This is not a pic of continental plates moving over the surface of the earth.
Older theories…
Elastic rebound theory
This theory states that stress builds up in rocks on either side of a fault, causing gradual deformation. When the deformation overcomes the friction holding the rocks together, the rocks suddenly slip along the fault, causing an earthquake.
Arthur Holmes’ theory
Holmes proposed that continents float on a layer of partially molten rock deep within the Earth. He suggested that heat from radioactive materials causes the rock to circulate slowly, which in turn slowly shifts the continents.
The Arthur Holmes’ theory sounds very similar and was quite insightful suggestion early on (though mostly ignored). But plate tectonics is even more radical than what he suggested, with the continents actually moving around like floating islands… with all the continents coming from the break up of a single continent 200 million years ago. It is comparable to the difference between the big bang and the steady state universe.
My cynical side also emerges when I read comparisons about scientific theory and theological doctrines. When I find huge gaps between the two, I usually start with the scientific side and work my way backwards, looking for nooks and grannies where falsifiability might reasonably take root. In particular, I look for ways in which theological doctrines, when repeated over and over, might have the makings of a neuroscientific “hook” – that is, doctrines that can exploit vulnerabilities within the brain’s natural architecture and lead to religious choices and behaviours that are the very opposite of what they claim to create.
One positive aspect of the scientific method is that – in theory, at least – new data, new evidence, new interpretations of existing data can lead to major shifts in the scientific understanding of a topic. One of my favourite examples of this is neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to rewire itself, grow new networks, and also delete networks that no longer seem efficient based on new evidence or on biological exigency, such as a stroke). For most of the 20th century, most physicians, neuroscientists, and researchers held on with all their might to their doctrine of the brain’s lack of plasticity. But when the original study methods were shown to be deeply flawed (the test subjects were highly stressed animals whose levels of stress hormones prevented neurogenesis), it was a game changer for psychiatry and neurology.
I wish I could say that theologians are as open to new evidence and new interpretations of old data as many scientists are. Sadly, this is only sometimes true. We’ve had an explosion of scientific research that has helped millions and millions and millions of individuals on this planet, but many theologians seem to want to pretend that God has no knowledge of this research and has no desire for us to update our religious brain networks to be consistent with the evidence available to us through multiple avenues that didn’t exist when religious doctrines such as Original Sin were being devised to help people try to understand why they so often felt like crap. (I’m thinking here of what we’ve begun to learn about major mental illness, including major depression, psychosis, and addiction disorders.)
Everything we know – or more realistically, everything we think we know – is always a work in progress. This should apply to every field of human endeavour, not just science. If you really believe in God, and really want to feel God’s presence in your life, you can’t go around saying that God is too stupid to know about the science or too unloving to want us to benefit from the science (where scientific results can lead to mature, compassionate, balanced outcomes for individuals).
For those of us who believe in a loving and forgiving God, it’s time we recognized that theological doctrines can have great effects on the wiring of the human brain, some good, some bad. Our theological mistakes should be held accountable in the same way our medical mistakes are held accountable – because both have neuroscientific effects on our lives.
Considerable research has been done in this area, and it’s not difficult to find papers from mainstream sources about the placebo effect, as one example.
I once attended a lecture at Queen’s University (Ontario) given by a medical doctor who held atheistic beliefs but was asked to participate in a study of “medical miracles.” Despite her lack of belief, she said she’d been forced to concede that some of the case studies were very puzzling indeed.
Her working definition of a miracle was “the doctor is surprised.”
I’m curious to know why you insist that a healing must be instantaneous in order to be considered miraculous. Are you so certain you know how God feels about every instance of healing where “the doctor is surprised”?
Instantaneous healings might go a ways towards convincing the occasional unbeliever, but in my experience, God doesn’t answer to our somewhat simple beliefs about what healing means.
If all people would heal after prayer, we would not call the healings miracles. The healings would be treated as one track of ‘normal’ healing process, ‘spontaneous’ rapid healings. I have heard that after sudden disappearances of cancer, doctors have told that spontaneous disappearance of cancer sometimes happen, although the cause of such healing is not known. A handy way to treat unexpected healings.
Usually believers pray that a sick person would heal, without mentioning when that healing should happen. If there happens a healing that is relatively rapid but not immediate, it is a matter of belief whether the case is understood as an answer to the prayers or a ‘natural’ healing process.
There are also cases where one or few symptoms of the ailment have disappeared immediately but full recovery has taken days. Although full recovery has taken days, it may be a great relief when a disabling pain or other symptom suddenly disappears - anyone who have suffered from disabling pain knows how much the disappearance of the pain matters. Disppearance of pain is a tricky case because a placebo effect or other changes in brain chemistry may alleviate pain much, so it is a matter of belief whether the disappearance of the pain is interpreted as an answer to the prayers or some ‘natural’ change in brain chemistry.
All people do not heal after prayers, many heal but slowly, and there are a few cases where the healing has happened immediately. The rarity of the immediate healings is the reason why these cases are called ‘miracles’. As I wrote earlier, miracles may appear as outliers in the data and outliers do not necessarily affect the results of statistical analyses much. Even if there would be an outlier in the data, the conclusion may be that there were no miracles, with a relatively high statistical confidence.
I think right here you make an important point. The connection would definitely be less easy to identify. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There are so many con artists and manipulators and thieves hovering around the edges of religious and spiritual communities that you always want to minimize the chances that somebody else will get hurt if you share a non-Materialist experience, even if you have no manipulative intents yourself.
There’s also the complication of what people can say, do, and believe when they’re suffering from a major mental illness or have ingested psychotropics. Is it helpful to have healing miracles conflated with psychotic hyperbole? Even the Vatican knows you have to be very cautious in what you claim and how well you can back it up with science.
From a personal perspective, it can be very useful, from the soul’s point of view, for you to not be 100% certain of how, when, or why you were healed. Your uncertainty keeps you asking new questions and making new connections with other human beings. Plus your uncertainty dissuades you from going out and loudly proclaiming you have “proof” you were chosen by God and everybody else should now just listen up to how special you are.
Our stubborn, logical, linear human brains really want the topic of miracle healings to make sense from a legalistic point of view, but I don’t think that’s how God sees it.
The moment you look for glory or recognition God turns away. The time for healing as proof died with Christ.
Healing will never again be a proof of God.
I’m confused. Your two statements seem to contradict each other. You imply that under special circumstances (which you define as instantaneous and medically uncalled for), a healing might fall under the category of miraculous. But then you say in your most recent comment that healing as proof died with Christ and healing will never be a proof of God. But isn’t the whole point of a miraculous healing to open up a pathway through which God communicates to at least one person (i.e. the “healee”)? It may not be proof from the standpoint of the scientific method (which demands, among other things, verifiability), but it can definitely become proof from a personal perspective.
It may be true that healing will never be a proof of God for you. It may be true that healing will never be a proof of God for all people or even most people. But there are enough individuals out there in the world who have had deeply life-altering encounters with the healing God that you have no grounds on which to make your claim that “healing will never be a proof of God.”
For some people, it’s the healing that starts them on a journey of wanting to better understand who God really is.
doctrine becomes so when the Church accepts that the wording and meaning is arrived at through guidance by the Holy Spirit, and yes it would be consistent with scripture (which, btw, was canonised by the Church).
I think the point is that science is the best approach to gain deeper understanding of ToE, filling in gaps of knowledge towards a more complete understanding. Religious Doctrine doesn’t do this, nor is it intended to do this. The analogy might be one-way in this respect.
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Relevant to several comments in the broader discussion: Issac Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong.
I don’t think anyone here thinks Religious doctrine is trying to understand ToE. The only thing religion is trying to do is include God in His creation. As such Science cannot do this unless or until God’s hand can be identified empiracally.
In the mean time the only thing let is to criticise ToE and claim/prove it cannot achieve its goals without God. The problem with this is to have the scientific knowledge and understanding to be able to criticise ToE effectively. Unfortunately most of the attempts fail in that capacity… It would take sincere dedication to reach the standard of expertise that would be acceptable. Knowledge is increasing almost exponentially so that amateurs like me cannot keep up with the access I have to the information., not to mention the time to digest and understand it.
I’m vaguely recalling an article about an experiment where the researchers somehow measured pain via nerve activity and compared to that to people’s reported levels of pain, with the result that what some people considered a 10 was only a 6 to others – concluding that patient reporting of pain levels is a poor measure unless somehow their different pain thresholds were measured.
It reminded me of when I was in pain management and I pegged the pain in my hips as a 7 or 8, but based on the X-rays and obvious hip damage the doctor said most people would consider my pain to be off the scale – at which point he asked how it was I was even walking. I just said it wasn’t that much worse than what I’d experienced running cross-country in high school and college.
Pain is a funny thing. I just had surgery that involved a couple of shotgun shell size holes in my abdominal wall, and significant tissue disruption inside, but still could tolerate with minimal pain meds. And fortunately, pain once gone, does not hurt when you remember it, at least physically.
Measuring pain is not easy. There have been attempts to measure pain through nerve activity, what can be seen in brain scans, how animals behave but all these are very crude measures. Asking the patient is still the most practical measure and probably as good as more laborious methods.
Feeling pain is something that is experienced within brains, not in the other parts of the nerve system. There seems to be a significant psychosomatic component, at least in the sense that someone may become sensitized to feeling pain even when there cannot be found any somatic cause to the pain. Brain studies have shown that these feelings of pain are very real for the patient, not just imagination or cheating. An empirical observation is that if the pain is not treated at an early phase, giving suitable pain medication when the pain starts, alleviating the pain becomes more difficult.
As the feeling of pain is subjective, I assume that the treatment of pain should be based on the most practical measure, asking the patient how strong the pain is.
Bull…that is your assumption because there is loads of scientific evidence that clearly supports YEC.
For example…have you actually examined some of the forensic orthodontic research that is directly opposed ro evolutionary timelines in relation to Neanderthals?
A.scientist actually went around a few of the well know international museums x-raying Neanderthals skulls and there is some damning evidence against old age timelines in those x rays.
To add to the above, the xrays also show that almost all of the well known skulls the researcher got access to, had been artistically altered to make the skulls look more ape like (alterations such as setting teeth incorrectly, intentionally misquoting skull measurements, and filing away the fossil chins).
One significant one, if memory serves, is the Broken Hill Skull…the skull has an entry wound that looks suspiciously like a bullet hole in it with a larger exit wound. If it is a bullet hole, how can that be Neanderthal that is many tens of thousands of years old and if its not a bullet hole, but from a round man made object, who made it? The argument it was a carnivore tooth is a fabulous possibility however, a signal entry wound from a carnivore that just so happens to be 8mm in diameter? The carnivore wound argument is even more problematic than simply accepting the bible story that men of old used metals and made tools and weapons from metals from the earliest times.
Lets also not forget the PiItown man…a lie that went on for like 40 years
There is no physical mechanism by which global planktonic foraminiferal relative dating could work or exist within the time scale required by a young earth. There is no physical mechanism by which radiometric dating can be compressed into a young earth that neither vaporizes the planet nor destroys all atoms: not boiling the oceans (without destroying all atoms larger than hydrogen) requires a minimum of 25,000,000 years of time for radiometric decay. There is no physical mechanism by which global shallow marine deposits of the type and depth observed could form during a young earth. Plate tectonics cannot be compressed into a young earth without melting the planet. The dozens of directly observable Milankovitch cycle-induced sea level fluctuations cannot be compressed into a young earth.
Those are a much worse problem than a few odd specimens.
Very interesting thought. Others have touched on the question of vocabulary and definitions…
The way it seems from my perspective, it seems that some of the problem lies in the fact that there really seem to be only three words to differentiate the entire spectrum of our human level of certainty. Colloquially or popularly speaking…
“Fact” - generally seems to refer to something we can percieve directly; something that is directly observable, repeatable, and/or directly testable. Something that no rational(?) person could reasonably(?) deny. This doesn’t mean it has to be currently observable, G. Washington being first US President under this constitution would generally be considered a fact even if we don’t have any direct access.
“Hypothesis” - generally seems to be understood as an educated guess, one that (hopefully) fits within the current facts as we know them, but which has not been further tested, or for which no significant attempt at falsification has been made.
“Theory”, then, popularly speaking, seems to refer to everything in between those two poles. The theory of gravity, cell theory, etc., which are so well established they are part of the established and agreed body of scientific knowledge, and something someone put in a single research paper submitted to a journal on which they made a scientific hypothesis and made a single follow-on experiment that did not immediately contradict said hypothesis.
Complicating all of this, are that within anything commonly known as a scientific theory, there are facts and theories and without exacting precision, sometimes they are confused… Unless someone corrects me, we can speak of the existence of gravity (the fact that we all stand on the ground and don’t float) and the existence of cells as being a fact, (these are things we can directly observe), whereas how cells function, and how gravity functions such that we all stand on the ground and don’t float, these are theories that are indeed open to falsification or modification (either micro or macro level) given the introduction of new knowledge.
I can’t conceive of any new discovery or knowledge that would change our belief in the existence of either cells or gravity, though I can certainly imagine various discoveries that could change our understanding of exactly how they work.
To evolution, similarly, we have to define also exactly what we mean by that term, and which parts are indeed fact, and what kind of discoveries would or could falsifiy the theory. That animals change over multiple generations is generally understood as a fact, as breeders know quite well. Not even Ken Ham or anyone at AIG would dispute this. For those who have accepted the larger scientific consensus, though, how these animals have changed, and to the extent that such change can explain observable facts of biology, is the “theory” that should be open to falsification given new data.
Personally I don’t see the parallel as helpful - theories (in theory ) arise from making a (new) hypothesis and then testing it against the facts, and then seeking new knowledge or new facts to falsify tsaid theory. To my understanding (and I am open to correction as this is a new thought I’m just thinking through), no theological doctrine began as an independent hypothesis and then theologians sought new knowledge or made new discoveries in order to falsify said doctrine.
Firstly, in theology, we’re talking about revealed truths - things that we have no direct access or knowledge in order to test, we are simply making conclusions and connecting logical dots between various statements that we have accepted to be true as we recognize them as having been revealed by God.
So in principle at least, stated doctrines in theology are essentially logical deductions from already established truths. God was emphasized to be one across the OT and into the NT, and yet the NT firmly established that the Father was God, and the Son was God, and then further equated the Spirit with God, said that all three together were the (singular) name of this one God, etc., etc.
From all that already extant and available data, our theological forebears derived, or deduced, statements or conceptions that would contain, communicate, and be consistent with all available data. In other words, there are no “new” experiments, no new sources of information or knowledge, no new discoveries or the like that we could turn to to attempt to falsify the doctrine of the Trinity. If it were (hypothetically) to be falsified, it would come from the realization that something about of it were in fact inconsistent with something already revealed in Scripture, not because we had made some “new” theological discovery.
All that said, I suppose it is possible that the historical process of establishing these theological truths may well have followed the pattern you’re noting - given an initial view of the data, perhaps an early theologian made a hypothesis of sorts, and in the process of searching Scripture, his colleagues pointed out some conflict his formulation made with some other revealed truth or Scripture, and in practice “falsified” said hypothesis… and what we know as doctrines today are in practice those hypotheses that have not been otherwise falsified by Scripture. The classification of various trinitarian formulations as heresy are essentially this - the falsification of a hypothesis based on alternate data.
That said, I still think there is a wide gap between scientific theories, in which we have a literal universe of new discoveries waiting for us, and zounds of new knowledge we can gain by advances in technology and methods, and hence the real possibility of all kinds of new knowledge that can modify our established theories - and the historic Christian doctrines, for which all the facts, in toto, have already been laid out before us and are exhaustively available, hence where there is essentially no new knowledge or bona fide new facts to be gained… any falsification would come about through a new understanding or formulation of data we already have, not through acquisition of new data.
But that’s just a quick knee-jerk reaction. Thoughts?
Interestingly enough, I was reading an old paper by the astronomer James Jeans from 1919 where he refers to the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system as a “scientific doctrine.”
I think that is an interesting analogy. Where it breaks down is that theological doctrines are generally non-negotiable. We can’t just dispense with the Trinity and still consider ourselves Christians in the Nicene sense, whereas if evidence was found tomorrow that completely discredited evolution, scientists could reject evolution and could still be considered good scientists. In fact, if they didn’t reject it, they would cease to be good scientists. Of course, there are some anti-evolutionists who would argue that evolution is a doctrine in the sense of being a dogma that is non-negotiable for scientists. I think that outlines a fundamental difference between scientific orthodoxy and theological orthodoxy. Theological orthodoxy requires acceptance of the right beliefs whereas scientific orthodoxy requires holding to the right methods. You can propose any hypothesis you want and it can be good science as long as it is based on evidence and testing predictions. That is probably why analogies between a theological doctrine and a scientific theory tend to break down at a certain point.
) arise from making a (new) hypothesis and then testing it against the facts, and then seeking new knowledge or new facts to falsify tsaid theory. To my understanding (and I am open to correction as this is a new thought I’m just thinking through), no theological doctrine began as an independent hypothesis and then theologians sought new knowledge or made new discoveries in order to falsify said doctrine.