Iain Strachan wrote:
> George wrote:
>
> > 1) My basic point, which I will restate as bluntly as possible,
> > remains. The "nobody was around to see what happened" (or "we can't see
> the
> > past") argument is utterly inept and cannot be used by anyone who has any
> > knowledge of the way the world works.
>
> I don't want to pick an argument here, and I sense from the perjorative
> words that you use, such as "utterly inept" that you are piqued. I will
> just say that I don't consider the following to be "utterly inept":
>
> "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you
> understand." (Job 38:4).
I'm not trying to be pejorative & deliberately used much gentler
language in my earlier post but the point seems to have been missed. The thrust
of God's address to Job, of which this verse is part, is that there is a
qualitative difference between creator and creature. We know the world to be
creation (i.e., as dependent upon God & God alone) only through revelation, not
scientific study. But we can get information about happened in the past. The
speed of light is finite and fossils are real traces of real organisms and these
things bring us real data. Denial or ignoring of that last sentence is what I
called "utterly inept".
> I have no objection to theorising, as long as it is made quite clear that it
> is theorising. I started this thread by objecting to the statement that
> shared DNA code was "conclusive proof" of Darwinism. It seems to me that
> all too often theory is confused with fact. I am sure we are all aware that
> atheists like Richard Dawkins use evolution as a battering ram to preach
> their message that there is no God.
>
> The first chapter of "The Selfish Gene" is entitled "Why are people?". At
> the end of the first para, Dawkins writes:
>
> Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious
> child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to
> superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life?
> What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions,
> the eminent zoologist G.G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to now is
> that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that
> we will be better off if we ignore them completely".
>
> I believe that man is the creation of God, as I'm sure we all do on this
> list. Evolution is the current attempt of mankind to describe "How" that
> happened. But Dawkins, I think, would have you believe that it answers the
> "why" as well. I think the import of the Job verse has to be that any
> attempt to answer the "Why" question before or since 1859 is worthless.
> Let's get on with the science, and try to find out about the "How". One
> day, when we no longer see through a glass darkly, and see God face to face,
> I believe we will know "why".
Theories are essential to science. But neither theory nor observation
answers ultimate "why?" questions. The problem with Dawkins _et al_ is not so
much a conflation of theory & fact as imagining that any question that can't be
answered by scientific means isn't a real question.
> > 2) Many "creationists", & not only those of the YEC variety, don't
> like
> > theories, labelling them speculation, against common sense, &c. But if
> they try
> > to deal with observational data at all they MUST theorize. The problem is
> that
> > they don't know how to do it! A common approach which shows up in many
> YEC
> > claims (e.g., changing speed of light, shrinking sun, decay of earth's
> magnetic
> > field) is to take some data gathered in the past couple of centuries &
> > extrapolate that data into the distant past. If you're not careful that
> may
> > mean you're just extrapolating observational uncertainties or errors,
> which can
> > just produce nonsense. (Though sometimes one just gets lucky, as with
> Lowell's
> > prediction of Planet X.)
> > The more fundamental error, however, is the failure to realize
> that what
> > they're doing IS theorizing. In order to extrapolate, you have to make a
> more
> > or less intelligent guess about the form
> > of the curve you're going to use - linear, exponential, or whatever. & of
> > course that's a theory. But just drawing a curve through points on a
> graph
> > without having any ideas about the underlying physical processes isn't
> likely to
> > give any real insight.
> > This doesn't mean that extrapolation is always worthless, but you
> need
> > to have some idea how & why to do it. E.g., extrapolation of changes in
> the
> > earth's magnetic field as simple exponential decay would make sense IF the
> field
> > were simply frozen in to a fluid conducting core. In fact, you don't even
> need
> > any data to determine that with such a model the half-life for decay of
> the
> > field would be a few thousand years. But there are good reasons for
> rejecting
> > such a model.
> > In other words, if you're going to do theoretical physics, learn
> to do
> > it right. & you can't do that if you're contemptuous of the whole concept
> of
> > scientific theory.
> >
>
> I think we're in agreement over this. I am certainly not contemptuous of
> the whole concept of a scientific theory. But I am contemptuous of the
> practice of clinging to a manifestly bad theory in the absence of anything
> better. It would be better to remain agnostic, and say "we just don't
> know".
The theories that are "clung to" are usually not so "manifestly bad"
as to be worthless. Physicists knew by ~1910 that there were things seriously
wrong with classical mechanics at the atomic level, & that a better theory was
needed. But they didn't just ditch Newton - & in fact still haven't - because F
= ma &c was adequate for a wide range of phenomena. Some physicists clung to it
more than others, some wanting to make only minor changes & some being more
radical. & while radical changes were needed, classical mechanics itself
provided significant guidance toward the correct form of the better theory,
quantum mechanics.
Evolutionary theory has not been static, and current forms of the
theory will undoubtedly have to undergo some changes. But they will be changes
which will preserve the successes which present theories have had. The chance
that evolution will simply be dumped for an essentially static model of life is
essentially zero.
> To cling to the idea that the speed of light must have slowed down
> by several orders of magnitude over the last 6000 years in the absence of
> any other way to reconcile the biblical timescale is a "scientific theory"
> which it is right to hold in contempt, particularly as the only evidence is
> the tail of a curve of noisy and inaccurate measurements. (YEC cosmologist
> Russel Humphries utterly rejects the variable speed of light notion; though
> I'm not at all convinced that his alternative theories are sustainable given
> observational data; but they are certainly more respectable that the
> decaying speed of light idea).
Among other things, Humphries has to use the "Then a miracle occurs"
argument at a crucial point in his discussion.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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