Science, Creation & EvolutionAge of the Earthabsolutetruth wrote:Girolamo wrote:Creationist science is an oxymoron.
what is it that makes it an oxymoron in your view?
I cannot speak for Girolamo, but I have read many copies of CRSQ, articles form CENTech, etc., and the garbage spewed to prop up creationism, which ios called creation science, is the antithesis of science.
what you need to distinguish between is historical science and operational science. evolution and creation mainly deal with the unobservable, unrepeatable past. but when the paradigms are put to the test in reality, as far as what we're able to test, we see clearly that evolution is overwhelmingly false and creation must be true by the law of the dysjunctive syllogism. there are no other options.
What utter nonsense! You cannot proclaim 'truth' by using some silly "logical" argument! If I declare the sky to be pink, and you insist it is purple, when it is shown NOT to be pink, the truth is not that it is purple. This is elementary. There are many other options - you are setting up a false dichotomy.
You don't start with a conclusion and make up whatever evidence you can to support it.
really? tell that to these naturalistic scientists who made these tremendous claims:
‘We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’ -- Richard Lewontin
Or. maybe we can actually not quote out of context and realize that what you just quoted is from a BOOK REVIEW and is preceded with every day examples and explanations of what that means.
Here - you can see for yourself - let's put in a bit more context, the small bit that creationists like to quote in bold:
Billions and Billions of Demons
RICHARD LEWONTIN
January 9, 1997
NY Times Book Reviews
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
by Carl Sagan
457 pages, $25.95 (hardcover)
published by Random House
...Third, it is said that there is no place for an argument from authority in science. The community of science is constantly self-critical, as evidenced by the experience of university colloquia "in which the speaker has hardly gotten 30 seconds into the talk before there are devastating questions and comments from the audience." If Sagan really wants to hear serious disputation about the nature of the universe, he should leave the academic precincts in Ithaca and spend a few minutes in an Orthodox study house in Brooklyn. It is certainly true that within each narrowly defined scientific field there is a constant challenge to new technical claims and to old wisdom. In what my wife calls the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral Syndrome, young scientists on the make will challenge a graybeard, and this adversarial atmosphere for the most part serves the truth. But when scientists transgress the bounds of their own specialty they have no choice but to accept the claims of authority, even though they do not know how solid the grounds of those claims may be. Who am I to believe about quantum physics if not Steven Weinberg, or about the solar system if not Carl Sagan? What worries me is that they may believe what Dawkins and Wilson tell them about evolution.
With great perception, Sagan sees that there is an impediment to the popular credibility of scientific claims about the world, an impediment that is almost invisible to most scientists. Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn't even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity "in deep trouble." Two's company, but three's a crowd.
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Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
The mutual exclusion of the material and the demonic has not been true of all cultures and all times. In the great Chinese epic Journey to the West, demons are an alternative form of life, responsible to certain deities, devoted to making trouble for ordinary people, but severely limited. They can be captured, imprisoned, and even killed by someone with superior magic.6 In our own intellectual history, the definitive displacement of divine powers by purely material causes has been a relatively recent changeover, and that icon of modern science, Newton, was at the cusp. It is a cliché of intellectual history that Newton attempted to accommodate God by postulating Him as the Prime Mover Who, having established the mechanical laws and set the whole universe in motion, withdrew from further intervention, leaving it to people like Newton to reveal His plan. But what we might call "Newton's Ploy" did not really get him off the hook. He understood that a defect of his system of mechanics was the lack of any equilibrating force that would return the solar system to its regular set of orbits if there were any slight perturbation. He was therefore forced, although reluctantly, to assume that God intervened from time to time to set things right again. It remained for Laplace, a century later, to produce a mechanics that predicted the stability of the planetary orbits, allowing him the hauteur of his famous reply to Napoleon. When the Emperor observed that there was, in the whole of the Mécanique Céleste, no mention of the author of the universe, he replied, "Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis." One can almost hear a stress on the "I." ...
Now, I realize that you probably cribbed that quote from one of the several hundred 'honest' creationist websites that has it prominantly displayed. But it would do you well not to trust creationist sources in the future.
‘Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic’ -- Dr Scott Todd, an immunologist at Kansas State University
Same with that one... Couldn't even find the original, but boy, the IDcreationist sites really love it.
You start with a hypothesis which is a reasonable guess, and only once it is tested and observed by other scientests can you determine if it is accurate.
that sounds nice, but the fact of the matter is that science isn't the one speaking on these issues, scientists are. you have a naiive view of science and don't realize that most of science (particluarly in the areas of creation/evolution) are directed by axioms, or presuppositions, or paradigms. we don't disagree with the evidence, but the interpretations of the evidence.
Indeed. The evolutionist interpretation of evidence is premised on the belief that we can understand it, that it makes sense, that previous experience is a good guide, and that multiple lines of evidence converging on a common explanation are a good reason to accept the explanation. Creationists, on the other hand, have a presupposition that their pre-formed conclusions cannot be wrong, so all evidence must be shoehorned to fit that evidence. Look at Setterfield's cDK gibberish - to fit a YEC timeline within the proposed rate of speed of light decay, the Cambrian period will last 41 years, while those deluded and deceived evilutionists think it lasted 54 MILLION years. Or baraminology, where Scripture is used as a yardstick to determine what species descended from which original 'kinds' - and when the analyses performed do not conform to Scripture, why those analyses are rejected!
the other point here is that while we do start with reasonable guesses in science, once these guesses have been shown to be untennable, they should be discarded. evolution is a perfect example of humanistic religious bias. the difficulty in Darwin's hypothesis of slow and gradual processes was fully demonstrated when evolutionists postulated punctuated equilibria. evolutionists themselves saw the problems and attempted to explain it a different way. it never occured that the paradigm might be the problem.
And yet, PE did not exclude Darwinian processes. Of course, what you are arguing against here is strict Darwinism, not evolution as such, and I'll bet you don't even realize it.
You already have a conclusion;
as do you.
True, but the non-creationist does not start out with their conclusions.
that everything scientests say happened in millions of years really happened in only a few thousand years or less,
that everything has happened over millions of years, and that scientists who weren't there and didn't observe these alleged "millions of years" are able to accurately describe what happened.
Oh, right, we weren't there, didn't see it.
So, who saw Yahweh create Adan out of dust?
and you are only willing to accept the made up reasoning and evidence of exclusively those who want to reach the same conclusion.
this is an interesting claim, especially coming from someone who apparently is telling us that we're wrong and that we ought to adhere to the "made up reasoning and evidence" of his/her own conclusion.
it's clear that you know next to nothing about this topic. i would be glad to answer any questions for you if i'm able to. thanks.
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