The side that produces the evidence has the far more comprehensive view. They are testing their hypotheses, unlike the rhetoricians.
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The question is, “Why?” You don’t have an answer.
As for a problem with its function, you seem to have forgotten the pronouncement of your hero Meyer.
you can test things in operational sciences. Historical events cannot be tested. They already happened.
what exactly are you referring to ?
By the time that a paper is submitted to a scientific journal, something that happened in a lab is just as historical as the Tiktaalik fossils.
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The Jews did not transmit their ancient belief in a 6 day creation into the modern era. Jewish people are pretty quiet about their beliefs.
@beaglelady is describing the source of the spark for the modern Evangelical movement for Young Earth Creationism.
Ken Ham (as one can see in the exhibits at the Ark Encounter) thinks that micro-evolution operated at hyper-speed in the approximately 200 years after the ark landed. (No, Ham hasn’t a shred of evidence for his claim and what he calls “microevolution” has traditionally been called “macroevolution” because it involves entire taxonomic families evolving from a single animal pair from the ark. But I tell 'em; I don’t necessarily explain 'em. So don’t ask me how this could make any sense!)
For example, Ham claims that a “cat kind pair” from the ark quickly multiplied and produced every modern day cat-kind species we have today, as well as some species which have gone extinct since the flood. So Ham’s brand of hyper-evolution produced tigers, lions, cheetahs, leopards, house cats, panthers etc. in a 200 year period and then the hyper-evolution stopped. Of course, Ham goes ballistic when anybody calls it “hyper-evolution” because Ham says that it is just “variation within a kind.” Even so, minutes later he will call it microevolution again. And a few minutes after that he will say that “evolution is a lie from Satan.” But only some evolution, I guess.
Of course, Ham & Co. usually claims that even millions of years is not enough time for evolution to produce new species. Yet, during that 200 year period, evolution turned a few thousand animal kinds on an ark into every animal species that we see today—and Ham refuses to tell us how he came up with the 200 year number, just as he comes up with a single Ice Age that was allegedly associated with the Noahic Flood. (That’s one of the enormous advantages of ignoring science and the need for evidence. It saves a LOT of work. Peer-review is tedious and tiring! And the $150+ millions of dollars that could have been spent on scientific research can build a boat-shaped building that will never float and will never hold any animals.)
I remember in the 1960’s when Drs. Morris and Gish started allowing for speciation within a taxonomic genus. They rarely allowed the word “evolution” to be used in a positive way, but they basically described a kind of “micro-evolution” being possible. They allowed for this because the evidence for evolutionary processes was becoming absolutely overwhelming. So when someone pointed out obvious examples of evolution, they could shrug it off as “just variation within a genus”, and as the years went by, Christians started calling that “variation” micro-evolution.
Yes, “speciation creep” (or is it “evolution creep”?) saw even more"inflation" take place over time, so when the evidence became too overwhelming, they admitted that some ark kinds represented family-level variation/diversification. Thus, Ken Ham tells his audiences that a taxonomic family is the typical meaning of a Biblical KIND, with Felidae, the cat family, being his favorite example of a boundary of diversification-variation within a kind. Yet, whenever the evidence indicates that evolution has occurred beyond the family level, Ham is always willing to flex the definition of KIND. I once heard an AIG speaker in a Q&A session claim that the entire Coelacanth order of fishes was one kind, which was his tactic for avoiding any assumption that modern day Coelacanths evolved for the ancient ones in the fossil record. (That one surprised me because most other YEC speakers will say that all Coelacanths are “essentially the same but scientists just like to invent new species so that they can pretend evolution happens.”)
I guess you sent me on a trip down memory lane. In recent years I’ve gotten to know a number of ministers and seminary professors who all had similar experiences in the 1960’s as fans of the creation science movement. So it has been fun to discuss our share heritage on various forums and even at Denny’s during each year’s ETS conference!
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Meyer’s unqualified pronouncement is, “Ribozymes are poor substitutes for proteins.”
So why did your Designer use a ribozyme for an utterly essential function?
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False. The empirical tests have to predict something you don’t know. You appear to be afraid to do such empirical testing.
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This is a interesting point, worth of further exploration. Thanks for posting.
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And every scientific observation in the history of the world observed events in the past. Astronomers look at star events which happened years or even vast eons ago. Scientists who study the sun see events which happened 8.3 minutes ago. And laboratory scientists observe experiments as they happened nanoseconds ago.
Technically, nobody ever observed anything in the “actual present.” There are always time delays.
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I’m utterly astounded that you would make that claim.
Suppose you drive home and find a heap of smoldering ashes where your house once stood. Are you actually going to tell me that you can’t observe the evidence and determine that a fire happened earlier that day?
Could anyone with a straight face declare that nothing can be determined about the past? The burning of the house is an historical event. It doesn’t matter if it happened earlier that day or a week before, unless someone removes all of the evidence (which is actually quite difficult to do in a 100% way), you can observe and test and determine what past event(s) turned the house into a non-house.
The Young Earth Creationist claims about bogus distinctions between “observational science” and “historical science” (sometimes called “operational science vs. origins science”) be abandoned as the bearing of false witness.
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My scenerio is that you come upon two cars with the front end smashed and the drivers dead. The authorities then say “The cars were made that way, and bodies were planted to look like they died in a crash.” Sure, I suppose that is possible, BUT what kind of person would do such a thing? My question is sure God could have made the universe look young and make things not be as they appear, but what kind of god does that?
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Perhaps a god similar to the one who inspired Deuteronomy 20?
Exactly. It is interesting to think back to a time when the people of Europe in the Middle Ages were prone to think that “magical” explanations were the best explanations for things they didn’t understand. Today, most people do not resort to a magical explanation first—though some do.
I’ve thought about that a lot. It represents a major cultural change when people naturally started gravitating towards rational cause-and-effect. A lot has to happen in a culture before everyone (or most) make that transition. (Even as I write, I think of missionary stories where they helped a family with a sick child get expensive medicine to save their child—and then the family sells the medicine in a nearby city so that they have the money to hire a shaman to do a special fire-dance ceremony to heal their child.)
At a time when nobody understood infectious disease, people assumed a kind of “cause-and-effect”—but it involved a type of thinking which assumed “About half of the village got sick last month, so a witch must have put a curse on the village.” And after all of the witches were rounded up and burned, sure enough, the sick either died or got better and things started returning to normal. (Nobody considered that a batch of milk got contaminated and that a bout of “the milk sickness” hit villages every now and then. Of course, if somebody could back in time and explain to them that “little tiny invisible creatures were living in the milk and that is what make them sick”, that would sound just as “magical” as any other explanation.)
Yes, even in our day, there are indeed plenty of people who like thinking “magical poofing” honors God more than the idea that God usually works through the natural processes he created. When I explain the evidence suggesting that the patriarch’s ages in the Genesis genealogies were symbolic numbers as favored by the cultures of that region and era, they react with alarm at the suggestion that Methusaleh did not live 969 years. They see it as a threat to “the supernatural in the Bible.” (However, wouldn’t a world where people commonly live for hundreds of years just be “natural” for that era, not “supernatural”?)
I guess there is fear that each time we are able to explain something in the Bible, it takes away another reason to be impressed by what God does. But I wonder how much individual personality and ways of thinking impact these reactions. Even as a young child, I remember hearing adults get angry at the suggestion that God divided the Red Sea by using a rock slide and other natural phenomena instead of “literally” blowing with His mighty lungs to divide the waters so that the Children of Israel could cross. Yet, I remember thinking to myself, “Does it really matter exactly how the waters were divided? The timing of such an event would be just as ‘miraculous’ and significant either way, because God took care of his people and led them to safety.”
Of course, plenty of Christians oppose the Theory of Evolution just because “The Holy Spirit tells my spirit that God would never use such processes.” and “These things can’t be understood of the carnal man because they are spiritually discerned.” They make clear that I’m carnal for thinking as I do. And they too keep telling me that various of their opinions are “undeniable facts”----even though lots of us deny them.
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i dont know in what context he said this. and as far as i know, they work just fine.
thats not the point. The point is you cannot repeat the occurrence and observe it in front of your eyes happening.
I have no idea why that wouldn’t be the point. You said that:
Yet they obviously can be tested!
Why would it matter that I cannot repeat the occurrence?
Of course, we CAN repeat the scenario. We can build a house and see what happens when it burns down. Then we can inspect the remains and compare them with the ashes on your home’s former site. That is testing no matter how one may try to side-step it.
It sounds like you are misunderstanding the concept of “repeat-ability” in science. I find that that is quite common among Young Earth Creationists. (I don’t know your position on the age of the earth. I’m just saying that this perspective is common among YECs.) They will say things like “Nobody has created life in the laboratory, so abiogenesis can’t be studied scientifically”. Of course, that’s absurd reasoning.
Do you believe that it takes 165 years for Neptune to orbit the sun one revolution? Nobody has ever observed Neptune complete an orbit of the sun. So is that historical event (one orbit of Neptune around the sun) unknowable? Is it immune from scientific investigation? Nobody has ever built a solar system in a lab and “repeated” an orbit of Neptune around the sun.
In that example, the testing of the hypothesis that it takes the planet Neptune 165 years to orbit the sun is indeed a repeatable OBSERVATION because lots of scientists in lots of places at various times have repeated and verified the observation of the orbit and path of Neptune. The orbit of Neptune around the sun is repeatable science and repeatable observations because we CAN observe historical events.
As I’ve already explained, an astronomer LITERALLY observes the past when looking at stars in the night sky. And each collection of photons we call starlight is a “data packet” describing the history of that particular star.
Do you deny any of this?
Did you understand my explanation that observing the past is what scientists do all of the time? Every scientific observation is a look at the past, whether that past be nanoseconds ago or many years ago.
Do you honestly believe that scientists have been misunderstanding these basics for generations now, but now that you are here, you are correcting their errors?
As to “abductive reasoning”, I don’t think you understand what it means. I’m certain that you don’t understand how science works. (Or, at the very least, the way you have communicated your understanding of how science works suggests to me that you don’t understand it—and that is why you think the scientists are wrong in their understanding of science. They aren’t.)
I sincerely doubt that you live your daily life in denial of the validity of observing evidence and determining what happened in the past. I am certain that you understand cause-and-effect and routinely observe effects and determine the likely causes from them. You might decide that somebody hauled away your house while you were absent and replaced it with a pile of charred debris. You might. But I doubt it. And I am absolutely certain that you don’t correct people who tell you that your house must have been burned to the ground that day–and tell them that they have fallen into abductive reasoning.
I just don’t believe it. I think that you are much smarter than that.
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