Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Thanks, KP, for the (brief) conversation.
What CarolinaGuitarman said... Before I got back!
YEC/IDers are constantly trying to imply that the basic theory of evolution is somehow in controversy, or even in "crisis". It just isn't so, no matter how much it's wished for.
It reminds me of the media continuing to posit that our current administration is somehow on the ropes.....
Funny, that one didn't seem to really work on me. Maybe I'm too used to trying to stare at graphs using poorly chosen color schemes on computer screens or a deeply hidden color-blindness streak, or my flat-screen monitor; I don't know. I only saw the 3 colors that are there in the graph, though they did appear to be slightly different hues in the various regions. (Usually your illusions get me every time, though.)
No, but I did after that one.
An Optical Illusion is in the Eye of the Beholder.
EVOs claim creationists suppress science, but from my perspective, what most EVOs appear to suppress is any knowledge of God. (Disclaimer: not intended in any way to suggest teaching religious doctrine in your “precious” public schools.)
Want to know the easiest way to deceive yourselves? Romans 1:28 - Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. Many think this is a reference to sexual perversion but depraved refers to any type of corruption.
IMHO the biggest assumption with all the age-dating methods is uniformity – that all the conditions found when a fossil is uncovered have always remained the same. Is this not the main tenet for FR folks rejecting global warming? This flys directly in the face of common sense. If anything corrupted the fossils and then leached out of the environment you assume it must always leave a trace.
Another excerpt defining science from Walt Brown’s heavily researched website: http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/FAQ12.html#wp1619382
Let me define science.
science: A field of study seeking to better understand natural phenomena through the use of observations and experiments.
Broad, but increasingly precise and concise, relationships are sought between causes and effects. These relationships, called scientific laws, help predict future phenomena and explain past events.
Notice, this does not mean the first cause must be naturalistic. It is poor logic to say that because science deals with natural, cause-and-effect relationships, the first cause must be a natural event. Furthermore, if the first cause were a natural consequence of something else, it would not be the first cause. Scientific laws can provide great insight on ultimate origins even though the first cause cannot, by definition, be duplicated. Yes, there was a beginning. [See Items 53 and 55 beginning on page 27.]
Scientific conclusions, while never final, must be based on evidence.
scientific evidence: Something that has been observed with instruments or our senses, is verifiable, and helps support or refute possible explanations for phenomena.
All evidence in Part I of this book is based on observable, natural phenomena that others can check. To most people, this evidence implies a creation and a global flood. This does not mean the Creator (The First Cause) can be studied scientifically or that the Bible should be read in public-school science classes. (I have always opposed that.) Those who want evolution taught without the clear evidence opposing it, in effect, wish to censor a large body of scientific evidence from schools. That is wrong. Also, the consequences of a global flood have been misinterpreted as evidence for evolution, not as evidence for a flood. That misinterpretation, unfortunately, is taught as science. [See Part II.]
Explanations other than creation or a global flood may someday be proposed that are (1) consistent with all that evidence and (2) demonstrable by repeatable, cause-and-effect relationships. Until that happens, those who ignore existing evidence are being quite unscientific. Evolutionists’ refusal to debate this subject (see page 343) and their speculations on cause-and-effect phenomena that cannot be demonstrated is also poor science, especially when much evidence opposes those speculations.
Evolutionists raise several objections. Some say, “Even though evidence may imply a sudden creation, creation is supernatural, not natural, and cannot be entertained as a scientific explanation.” Of course, no one understands scientifically how the creation occurred—how space, time, matter, and the laws of physics began. [See Figure 156 on page 336 and the paragraph preceding that figure.] Others, not disputing that the flood best explains many features on earth, object to a global flood, because the Bible—a document they wish to discredit—speaks of the flood. Still others object to the starting point for the flood (given on page 110), but in science, all starting points are available. The key question must always be, “What best explains all the evidence?”
Also, the source of a scientific idea does not need to be scientifically derived. For example, Friedrich Kekulé discovered the ring structure of benzene in a dream in which a snake grabbed its tail. Kekulé’s discovery laid the basis for structural chemistry. Again, what is important is not the source of an idea, but whether all evidence supports it better than any other explanation. Science, after all, is a search for truth about how the physical universe behaves. Therefore, let’s teach all the science.
How about taking this jumble one item at a time. What's your most important point?
This is why several different dating methods are used in simultaneity in dating any specimen. A convergence of various dating methods means either
A) The date is approximately correct or
B) All these various, unrelated dating methods were "corrupted" to exactly the same degree, even though the physical phenomena are unrelated, by some unexplainable collusion of natural laws, and that this occurs on regular basis in practically every rock sample and fossil ever dated.
The key is indeed uniformity. These scientists know their business (better than any layperson).
Do you regard yourself as a pantheist or panentheist, Chiapet? This would probably entail belief in an eternal universe. Truly I'm interested in your views!
You wrote, "I don't think that God can violate or supercede his own laws. It would be tantamount to God denying himself."
On my view, it makes little sense to use the words "can" and "can't" when it comes to God. If His laws were made for the natural universe, then I don't see why they need to apply to God at all -- on the theory (which I hold) that God is "beyond" the universe, noting the qualifications to this statement I made in my last message to you.
Thank you so much for writing Chiapet! I do appreciate your sharing your thoughts with me.
Funny you should mention that, King -- I feel the same way. But am too polite to complain about it.
Oh but we did, the method of logic was derived, defined and is taught by man. Reason is a learned response and few children learn to reason before six. They learn mostly by observation and those without a good example have little reasoning ability.
Somebody steal all the bibles, and no more will be printed? Or did the evo's get them so they would have all the biblical science.
Hi jec41! Well, I'd define truth as the divine Logos, the Word of God. I think it's the foundation of the order of the universe, the source of all universal law. As to how it is "determined" -- I take this to mean how do humans recognize truth? -- Plato and Aristotle provide some possible answers.
For Plato, the Cosmos is one living being. Aristotle held that the Cosmos is "rational" through and through. Man is an "image" or eikon of the Cosmos; he is the microcosm, and so recapitulates all the various orders of the Cosmos in himself. If the Cosmos is "rational," then man, as its image, must be rational, too. And so man is naturally equipped to grasp the nature of the Cosmos. This is the setting, or context in which the quest for truth unfolds.
Man has two basic tools whereby to discover truth. One is perception, and the other apperception. Perception deals with sensory experience, and is directed "outward" from the human person. Apperception, or introspective self-consciousness, with noetic experience.
I came across a wonderful book recently, P. T. Raju’s Introduction to Comparative Philosophy. He expounds and cross-correlates the Western, Eastern, and Chinese cultural traditions, from antiquity to the present, conceding all the way that cultural traditions leave very long-lasting “footprints” on actual human experience. Raju writes:
If we take all the three traditions together, we find three standpoints in philosophy: the inward, the outward, and the middle. As I have said, man’s being has two dimensions or two directions, the inward and the outward.Raju goes on to say that a rational explanation can be given in one of two ways: as a derivation of “the higher from the lower”; or as a derivation of “the lower from the higher.” In each case “the word evolution is often used.” Raju recognizes thatBoth the inward and the outward are the directions of man and point to something beyond him: the importance of this truth has not been properly recognized. On the whole, the outward limit is treated as objective and therefore as the objective basis for philosophical explanation, and the inward as merely subjective. This attitude results in materialistic philosophies.…
With respect to value, philosophies that start from the inward limit fare better. The Supreme Spirit is higher than mind, mind higher than life, and life higher than matter. The higher the reality, the higher is its value; and if the highest is the only reality as in Sankara, then it is the only value. Spiritual philosophies then can identify and equate reality and value; and this identity is the motif of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic traditions.
...spiritual philosophies maintain that the One — be it Sankara or Ousia — is beyond our powers of understanding. Yet, like a mischief-maker reason demands a rational derivation of the world from what is beyond reason.
Reason here is inconsistent with itself, in that, while accepting that the One is beyond reason, it asks for a rational derivation from the One.
...evolution in the two directions will be intrinsically different. One is evolution of the higher from the lower, of the inward from the outward, of unity from the plurality; the other is the evolution of the lower from the higher, of the outward from the inward, of plurality from unity. The plurality is an emanation, creation, manifestation out of the fullness of the One; just as the unity is an emergence, an evolution, a product, or even a resultant of the plurality. In the histories of the traditions, [every] philosopher ... has accepted one [or other] of these views.In short, what we must have is a balance in consciousness of the external and the internal. They are, as Raju said, “complementary to each other.” For reality contains both the “thingly things” with which science is preoccupied, and the “nonthingly things” — values — with which science does not deal at all.But just as the approach from the limit of outwardness fails to do justice to the conception that ultimate reality is also ultimate value, the approach from the limit of inwardness fails to explain the rationality of the descending orders of being. In the history of philosophy the latter tended to lean towards, and encourage, supernaturalism and even superstition. Indeed, the universe is mysterious. But it is a rational and natural, not a supernatural and superstitious, mystery….
So the world at every stage is a mystery. Yet it is a natural and rational mystery. Only we cannot abandon all attempts to understand it rationally because it is a mystery. It is as much a mystery that unity evolves out of plurality as that plurality evolves out of unity….
Matter answers the best to the principle of fixed order. Hence the contention of contemporary physicalism that we should rebuild our conception of the world in terms of physics. But the difficulty is that, unless we accept the higher realities beforehand, we cannot rebuild them simply with the help of the concepts of physics; much less can we rebuild them with the deeper inner experiences of man, which have an autonomy of their own. Yet, much of the rationality in the universe will be missed if we are content with the inward approach only. And the excesses of this approach are to be checked by the opposite approach and vice versa.…
Thus both the inward and the outward approaches can be made complementary to each other. The excesses and failures of each are checked and made up by the other.
That's enuf for now, jec41. Must run along and take care of an errand. But I'll be back later.
Thank you so much for writing!
I am not asking
What you are asking is whether a real God could possibly have any genuine interaction with man.
That question is unanswerable. But I'd say it's possible.
OR are you asking if God is powerfull enough to have others write accurately what he intended.
That's possible as well. But that doesn't mean it happened that way.
I don't find anything with the string *certain* in it that is anything like the quote under question.
Besides, any rational person could deny being completely certain about something. Everything we believe has degrees of certainty. The question is better expressed as asking whether we have reasonable doubt about the main events and processes of evolution.
I heard you the first time. why did you feel compelled to reply again after so long a break?
that, too.
However looking back into the last several billion years we see everything looking exactly as it would if the speed of light were the same then as it is now. We make predictions about how things would look if lightspeed were constant, and those predictions are borne out. This process is known colloquially as "doing science".
Only when we go back almost to the dawn of time, more than 10 billion years ago, do we start to see apparent effects which *might*, *tentatively*, be explained by the speed of light being different then from its current constant value. As your original question referred to the calibration of events that occurred less than 100 million years ago I have to wonder if you actually read the articles that you posted links to. There is no comfort for YEC positions in them, and no comfort for those who'd question the assumption that at least over the last 4.5 billion years (the approximate age of the earth, calculated using different methods to arrive at answers within 1% of each other) lightspeed and atomic decay has been constant.
"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, or let's call it a non- evolutionary view, was last year I had a sudden realization for over twenty years I had thought I was working on evolution in some way. One morning I woke up and something had happened in the night and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it. That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. Either there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with evolutionary theory. Naturally, I know there is nothing wrong with me, so for the last few weeks I've tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, `I do know one thing - it ought not to be taught in high school.'"
Of course I don't know if this is an accurate record or not, I found another source wording it differently.
While the Quote Mine Project does not address this directly, a letter from Patterson mentioning it.
"That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else."
I believe he's at least partially right about this, by the way. I've been doing some reading about the classification of Cambrian organisms and it looks like sometimes attempting to place them in modern crown group phyla can give a false picture of the Cambrian explosion since they are actually stem group organisms.
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