-A8
Hypothesize all you want...didn't you know that dogs were really cats yesterday?
Don't you see that if everything was created yesterday, your clocks would look exactly like they look right now?
It's not about the friggin' APPEARANCE of my clocks. APPEARANCE is IRRELEVANT. It's about the clock's ability to tell and count the friggin' time accurately. How you can even follow a baseless hypothesis and claim anything is beyond me.
So, your appeal to the present appearance of your clocks to "scientifically prove that creation did not happen yesterday" proves nothing at all, since the evidence would look exactly the same if creation did happen yesterday.
IT IS NOT ABOUT APPEARANCE. You DO know that time passes don't you? I use my clocks to PROVE that time has passed, nothing more. Those clocks were counting the time 2 days ago and accurately counted the time for the next 48 hours, thus their creation COULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED YESTERDAY. Proven...signed...sealed...delivered. The hypothesis fails.
Go ahead. Prove your hypothesis. Prove that everything was created yesterday. Until then, you've got nothing but a philosophical discussion that you're trying to pose as scienctific thinking....even logical thinking. Baseless....based on nothing. Nada. Zip.
I've said for years now that any question becomes an epistemological question, if you're stubborn enough.
I know the universe wasn't created yesterday, because I remember the day before yesterday. And because there's a pile of laundry in my bedroom that I couldn't possibly have accumulated in a day.
Ah, but what if God created the universe yesterday, filling our heads and libraries and televisions and Free Republic message boards with all the false evidence of the last several thousand years of civilization? Or what if this entire universe exists as a dream of someone who just fell asleep, with all the "evidence" created in an instant, etc? What if we're in the Matrix, and it was just switched on?
That's a favorite argument of college freshmen, with or without chemical stimulation. It's also employed to further the claim that you can't prove anything, so all forms of science, superstition and wild guesses are on an equal footing.
The answer of Western philosophy at least since Descartes has been that we can trust the evidence of our senses because God does not deceive. If you don't trust that explanation, I recommend that you ask as if it does; look both ways before crossing the imaginary street, lest your non-existent self imagines itself getting hit by a non-existent bus.
Science comes up with the best possible explanations for observed phenomena. The explanations change as the observed facts change. It is an empirical pursuit that does not, and cannot, prove any metaphysical point (though it can sometimes provide a materialistic explanation for phenomena that could only be described in metaphysical terms before).
My bottom line is that it doesn't really matter beyond idle speculation -- either everything we observe exists or nothing we observe exists, and our relation to the rest of the world is the same either way. If you attempt to discredit science because all the evidence to support it is based on the fallible five senses, then the same applies to scripture.