Well of course any scientific or philosophical position can be misused and abused, but that has no bearing on whether or not they are true. You wouldn’t argue against gravity just because people fall off ladders and end up in wheelchairs, nor would you argue against atomic theory just because Kim Jong-Un is using it to try and develop nuclear weapons. In the same way, trying to falsify the theory of evolution by fabricating a link between it and racism or eugenics is nothing more nor less than noise.
In any case, when the theory of evolution, like gravity or atomic theory, has adverse consequences, that’s just a result of people either abusing or being careless with facts and objective reality. On the other hand, when scientific falsehood, misinformation and conspiratorial thinking has adverse outcomes, those adverse consequences are a direct and inevitable result of people being taught falsehood, misinformation and conspiratorial thinking.
I’m sorry Craig, but Ken Ham does vilify science. When somebody divides science in two, invents a separate category called “evolutionism” or “historical science” or “secular science” for any and every scientific theory that they don’t like, and puts well-established scientific theories into that category despite the fact that they have been established by exactly the same rules and methodologies as every other area of science, that is vilifying science.
If you don’t want to be accused of vilifying science, then don’t vilify science.
I make no such assumption, and I’m pretty sure that most other people on this forum do not make any such assumption either. If YECs are reaching out to the homeless and these people are coming to Christ as a result, then that is something to be thankful for. But it doesn’t make them right about either the age of the earth or who did or did not evolve from what.
Having said that, young earthism does divert valuable resources in the Church away from more important ministries such as outreach to the homeless. The Ark Encounter cost $100 million to build. Just think how many homeless people could have been provided with housing and shelter with that amount of money.
Science is an umbrella term for a set of subjects that draw conclusions about nature on the basis of physical evidence. It does so under the constraint of rules—rules that have proven themselves to be successful and fit for purpose in multiple different contexts. Rules which, in some contexts, if you were to break them, you would kill people.
If you think that “naturalism” should not be one of those rules, I have some sympathy to that. If you think that design and intelligence should be considered a possibility, I have sympathy for that too. But it is not “naturalism” that brings a young earth or independent human ancestry down. It is the other rules and principles—rules that apply regardless of whether miracles happen or not—that these things conflict with. Rules such as mathematics, measurement, logical consistency, making sure your facts are straight, and not making things up out of whole cloth. Rules which, in any other context, if you were to break them, you would kill people.
You would have to strip out the rules and principles that lead to those conclusions as well. Rules and principles such as mathematics, measurement, logical consistency, making sure your facts are straight, and not making things up out of whole cloth. Rules and principles that also form the basis for numerous other scientific disciplines, some of them safety-critical. And then you would have to find something else to replace them with. Something that actually worked—in every context, without killing people. Good luck with that.
And I submit that you are not getting your facts straight here.
Billions of years play a crucial role in finding oil. And evolutionary science plays a crucial role in machine learning, artificial intelligence, cancer research, immunology, virology, conservation and all sorts of things like that.
But EC folks do recognise that. Nobody is claiming that the theory of evolution or deep geological time or the cosmology of the early universe are completely solved problems. But the problems with conventional science only concern the fine details and have no bearing whatsoever on well established facts such as the age of the earth or common ancestry of all life on Earth. None of them are questions that we should expect to be answered by now if the earth really is 4.5 billion years old.
Unanswered questions for a young earth, on the other hand, are deal breakers. They are questions that leave a young earth dead in the water. They are questions on which not a shred of progress has been made in the past twenty years. They are questions that still leave young earthists inventing absurd new physical phenomena out of whole cloth—phenomena for which not only is there not a shred of evidence whatsoever, but which would have vaporised the Earth if they had any basis in reality.That’s what we’ve been discussing on the other thread that talks about the heat problem.
For the record, I don’t refer to young earthism as “creationism.” I refer to it as young earthism. Because it is perfectly possible to acknowledge the existence of God as Creator while at the same time recognising the hard indisputable evidence-based fact that He created everything far, far longer ago than six thousand years.
And there is a reason why we don’t like terms such as “evolutionist” or “evolutionism.” It is because terms such as these portray hard indisputable evidence-based facts as if they were merely disputable philosophical positions. They aren’t. They are hard indisputable evidence-based facts.
The horizon problem is not even remotely comparable to the distant starlight problem. The horizon problem concerns only phenomena that took place in the very early universe, right at the limit of what we are able to reason about theoretically and study practically. The distant starlight problem, on the other hand, concerns everything outside of a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, and physical phenomena that are well within our capability of studying. Heck, we can even measure the distance to stars further away than 6,000 light years using parallax now. Basic trigonometry.
Seriously, this one is like comparing Mount Everest to a teaspoonful of sand. If you must make tu quoque arguments, at least make ones that actually compare apples with apples.
I’ve seen Russell Humphreys’ prediction and I’m sorry but it’s a joke. All he predicted was an upper limit to the magnetic fields, and he said this:
And regardless of assumptions about planetary interiors, if the present field of either planet had exceeded the maximum (the line in Figure 1), my theory would have been falsified. There is no definite minimum, but values several orders of magnitude lower than the prediction would cast serious doubt on my theory. Thus I proposed that the Voyager II measurements would be a good test of my hypothesis.
He also includes a graph. The graph is fairly small and low resolution but it looks like this:
Note that the left hand side is a logarithmic scale. The dots representing some of the planets fall far below his maximum line—Mercury is about three and a half orders of magnitude too low, Mars and Venus about five orders of magnitude, Earth, Uranus and Saturn more than one order of magnitude each. Basically, the values that he already had were already casting serious doubt on his prediction by his own criteria, and in any case since all he was predicting was an upper limit, this was the kind of prediction where he had about as much of a chance of getting it right as of getting it wrong.
Sadly this is typical of what I’ve come to expect of young earth claims. Tiny samples with huge error bars, predictions so broad that it’s hard for them to fail … I’m sorry but that is simply not how science works. Especially not when the theory you’re trying to refute is backed up by hundreds of thousands of tightly constrained results with tiny error bars and predictions that are easy to get wrong and difficult to get right.
As for your claim that “evolutionary cosmologists” failed to get their predictions right, that one doesn’t stack up either. His statement, “In contrast, many evolutionists had predicted that Uranus would have a much smaller field, or none at all” is factually untrue: there were several models knocking around at the time and some of them made much more specific and accurate predictions than Humphreys’ almost-anything-goes one.
This was covered in some detail by @pevaquark here:
And these principles aren’t exactly difficult and don’t exactly require much in the way of expertise. It’s nothing more than basic measurement and mathematics that you learn at school.