If creation was supernatural, how could methodological naturalism ever discover it?

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Mike_Gantt

Of what else is a fellow who can’t even qualify as a novice in this field capable?

@Mike_Gantt… this kind of statement is self enfeeblement.

What would you say about a critic of most Christian creedal positions explaining his habitual distortion of Christian theology as due to the fact he is no graduate of seminary school?!

You don’t need to be a seminarian to get Christian theology 90% correct. And you don’t need to be a professional scientist to define 90% of science correctly.

[pevaquark (Matthew Pevarnik)]

@Bill_II

The geologists that first came to the conclusion that the earth was older than 6,000 years had nothing but their visual observations of the earth to work with. No radioactive dating or other fancy tests that are so common now. It was just good old fashion going to the field and looking at the rocks. Geology can be a very visual field of study. It doesn’t get you to 4.5 billion years but it does get you way beyond 10,000 years.

This document goes through the historical estimates of the age of the Earth, starting with Comte du Buffon in 1779 getting 75,000 years. 80 some years later, Lord Kelvin extended this to about 20 million years old. A fun quote from Kelvin’s wikipedia page:

Thomson (Lord Kelvin) remained a devout believer in Christianity throughout his life; attendance at chapel was part of his daily routine. He saw his Christian faith as supporting and informing his scientific work

Age of Earth

A fun fact about Cosmology is that an embarrassing thing happened in the 1900s is that the age of the Earth according to geology was older than the age of the Universe (by our first estimates of the Hubble constant). This also happened with some stars where the age of some stars was older than the universe. The remarkable thing and beautiful thing about science is that all the dates converged on a consistent date as more information came in. You would think that if science was wrong, the dates would get less and less consistent.

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@Mike_Gantt

Of what else is a fellow who can’t even qualify as a novice in this field capable?

Learning the fundamental nature of science.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@Mike_Gantt

Of what else is a fellow who can’t even qualify as a novice in this field capable?

@Mike_Gantt

How can I expect to experience resurrection and eternal life? I do not have a divinity degree…

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

I think you can get one online…

[RLBailey (Ray Bailey)]

@jpm

I think you can get one online…

LOL ROTF!

[heddle (David Heddle)]

If you were in the vicinity of a miracle you could analyze it just like any other phenomenon. If you were present with instrumentation when Jesus walked on the water you certainly could have recorded it and possibly (depending on the details of the miracle) measured minute pressure variations in the water as he stepped. What you could never do is come up with a viable scientific explanation–otherwise it was not supernatural, but natural. But as a scientist my commitment to methodological naturalism (which I take as a synonym for the scientific method) means that were I fortunate enough to collect data on a miracle, I would essentially die trying to explain it (while wearing my scientist cap.)