NTSB were allowed to crash a jetliner to investigate a crash, it
couldn't very well crash the *same* jetliner all over again. The medical
examiner can't repeat the death of the particular individual on his table,
even if that individual died a mere hour back. "Historical" investigations
are all investigations of unique events, but all such investigations rely on
"naturalism." If we are to take seriously the idea that "origins" research
would benefit from consideration of "supernatural" causes, then you really
ought to show how such investigations would work when dealing with other
unique subjects of investigations.
It is not to the point, by the way, to argue that "creation scientists" are
only asking for a limited number of exceptions to naturalism, all confined
to the distant historical past. First of all, I think this is unlikely; you
yourself have argued for a supernatural explanation of a much more recent
unique event (Fatima). Other "supernaturalists" could with equal
justification demand that we consider supernatural explanations for aircraft
crashes, sudden unexplained deaths, etc. If someone insists that a given
death is the result of witchcraft, how would you test that hypothesis? Or,
how would you justify refusing to consider that hypothesis, while demanding
that we explain shared pseudogenes between humans and chimps with "the
Creator wanted it that way?"
>
> >Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
> >*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
> >cause.
>
> Pagano replies:
> What on earth is a "methodologically natural" cause?
>
It is a cause of the sort considered when employing "methodological
naturalism" to investigate phenomena. I thought that was rather clear. But
then, I often suspect that clarity is nearly as much your enemy as
"secularism" or "neoDarwinism."
>
> As used recently by secularists "methodological naturalism" is the
> doctrine of restricting our investigations, theories and tests to
> those events, initial conditions, and forces which are "directly"
> observable. This is the ostensible "sword" used to eliminate
> supernaturalism, but unfortunately it eliminates a whole host of
> theories which secularists/atheists hold sacrosanct.
>
No, the above is simply and blatantly wrong. "Methodological naturalism" is
*not* limited to directly observable phenomena; how many people have to
point this out, and how many times, before you allow it to sink in?
>
> Once backed into this corner "methodological naturalism" is then
> modified to include unobservable forces which have empirical
> consequences. Unfortunately this includes supernatural action which
> can have empirical consequences. Backed into another corner.
>
No, "methodological naturalism" has always included indirect observation and
unobservable forces which have *predictable* empirical consequences. I
suppose if an event in space-time has a supernatural cause, then
supernatural causes must have empirical consequences. But this does not
help us distinguish the effects of one supernatural cause from another, or
from an unknown "natural" cause.
>
> In philsophy "methodological naturalism" is the metaphysical child of
> Naturalism. It is the doctrine wherein knowledge can only be obtained
> by investigating natural objects. Of course this throws mathematics
> and other disciplines out the window. Steven J really has nowhere to
> hide.
>
Tony, I suggest that, in the future, you try to rebut a worldview that
someone, somewhere, actually holds. The phantasm you imagine (or pretend to
imagine) "methodological naturalism" to be does not exist. No one holds
that view or ever pretended to hold it. Of course, attacking that phantasm
does give you something to do, in place of actually proposing a
"supernatural" hypothesis and a methodology for testing it, and
distinguishing its effects from those of other conjectured supernatural
causes.
>
> snip
>
>
> Regards,
> T Pagano
>
-- Steven J.
Steven J.
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:20:25 +0000 (UTC), "Steven J."
> <sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>
> >Rather, the question is, what sort of causes can actually *explain* any
sort
> >of phenomenon? To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way
rather
> >than some other conceivable way -- a cause has to have some sort of
> >discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts. One must be
able
> >to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
> >particular cause. Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
> >*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
> >cause.
> >
> >We've gone over this before. For example, a global flood in which the
> >waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics....
>
> Pagano replies:
> What "laws of physics?" There are the three Laws of Thermodynamics,
> there are Newton's laws of motion, Keplers Laws of motion, and there
> are a few law-like generalizations but there are no "laws of physics"
> as far as I know. Furthermore events are rarely if ever reducible to
> these laws let alone to the methodology of physics. The strict sort
> of reductionism advocated by Steven J isn't even in vogue among
> secularist/atheist scientists because it has largely been discredited.
>
providing an actual, testable supernatural hypothesis, much less any
evidence for it, but it's not very helpful.
>
> Fluid mechanics and sedementology which are the applicable
> disciplines, and while they are not in their infancy, they haven't
> solved all their problems either. Fluid mechanics and sedementology
> are not merely a deduction of Newton's laws of motion or any
> conjunction of the other laws we know of.
>
gravity, viscosity, quantum physics (why particles don't fall through one
another), and so forth. But no matter.
>
> >For example, a global flood in which the
> >waters acted in accordance with the same laws of physics as observed
today
> >would be a natural phenomenon, and its effects would be detectable by the
> >methods of geology and archaeology, and it would function as an
explanation
> >for, e.g. why we find ruined cities and human bones under the jumble of
> >dinosaur and whale fossils in the flood deposits.
>
> Pagano replies:
> Here Steven J is referring to the "empirical consequences" of some
> global flood not the event itself. Modern secular geologists began as
> pure uniformitarians but discovered too many problems. Then they
> punctuated their uniformitarian theories with catastrophies. When
> will the pendulum shift closer to Noahic Flood?
>
was being born, not all geologists agreed with those views. Nor were the
"catastrophists" simple biblical literalists; they sought *naturalistic*
explanations for geological formations in terms of catastrophe. Nor was it
simply the pure uniformitarians (the Lyellians, and ultra-Lyellians like
Darwin himself) who reluctantly accepted local catastrophic events as
geological explanations. The catastrophists abandoned the Noahic flood and
moved closer to a "uniformitarian" viewpoint.
>
> Secular geologists are still uniformitarians with regard to flooding.
> Their theories hypothesize that prehistory was filled with calm,
> global like flooding over eons. The Noahic Flood hypothesizes about a
> catastrophic, global flood lasting about a year which was initiated
> about 6000 years ago. BOTH hypotheses have empirical consequences
> which are not equivalent and both can be sought in the record.
>
world, as we see it today, undergoing "calm, global-like flooding?"
Geologists infer that continents and seas have moved around, but that for at
least the last three billion years, a minority of the globe's surface has
been dry land, and the rest under seas of different (and variable) depth.
And what do you imagine to be the distinctive empirical consequences of
Noah's flood?
More specifically, why do you imagine that the following are *not*
predictions of such a flood? *I* would expect, if Noah's flood had
literally occurred about 6000 years ago (actually, many "creation
scientists" would put it about 4500 years ago, but why quibble?), that we
would find cetacean fossils in the same sediments as plesiosaurs, mososaurs,
and ichthyosaurs, probisideans in the same sediments as sauropods, modern
mammals all through the geological column, and so forth.
>
> Noahic Flood theorists make no metaphysic presuppositions other than
> the fact that a supernatural God set up the conditions necessary for
> the initiation of such a flood. Secularists/atheists make the
> demonstrably false presuppositions of superposition, faunal succession
> and uniformitarianism.
>
If there were any actual "Noachic Flood theorists," they might make no
further presuppositions. But in practice, of course, YECs make all sorts of
other presuppositions. God might have altered radioactive decay rates in
various ways for unfathomable reasons of His own. He might have intervened
in the actions of the flood waters, to control everything from the effects
on the Ark and its inhabitants, to the deposition of fossils in different
strata.
As for the "demonstrably false presuppositions" of superposition and faunal
succession, please explain what you mean by these terms. I know what *I*
mean by them, and I think I know what professional geologists mean by
them -- but I don't trust you to use the standard definitions. Your
statement that "secular" geologists make the demonstrably false assumption
of uniformitarianism contradicts your own earlier claim that they have
recognized problems with and modified this position.
>
> Finally fossilization requires very special conditions to occur. The
> calm flooding proposed by uniformitarian geologists doesn't seem to
> meet the qualifications. We have observed almost no fossilization
> occuring by so-called "calm" flooding. But we have observed river
> flooding create tremendous damage and rapid sedementation over short
> periods of time.
>
Oddly, people who actually seem to know something about the conditions for
fossilization seem to disagree with you about its requirements. And
demonstrating that violent floods can deposit a lot of sediment in a short
time, oddly, is not the same as showing that such floods produce more
favorable conditions for fossilization. Certainly a *violent* flood is hard
to reconcile with, say, the type fossil of _Comsognathus_, with its neck
arched back as though its tendons had had time to dry out and shrink after
death, but which was buried nearly complete and articulated.
>
> >Except, of course, that
> >geologists and archaeologists *don't* find such an arrangement of
fossils,
> >or any of the other expected evidence of a global flood.
>
> Pagano replies:
> Uniformitarian geologists are plagued by stratigraphic layers out of
> order too large to be explained away by over thrusts; fossils found
> out of sequence with faunal succession...
>
Out of idle curiousity, why do out of sequence stratigraphic layers support
Noah's flood? What flood-related phenomenon is going to segregate different
species into different layers, and then invert those layers exactly from
their normal sequence? You spoke of empirical predictions of the Noachic
flood hypothesis; surely you meant something more than "somehow, somewhere,
there must be geological evidence that can't be explained by mainstream
theories." There must, in addition, be some way that these observations are
predicted effects of Noah's flood.
You ought, also, explain why you think that "out of sequence" strata are too
large to be explained by overthrusts (bone up on your plate tectonics), and
tell us what some of these "out of sequence" fossils are. Otherwise,
there's no reason to suppose that they pose any problem for mainstream
geological theories, except in the minds of people like yourself desperate
to find reasons to reject mainstream theories.
Steven J.
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:20:25 +0000 (UTC), "Steven J."
> <sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
>
> >One could, of course, posit that the Designer intervened repeatedly and
in
> >unfathomable ways for unguessable purposes in the course of a flood,...
>
> Pagano replies:
> Scripture is creationism's source. Genesis documents God's
> interactions with the world and reports them to have occurred in
> SPECIFIC AND LIMITED INSTANCES FOR KNOWN PURPOSES.
>
"creation scientists" quite routinely speculate about changes in radioactive
decay rates, usually thought to occur at the times of the Fall and the
Flood, to account for the appearance of vastly different ages in radiometric
dating of different strata. See, for example,
http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-352.htm. Now, modern physics does not even
hint at a reason why dumping gigatons of water on rocks should change decay
rates, so the ICR must be positing an miraculous Divine invention in the
world occurring at the time of the Flood, but nowhere mentioned in Genesis.
And, of course, there is no discernable reason why God should bother to do
such a thing (and some reasons -- e.g. the support radiometric dating gives
to theories contrary to Genesis -- for Him to refrain from doing so), so
clearly we have "creation scientists" positing much the sort of intervention
you say I falsely attribute to them.
Flood geologists routinely describe a Noachic flood filled with events not
mentioned in Genesis -- volcanic eruptions (to explain layers of igneous
rocks between layers of sediment), or catastrophic orogeny and lowering of
ocean basins (to give the flood waters somewhere to drain off to, and
explain the difference between the topography of today's world and that of a
necessarily smoother globe that could be flooded by the amount of water in
today's oceans). These may not be intended as miracles (although they would
not be survivable without miracles), but they are certainly not reported in
Genesis.
I should perhaps note that, as a Catholic creationist committed to a
supernatural explanation for the Marian visions at Fatima, you yourself do
not limit yourself to those SPECIFIC AND LIMITED INSTANCES of supernatural
interventions mentioned in the Bible.
>
> So the supernatural forces were NOT introduced repeatedly or for
> unguessable reasons and are NO LESS unfathomable than are the occult
> forces introduced by secularists in the hypothesis of Big Bang.
>
Note I said they "could" be, not that they invariably "are." Yet without
such miracles, you do have problems explaining the evidence with a flood.
I've mentioned examples (e.g. whales and ichthyosaurs not being found in the
same strata); geologists could list others (e.g. layers of evaporites found
sandwiched between marine layers, or angular disconformities, etc.). You
implicitly raise the possibilities of such unmentioned miracles every time
you complain that the geological evidence is viewed on the assumption that
present physical laws operated unaltered in the past, since Genesis makes no
mention of any changes in the laws of physics in the course of the Flood.
>
> Had Steven J bothered to read Genesis he wouldn't make such obvious
> falsehoods. Or even worse he knows what's in Genesis and he makes
> intentional falsehoods anyway.
>
I am not making claims about Genesis, but about creation "science," and
about "supernaturalism." I explicitly deny your assertion that "creation
science" limits itself to only those specific and limited divine
interventions in nature explicitly mentioned in Genesis.
>
> >...so that
> >its empirical consequences were not at all what we would expect from a
> >global flood
>
> Pagano replies:
> First the history of science has shown that most of the time our
> expectations are wrong. Second, what expectations is Steven J
> referring to? Third the secular/atheist model proposes global like
> flooding.
>
First, the original expectation of modern geologists was that the global
flood of Noah would be confirmed. That expectation was indeed wrong; this
was admitted nearly two centuries ago, after no modern fossils or human
artifacts were found under any of the supposed "flood strata." Of course,
if your point is that scientists keep expecting the wrong consequences of
the causes posited in their theories, that would imply that all theories
were untestable, and that there was no possibility of "creation science" or
any other science.
Second, I have mentioned above, more than once, some things I would expect
from a global flood. Why are there no bony fish in Cambrian strata? It
will not do, as most creation scientists do, that the Cambrian represents
only bottom-dwelling species, since there are bottom-dwelling bony fish. So
I would expect such fossils in Cambrian strata (even if the Cambrian is
pre-flood, since presumably the same "kinds" of fish would exist in the
millenium and a half before the Flood). I would not, in fact, even expect
consistent, distinct strata -- and certainly not *inverted* strata. Any
turbulance that could invert layers of sediment ought, I would think, mix
them completely. I would not expect (although this has been observed)
layers of evaporites between layers of water-laid sediment. I really would
not expect dinosaur footprints, unless they were *under* the lowest possible
level of flood sediments (footprints are supposed to survive 40 days of
torrential rain and a global violent flood?!). And so forth and on.
Third, not all "secular" geologists (i.e. those who don't feel compelled to
force-fit their data to a literal reading of Genesis) are, in fact,
atheists. Historically a literal Noah's flood was abandoned by devout
Christians (many of whom were not trying to fit their results to
evolutionary theories, and, in fact, rejected such theories). If by
"global-like" flooding, you mean the gradual advance and retreat of shallow
seas over millions of years, and he equally gradual slow movement of
continents, this yields rather different expectations than those of a
year-long, global flood covering even the highest mountains (even if those
mountains were low by today's standards). So your third point does not
support your arguments.
>
> >-- or even were exactly what we would expect from millions of
> >centuries of local, more "uniformitarian" causes.
>
> Pagano replies:
> The problem is that there is no such scientific principle of the
> uniformity of nature. And there are so many anomolies crying against
> it that one wonders why secularists cling to it as tightly as any
> religious dogma.
>
Tony, the whole *point* of science presupposes the uniformity of nature.
There's not much point to finding out how matter and energy normally behave
in the lab, if we don't assume that that is also how nature behaves under
your bed, or in high Earth orbit, or in the unobserved past. No one
conducts research simply to understand how experiments in a lab work, but in
how the world works -- and to do that, one must assume that, in fact, the
world works in some consistent, discoverable way.
>
> >But one could not
> >differentiate the expected empirical results of one Designer's
interventions
> >from those of another, rival Designer,
>
> Pagano replies:
> Again Steven J creating more straw men. What other model of earth
> history involving a designer exists besides the Noahic Flood? None,
> so the problem of distinquishing between rival Designers is a figment
> of his imagination.
>
Your ignorance is the measure of possibility? Who established *that* rule
of science?
Indeed, if I read you literally, your ignorance is truly staggering. There
are numerous Christian old-earth creationists (Hugh Ross is the most obvious
example) who hold to models of Earth history in which Noah's flood explains
little or nothing of geology. Even if you don't agree with them, it's
appalling that you don't seem to know they exist. There are Hindu
creationists who think humans have been on the Earth through billions of
years of Earth history -- a model different from yours, Ross's *and*
"secular" theories.
Then there are the creation myths of scores of other cultures. I keep
mentioning "scientific Ymirism" -- the possibility that the Earth was
created from the corpse of the frost giant Ymir by Odin and his brothers, as
Norse myth relates. Now, there admittedly are no current proponents of
scientific Ymirism -- but do the number of current adherents to a theory
count as a measure of its *scientific* merits? Unless you propose to make
science a matter of counting votes, you really need to come up with some way
to distinguish between the empirical consequences of the Noachic Flood,
Ymirism, and Sumatran Cosmic Chicken Theory.
>
>
> >or from the effects of mindless but currently unknown causes.
>
> Pagano replies:
> But we can, in principle, distinquish between the Noahic Model and the
> uniformitarian model. The empirical consequences are not the same.
> Furthermore the uniformitarian model has yet to solve many of the more
> difficult problems. The stratigraphic layers out of sequence and the
> finding of so-called index fossils out of sequence is unsolved. The
> ad hoc solutions exist only to stave off refutation.
>
The out of sequence fossils (if such truly exist) and out of sequence
stratigraphic layers are not predictions of Flood theory (if you disagree,
tell me the mechanism that produced them). A global flood can't explain why
there are fossil sequences for there to be exceptions to. And, again, a
flood that could invert strata ought to mix them inseparably, rather than
leave them distinct but inverted. The "ad hoc solutions" invoke phenomena
that have actually been observed (the tectonic plates have been mapped and
their velocities measured, for example). You have yet to provide *any*
testable empirical consequences of a global flood.
>
> >>That is because such a Designer, as described,
> >has no knowable "nature" and His actions cannot be predicted or tested
for.
>
> Pagano replies:
> We don't have to know the Designer's nature any more than we have to
> know the nature of supernatural action employed to intiate a world
> wide, short term, catastrophic flood. All that can be sought now for
> either the secular model or the Noahic model are empirical
> consequences and the consequences of the Noahic Flood are not the same
> as those of the secular model. The Noahic Flood model does not suffer
> from the stratigraphic layer problem or the index fossil problem.
>
Rather, it suffers from the angular unconformity problem, and the
interleaved dry-land and marine sediment problem, and the failure to find
modern species (even those that dwell on the sea bottom) in the lower
supposed flood strata, and the failure to find *any* modern "kinds" besides
bacteria and protists *under* the supposed flood strata, and the
radiometric-dating problem, and the no-damned-place for the floodwaters to
come from and no mechanism to drain them afterwards problem, and, oh yes,
the stratigraphic layer problem and the index fossil problem.
>
> Steven J should remember that neither does he or anyone else know the
> nature of the forces or the nature of anything in the purported cosmic
> singularity yet this bothers no one. And it shouldn't so long as the
> theory entails empirical consequences which can be sought.
>
Tony, stop spouting drivel.
Fencingsax
Perhaps you'ld know that if you read a science book. You make moronic
arguements about not being able to observe the progression of
evolution, but you seem to forget about observation when it comes to
creationism. Since, by your own arguements, creationism is invalid,
where does that leave you?
Also, I think they should include an amendment that very clearly states
that no one belief system or any one system of behaviors THAT DON'T
INFRINGE ON OTHERS' RIGHTS can be discriminated for or against.
Fencingsax
Richard Forrest
> On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:20:25 +0000 (UTC), "Steven J."
> <sjt195...@nts.link.net.INVALID> wrote:
>
> But we can, in principle, distinquish between the Noahic Model and the
> uniformitarian model. The empirical consequences are not the same.
> Furthermore the uniformitarian model has yet to solve many of the more
> difficult problems. The stratigraphic layers out of sequence and the
> finding of so-called index fossils out of sequence is unsolved. The
> ad hoc solutions exist only to stave off refutation.
>
> We don't have to know the Designer's nature any more than we have to
> know the nature of supernatural action employed to intiate a world
> wide, short term, catastrophic flood. All that can be sought now for
> either the secular model or the Noahic model are empirical
> consequences and the consequences of the Noahic Flood are not the same
> as those of the secular model. The Noahic Flood model does not suffer
> from the stratigraphic layer problem or the index fossil problem.
>
<snipped>
I've been studying geology for 30 years, have spent an inordinate
amount of time grubbing about in quarries, road cuttings, coastal
exposures and holes in the ground collecting fossils and recording
stratigraphic sequences and have never come across anything which
could be called a 'stratigraphic layer problem' or an 'index fossil
problem'.
I've seen claims that such problems exist on creationist web sites and
in creationist books, but they are so facile, ignorant and easily
refuted that I can't take them seriously
Similarly, I have never come across a scrap of evidence for a 'a world
wide, short term, catastrophic flood', and a vast amount of evidence
to suggest that such an event didn't happen. Here again, I have seen
claims of such evidence on creationist web sites and in creationist
books, but they are so facile, ignorant and easily refuted that I
can't take them seriously.
Furthermore, I have worked my way up sections which show a sequence of
depositional conditions, including varying rates of sediment transfer,
varying proportions of organic components, episodes of volcanism,
paleosols, turbated layers, layers riddled with the burrows of
invertebrates, finely laminated shales, and all the other evidences of
a rich an varied geological history. It is worth noting that the
science of geology makes strong predictions on matters which are of
enormous economic importance such as where to drill for oil, and that
it has demonstrated the robustness and value of the theory not only to
other scientists, but to the hard-headed financial bodies who only
care about results.
It seems that you are more concerned with preaching to the converted
than offering any real evidence to support your assertions, but why
not make an exception in this case:
1) What physical evidence exists to support the theory of a global
flood?
2) What is the 'stratigraphic layer problem' and what evidence is
there to support your assertion that there is such a problem which has
not been thoroughly refuted? Please note, that if a refutation exists,
you need to address the refutation rather than dismissing it out of
hand.
3) What is the 'index fossil problem' and what evidence is there to
support your assertion that there is such a problem which has not been
thoroughly refuted? Please note, that if a refutation exists, you need
to address the refutation rather than dismissing it out of hand.
Of course, if you ignore this post and the questions posed here (as I
suspect that you will), I will take that as a tacit admission that you
have nothing to support your position other than personal conviction
and unfounded assertions.
RF
Stanley Friesen
>I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
>conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
>is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>
>Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
>marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
An *amendment*, if it passes, is *by* *definition* constitutional, since
it *changes* the Constitution. That is, after all, what the word
means.
Now, a similarly worded *law* would be unconstitutional.
--
The peace of God be with you.
Stanley Friesen
Rich Mathers
Oxymoron. All philosophy is unscientific. If you think not demonstrate
otherwise.
There is nothing
> necessarily devious about this decision; scientists have always
> employed their metaphyscial world views to guide their search for
> answers.
Document this "have always." You can't because it's another one of your
empty rhetorical pontifications. Your numerous assertions about science
are orthogonal to scientific practice.
However, they must be prepared to accept criticism of this
> world view (Naturalism) and show that it is superior to others.
>
It's your straw man. You fail at several levels to understand science.
>
>
>>To "explain" a phenomenon -- to say why it is one way rather
>>than some other conceivable way
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> To explain an event is to show that given a set of intial conditions
> conjoined to some causitive action (forces, chemical reactions,
> introduction of energy, etc.) that "only" that event will occur.
>
>
>
>
>>-- a cause has to have some sort of
>>discoverable, regular nature according to which it acts.
>
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> This is a metaphysical claim about nature not a first order claim of
> science.
Pontificating without insight into the practice of science reveals you
to be less than the amateur you claim to be.
In fact our background knowledge contains very few
> regularities.
s/not/my/
While there may be some regularities in nature Steven
> J's metaphysical notion that every event in space-time is the result
> of some regularity of nature is uniformitarianism which is also a
> metaphysical claim about nature not a first order testable claim of
> science.
Silly comment on uniformatarianism again reveals ignorance of the
practice of science. Your philosophical whinings are also irrelevant to
the practice of science.
>
> It is also a very weak metaphysical view which secularists employ
> heavily but (like Naturalism) deny once its isolated from their
> theories.
>
You are thoroughly confused!
>
>
>
>>One must be able
>>to detect and predict regularities in the empirical consequences of that
>>particular cause.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> An "empirical consequence" is an observable state of affairs left
> after an event has occurred.
Bloviation!
"Empirical consequences" will be found
> only if our theory about the event is correct
That is a really stupid statement. "Empirical consequences" are found
whether the theory is correct or not.
and gives us a clue
> where to look.
Correct but there is much more to it than this. And your failure to
understand this leads to a hackneyed view of science.
>
> Unfortunately if our metaphysical world view about nature arbitrarily
> limits where we may look for theories (that is, what theories we will
> permit to be considered) then we may well not predict the correct
> consequences and not look in the right place.
Prolixity is not profundity. Science has limits but it is not due to
some preconcieved metaphysical problems that you make up.
This is precisely the
> problem. Naturalism excludes a whole class of possibilities and
> secularists have yet to offer much of a rebuttal for the criticism of
> this unscientific philosophy.
Straw man. Demontrate where it has these scientific limitations in the
literature or be seen as "the pontificator par excellence!"
Things are even a little more sticky
> for Steven J.
Just the opposite. It is you who misunderstands the practice of science.
>
> Origins investigations; that is, Big Bang, Cosmogonies, abiogenesis
> and evolutionary biology are historical investigations involving
> unique, non recurring, unobservable and experimentally unreproducible
> events not the search for regularities.
Blovating. Regularities can be found from the "empirical consequences"
of unique events.
As a result
> secularists/atheists have relied even more heavily on naturalism,
> uniformitarianism, the Copernican principle, and the anthropic
> principle. All are unscientific metaphysical claims about nature.
The above are traw man distortions about the practice of science.
> But so is supernaturalism.
True "supernaturalism" is "unscientific."
On this we agree.
>
>
>
>>Acting in space-time with predictable effects is what
>>*makes* something, for scientific purposes, a "methodologically natural"
>>cause.
>
>
> Pagano replies:
> What on earth is a "methodologically natural" cause?
If you understood the practice of science as Steve J does you would not
write the three irrelevent paragraphs below. They again reveal your
ignorance of the practice of science.
This could be corrected of course but then you would have no amateur
"straw man' arguments to pose as scientific problems.
Eric Root
> "Alexander" <alexande...@virgin.net> wrote in message news:<Gx6Wc.712$IX2...@newsfe2-gui.ntli.net>...
>>>all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>>>on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>>>conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>>>gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
>>>is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>>
>>what is perceived to be true.
>>
>>At the most superficial level when looking at Biblical creationism what you
>>are discussing is a literal interpretation of the Bible. A literal
>>interpretation precludes, by definition, any alternatives. So when science
>>starts describing both the 'how' and 'why' of our biological origins the
>>literalists start to get a little panicky.
>>
>>Not only are you defining away their rationale for the creation of the
>>world, but if you challenge this cornerstone of literalism then it calls
>>into question the entire ideology of their literal Bible as well. This
>>means their identity, values, morals and ethical constructs are being called
>>into question. A literal Bible means just that, it must be a de facto
>>description of the world and God must have created it in such a way as to be
>>described by the Bible otherwise none of it can be true.
>>
>>Therefore the Bible is not an allegorical tale and guide for life, but an
>>actual record of events. If this is so then Darwinian science and
>>methodology cannot _also_ be true. Hence, to a Creationist, evolution is
>>neither true nor scriptural, and if that is the case it cannot be morally
>>correct either (otherwise it would be Biblical, natch).
>>
>>So the challenge to demonstrate evolution as 'religion' and a faith based
>>position is an attempt to claw back the ground lost over the sheer weight of
>>evidence available to most biologists, palaeontologists, cosmologists etc.
>>who are, according to the creationist, challenging the authority of God.
>>This isn't about mispresenting science as far as they are concerned, it's
>>about an actual fight between good and evil. The terms and definitions
>>being deployed are those that, the Creationists see, are the words of the
>>enemy who are out to deceive them. Their guidance is not in definitions of
>>the secular world, but from 'elsewhere' and no matter how frustrating it is
>>to keep pointing out how incorrect their usage and application of terms are,
>>they will not listen to us as we represent the immoral source of their
>>adversary.
>>
>>I would challenge that most creationists are 'stupid' or even 'willfully
>>ignorant', despite the spicy flavours of trolls we have to sample here. I
>>would accept 'blinded by faith' however, as that seems most apt.
>>
>>So - it really isn't about creationists understanding our own, technical,
>>definitions of science, method or practice, it's about their preconceptions
>>of belief, faith and how to challenge and witness to the unsaved. Taking
>>down Darwinian models has more to do with evangelism than anything else.
>>
>>Like I said, a superficial reading as a lot more is tied into Creationists
>>needing to ringfence their identity referents and what might lie behind
>>that. Just look at Pagano's post to see what I mean.
>>
>
> <snip the marriage ammendment comment>
>
> You've described the situation very clearly. It is also helpful to
> look at Craig Nelson's "rusty hand grenade" analogy at
>
> http://php.indiana.edu/~nelson1/NSTA2.html
>
> That is, what are the consequences if evolution is true? For
> creationists, the truth of evolution would necessarily mean that
> Genesis is wrong, and therefore not God's word. By accepting, on
> faith, that a literal interpretation of the Bible is the only valid
> interpretation, they can't wiggle out of inconsistencies the way that
> more flexible Christians can do. Therefore, either Genesis (and by
> extension the entire Bible) is correct, or it is not. If it is not,
> then eternal salvation can't exist, and our moral code won't exist,
> and the forces of evil will rule the world.
>
> Worse, what if they accept evolution and thereby (in their minds)
> reject God's word? There might be no consequence if God doesn't
> really exist and if the Bible was really written by Man...but what if
> the Bible really IS right? Rejecting God's word would result in
> eternal damnation.
>
> It's not an issue of the validity of scientific data. It's about a
> real moral crisis. The penalty of accepting evolution *might* be too
> severe, so it is necessary to build walls of defense--even if this
> means refusing to look at the evidence (or looking, but refusing to
> see). It would be a very difficult position to be in. One might
> begin to get a little panicky as the supportive data pile higher and
> higher.
>
> --JB
>
What I don't get is, what is the answer to: "So why don't they become
Methodists or
Lutherans or some other denomination where they can have their salvation
_and_ science?" What screw is loose that they can't give up literalism?
Eric Root
> Bob Casanova <nos...@buzz.off> wrote in message news:<6vqhi059uln596de5...@4ax.com>...
>
>>On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 03:45:29 +0000 (UTC), the following
>>appeared in talk.origins, posted by "Fencingsax"
>><chris...@aol.com>:
>>
>>
>>>I'm sure that the majority of people on t.o would have no problems at
>>>all if creationism were taught in a RELIGION class. That is, a class
>>>on comparative religion. (Hell, we did creation myths in 9th grade
>>>English). The problem that I have is that creationists continue to
>>>conclude that because we don't want a myth in science class, we are
>>>gagging the first amendment, which is plain dumb. Please, Creationism
>>>is not a science. And if it is what is its Scientific method?
>>
>>"Goddidit" is an acceptable answer to literally *any*
>>question it's a bit difficult to analyze data for cause and
>>effect (at least, it's difficult to actually *learn*
>>anything). Most Creationists believe (or claim to believe,
>>which is operationally identical) that science is just
>>another belief system, and that conclusions reached via the
>>methods of science are no more valid a description of
>>reality than the "truth" written by long-dead nomads after
>>being passed down as oral tradition for dozens of
>>generations.
>>
>>
>>>Also, you want gagging the first amendment? What about the proposed
>>>marriage amendment? How is that constitutional?
>>
>>speech" and "free press" clauses of which were written
>>*specifically* to guarantee freedom of political discourse?
>>Check out the "60-day gag" provisions of McCann-Feingold,
>>and reflect on the fact that the SCOTUS approved it.
>>
>>--
>>
>>Bob C.
>>
>>Reply to Bob-Casanova @ worldnet.att.net
>>(without the spaces, of course)
>>
>>"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
>> the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
>> 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
>> - Isaac Asimov
>
>
> Hi I would like to add something, I will start by stating that
> creation science is more of a science than the evolutionary type, by
> main stream scientists own admission evolution is too slow to observe,
> that is the defenition of science is to observe. Since no part of
> evolution can be reproduced in any way and we can't see it happening,
> we can't insist that it is or ever happened.
> I suppose you might say the same can be said of creation! however we
> can use the laws of science create models to demonstrate how things
> like the global flood produced fossals, rock strata, the grand canyon
> and other features on the planet. Simple math can also show that
> things are very young rather than millions of years old. For example
> the earth gets 20 tons of dust from space every day, if the earth was
> billions of years old it would be thousands of times larger than it is
> now. The big bang is another non scientiftic idea,if everything came
> out the explosion, all the paticals would have moved away from each
> other in a radial pattern very fast and never could have returned or
> collided in any way to have become planets and the like, remember the
> law that states a body in motion tends to stay in motion and in that
> direction unless somthing acts on it. If you look close at the theries
> given by evolutionists you will allways find they violate all of the
> laws of science. I found hundreds of good and yes scientific reasons
> to reject the evolutionary cause for the universe,and allmost every
> one them by it self can cancel out and make evolution non workable.
> Robert Gentry is a fine scientist, he disscovered that granite, the
> foundation rock of the earth had to be solid in less than three
> minutes, and if it were not so, then traces of elements would not show
> they were ever present in the rock. His resurch also shows that
> granite could never have been molten or it would not be granite but
> rather bassalt. For more info go to the creation encyclapedia web
> site,you can about Robert gentry and other people who made big
> disscoverys for creation and show just how foolish it is to believe
> that everything we happend through happenstance. Good luck in your
> search for the truth.
>
Actually, you are mistaken in everything you say above. Read the
talk.origins
site for refutations for all your misconceptions about evolution.
Mark Isaak
wrote:
>The fact is that science is a method. It's clearly defined in every
>elementary school book up to high school and college.
And the elementary school definition which you are using is simplified
to the point of being misleading.
> You should try reading it sometime.
You should try *doing* it sometime.
> If you want to define science you know the
>method, because the method is the science.
Yes, but not your method.
>The fact is science is
>observation, hypothesis, observation, experimentation, etc. If you
>don't have something tangible to deal with, like observations, you
>don't have science. It's just that one day creationists came along
>and pointed out that evolutionary beliefs are not based on direct
>observation as is science or indirect writings that involve history.
I spent yesterday double-checking some references, and in the process,
I saw many journal articles that dealt with genetic sequences,
population counts, descriptions of fossils and the geology where they
were found, paleosol depths, results of chemical processes,
observations of cell morphology, etc. In what way are any of these
not direct observation?
How can you justify what you say as anything other than false witness
in its purest form?
>Therefore you rely on speculation based on interpretation of data that
>are inconclusive regarding origins. That frustrates those who are
>interested in empirical data. The fact remains that evolution, more
>specifically, macro-evolution, is not scientific.
None of that applies to evolution. The biggest problem with evolution
as science is that there is so *much* direct evidence that nobody can
keep up with more than a fraction of it. (In your case, the fraction
is zero.)
Creationism, though, has no connection at all with evidence, except to
be contradicted by it. That frustrates those creationists who are
interested in scientism, which seems to be almost all of them.
--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) earthlink (dot) net
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of
the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering
J McCoy
> On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 03:31:48 +0000 (UTC), mc...@sunset.net (J McCoy)
> wrote:
>
> >The fact is that science is a method. It's clearly defined in every
> >elementary school book up to high school and college.
>
> And the elementary school definition which you are using is simplified
> to the point of being misleading.
Mark, funny that you should point that out because textbooks above
the elementary school level don't add anything to the scientific
method. Only evolutionists add more to the scientific method. The
fact is, if you cliam that the elementary school definition of the
method of science, which is basically restating the method as given by
Karl Popper, is insufficient, then why didn't you add to it just now
rather than to assert that the definition is simplified to the point
of being misleading. It isn't misleading, Mark. The fact is, you
want to bring speculation and mythology into science. Macro-evolution
hasn't been observed. All you have are a bunch of monkey bones and
some scientists conjecturing that they evolved into mankind. Then you
have the scientists who propagated hoaxes or speculated that a pig's
tooth was a man. You also have hoaxsters like Haeckel.
>
> > You should try reading it sometime.
>
> You should try *doing* it sometime.
>
> > If you want to define science you know the
> >method, because the method is the science.
>
> Yes, but not your method.
>
> >The fact is science is
> >observation, hypothesis, observation, experimentation, etc. If you
> >don't have something tangible to deal with, like observations, you
> >don't have science. It's just that one day creationists came along
> >and pointed out that evolutionary beliefs are not based on direct
> >observation as is science or indirect writings that involve history.
>
> I spent yesterday double-checking some references, and in the process,
> I saw many journal articles that dealt with genetic sequences,
> population counts, descriptions of fossils and the geology where they
> were found, paleosol depths, results of chemical processes,
> observations of cell morphology, etc. In what way are any of these
> not direct observation?
I've seen quite amount of evolutionistic material. The fact is these
materials are long on description, short on evidence, and
unconvincing. If you took a look at Haeckel's forged embryo chart
you'd notice a lot of detail, enough to fool the casual looker. But
infact Haeckel fooled a lot of people as that chart or copies of it
are found in textbooks as late as the 1990's.
>
> How can you justify what you say as anything other than false witness
> in its purest form?
>
> >Therefore you rely on speculation based on interpretation of data that
> >are inconclusive regarding origins. That frustrates those who are
> >interested in empirical data. The fact remains that evolution, more
> >specifically, macro-evolution, is not scientific.
>
> None of that applies to evolution. The biggest problem with evolution
> as science is that there is so *much* direct evidence that nobody can
> keep up with more than a fraction of it. (In your case, the fraction
> is zero.)
Hogwash. Any evolutionist would leap to gather all the evidence,
which has already been sorted, and mount an attack on creationists in
these infamous debates. But frankly the evolutionists do not want to
debate and the evidence is minimal.
JM
Eric Root
Tarzan of the Apes or a Marvel Comics villain.
John Wilkins
> Pagano not only pontificates, but refers to himself in the third person like
> Tarzan of the Apes or a Marvel Comics villain.
Or like a pontiff...
John Drayton
<snip>
> Hogwash. Any evolutionist would leap to gather all the evidence,
> which has already been sorted, and mount an attack on creationists in
> these infamous debates. But frankly the evolutionists do not want to
> debate and the evidence is minimal.
>
> JM
AFAIK, there are a number of standing offers for creationsts to
take part in an on-line, un-censored written debate. (A number
of people here have offered -- who were they?)
It appears that the major creationist identities loves debates,
except where there is a permanent record of what is said. Why
is that I wonder?
<sigh> ... can't we get some *new* fruitcakes in t.o.? I'm so
tired of JM and Ed. BTW, anyone who is interested in some folks
who are a few red-and-white marbles short of a full box - head on
over to alt.talk.creationism, and check out some posts by
"Atheist Bruiser" and "Mad Scientist".
<snip>
--
John Drayton
Severian
The morons are posting to talk.atheism too.
--
Sev
Stanley Friesen
>What I don't get is, what is the answer to: "So why don't they become
>Methodists or
>Lutherans or some other denomination where they can have their salvation
>_and_ science?" What screw is loose that they can't give up literalism?
Their parents drilled it into them that faith *depends* on literalism,
and to admit otherwise would be to admit their parents were dangerously
wrong. So to them, giving up literalism is the same as giving up faith.
Thus we can see the central problem is the terrible *weakness* of their
own faith, that it cannot stand on its own.
Stanley Friesen
>> Robert Gentry is a fine scientist,
Actually, he is a mediocre scientist who made some clumsy and erroneous
observations and made a big deal of them. Check the actual scientific
literature on his "finds" - they were refuted and dropped as meaningless
*decades* ago.
Roughly, he made sampling errors, and he missed certain subtle cues as
to what really happened.
>>he disscovered that granite, the
>> foundation rock of the earth had to be solid in less than three
>> minutes, and if it were not so, then traces of elements would not show
>> they were ever present in the rock.
The elements he found were the *result* of radioactive decay of older,
longer-lived elements. He missed the evidence for the prior radioactive
decay of these precursors. When that is taken into account the
"anomaly" ceases to be anything notable.