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To: Olog-hai
Olog-hai: "By 'dogma', I mean just that. Uniformitarianism is not science by the definition of science."

There you go again!
Trying to redefine the word "science" to suit your own purposes, pretending to be some kind of "authority" on just what is, or is not, proper "science".

The truth of this matter is that you, Olog-hai, have no authority -- none -- to declare anything either "in" or "outside" natural-science.
Science is not necessarily what you declare it to be, never was, never will be.
Whether you like it or not, the definition of "science" is outside your personal control.
So, you can take it, or you can leave it, but you can't change it.

What is "science"?

I'll repeat what I've posted here before: first and foremost our word "science" is short of the Enlightenment Age term: "natural-science", meaning natural explanations for natural processes.
That is what our Founders understood the term to mean, and what they mean by "science" in the US Constitution.
"Natural science" is defined specifically to exclude any reference to super-natural or spiritual phenomenon & explanations.
The philosophical term for it is the assumption of: "methodological naturalism".

But that is not the only assumption of natural-science.
Another is the term "uniformitarianism", meaning we assume that basic natural processes we see in operation here and now were operating more-or-less the same in times past and places other than earth.

Obviously, such assumptions are not iron-clad, for just one example: it's understood that Earth's rotation which is today 24 hours was, billions of years ago, less than half that.
So Uniformitarianism does not overrule other observations, but it would apply, for example, to elements of the Periodic Table -- we assume they were the same and behaved the same on early Earth as today.

Again, these are not just matters of tradition & convention, but also of US law, since the US Supreme Court was asked to rule, and did so, saying that the word "science" is defined by actual scientists, not by anti-scientists such as yourself, Olog-hai.

239 posted on 11/19/2014 6:16:01 AM PST by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective..)
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To: BroJoeK
I never claimed to be an authority (and your inferring that I am attempting to be is argumentum ad hominem), but you write several posts including this one ascribing argumentum ad verecundiam to the government, to “the enlightenment”, and to other ephemeral “authorities” that you cannot or will not identify.

By the way, natural science is the most rigorous of all science, and by every test, Darwin’s alleged theory fails miserably, standing on assumptions. Assumptions are not part of natural science; they are unscientific by definition. Also, saying it is valid for the government to define what science is is an attack on natural science.
245 posted on 11/19/2014 9:50:13 AM PST by Olog-hai
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