You cannot hide behind an argument of "moral equivalency," or of groundless personal bias here; i.e., my supposed lack of "objectivity." The distinctions I draw are perfectly "objective."
137 posted on 06/22/2007 9:41:47 AM PDT by betty boop
That appears to be a claim of perfect objectivity and absence of personal bias in the matter of what is and isn't "creationism".
In the first place, there is absolutely no way a human being can ever be "perfectly objective." Objective about what? "Personal bias" necessarily creeps in, because there is no other way for human beings to acquire knowledge -- via sense perception or any other source. The human mind is individuated -- discrete, not a mere flotsom or jetsom of a communal mind, let alone an epiphenomenon of the physical brain.
Each of us has a particular worldview or cosmology. Both of us are equally "observers"; meaning each of us stands on our own turf, in our own spatiotemporal coordinates: We see what we can see from where we stand; we have particular life experiences, and education and so forth. We probably see many different things, from our own unique perspectives. What I don't understand is the reasoning behind the supposition that, because I don't see what you see, my own view is somehow illegitimate, false.
Einstein's Special Relativity comes to mind here. This was the 1905 paper that made E = mc2 famous. But there's much more of interest.
Einstein speaks of different observers as occupying just so many different inertial frames. Inertial frames are such as can be defined and located spatiotemporally in terms of mathematical coordinates. The upshot is that spatially-separated observers who are nonetheless "relative to" or associated with each other, would experience and record different "rates" for their space and time experiences, were they to get together and compare notes. Measurements taken by both their "clocks" and their "rods" would not exactly dovetail. Thus relativity would seem to imply uncertainty, rather than Newtonian precision.
The one thing that Einstein seemed absolutely to hold sacrosanct -- in Special Relativity and beyond -- is that the physical laws of nature -- i.e., Newtonian mechanics -- are (axiomatically) the same for all observers in all inertial frames. Einstein figured (I gather) that the Old One (as he called Him) made a pretty decent piece of work when He made the universe....
Many people think that the "observer problem" -- not to mention the problem of so-called "quantum" uncertainty (aren't Einstein's inertial frames already a sort of quantization of space and time relative to observers?) -- didn't become evident before Bohr and Heisenberg. It seems to me Einstein anticipated them by some two decades.
So where am I going with this, tacticalogic? Something you said set me off on this tangent....
Thanks for letting me rant; and thank you so much for writing!