Kind of like saying that since there are highways signs indicating that Littleville is 30 miles east, and another fifty miles away indicating that Littleville is twenty miles west then we don’t know that Littleville even exists.
Back to Luther’s theological term: excrementum tauri.
In geology class we were given rock samples to date. We did not start with the premise that they were at least several hundred thousand years old and then hunt for data to show that, we started by listing all the observations we could and charting the data thus obtained, and then formed our ‘theory’.
If you had taken the least history of science course at a university level you would know that the theory of evolution has been formed in the same exact way, though with a difference: in our lab class no one was trying to find flaws, but in biology people try to shoot holes in the theory constantly.
Which is to say that your claim is contrary to reality.
Or at the very least, papers written for upper-level university science courses that follow all the requirements for submission for publication, which was the standard for just about every junior- and senior-level science course I took.
Heh – I deleted what I wrote since this is so much clearer!
Monsanto spends many millions annually doing research directed by the theory of evolution to discover new ways to deal with the three above. It’s an important tool especially for dealing with parasites that haven’t been affected by other approaches.
Excrementum tauri.
Several of my various biology professors were always on the lookout for the least evidence that there wasn’t just a common ancestor. They got grants to fund research trying to find an organism that doesn’t fit the pattern.
You treat the scientific community as though it was an association of tribal shamans out to bamboozle the public, when the truth is far closer to community of tribes out to do in each other;s shamans.
That is incredibly disrespectful and shows a susceptibility to irrational thought.
Of course it isn’t taken seriously, ever since the young earth creationist crowd hijacked the term to try to smuggle religion into public school textbooks – in fact since then anyone using the term isn’t trusted just because that crowd proved they couldn’t be trusted (and have since proven it repeatedly).
Speaking from my experience with university science professors – false.
False, for the reason given above.
That’s because almost always the proposer isn’t in fact qualified, but knows just enough to make ridiculous claims without being educated enough to recognize why they are ridiculous.
Why?
Wildlife biologists in the region where I live suspected feral dogs had bred with coyotes, this being proposed to help explain some unexpected behavior. Not only did they demonstrate that there was in fact dog DNA in the suspect coyotes, they could tell how long go it entered and what dog breed(s) it came from.
Oh good grief!
Having taken university science courses that dealt with both feathers and grasses, I have to tell you that your claim is the sort that makes people wonder if they’re going to lose IQ points from reading! The chances of confusing fossilized grass with fossilized feathers are less than being dealt a royal flush in poker.
Its funny. People are all so full of their certitude. No one could possibly have an alternative viewpoint. Truth is so obvious and well defined. I always liked the quote It’s the difference of opinion that makes horse racing
I am not going to argue with you further
you think I am not qualified
(But you think that you are qualified in my field of theology)
I should bow down to your superior knowledge and understanding.
The meek will inherit the Earth (if it OK with the rest of you guys)
Well some things are about as certain as you can possibly get. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second. London and New York have three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean in between them. The digits in every row, column and 3x3 box in a sudoku sum to 45. password, qwerty, letmein and 123456 are bad choices of password.
Sure, some things are not so certain, but if you want to argue that something (such as evolution for example) falls into that category, you need to make sure that the case you are making to that effect is coherent and factually accurate.
The problem with unqualified people attempting to challenge scientific theories is not that they are unqualified per se, but that they are much more likely to make mistakes that invalidate the legitimacy of their critiques.
For example, they may claim that scientists do things that they do not, or that they do not do things that in reality they do. When a scientist studying evolution professionally says “We do X” and a naysayer confidently asserts that “evolutionists” do not do X, the naysayer is either not getting his or her facts straight, or else accusing professional scientists of lying about what they do for a living. In the former case, the naysayer’s claim can be summarily dismissed; in the latter case, the naysayer needs to provide credible evidence to back up their accusation of lying, otherwise, again, their claim can be summarily dismissed.
Or they may be critiquing an outdated or inaccurate description of what scientists actually do, or even an outdated or inaccurate description of the theory itself. Or they may be claiming scientists overlook various facts and evidence when in reality they have fully accounted for that very evidence. Or they may be attempting to challenge a description of the theory or its methodologies that is over-simplified and therefore inaccurate.
The fact of the matter is that subject matter experts are familiar with the evidence that supports their theories, with the laboratory and field procedures that they use, with the protocols that they follow, with the assumptions that they make (if any), with what needs to be done in order to challenge those assumptions, and with the practical applications that their theories find in industry. Anyone who wants to challenge their theories and findings needs to be able to address this body of knowledge and to point out the places where it is fallacious or misapplied. It is unlikely that anyone without the necessary level of training and subject matter expertise will have the requisite knowledge and experience to be able to do so with any credibility.
Not argued. But whether they are familiar (in terms of understanding them) with ones against it is another matter entirely. More likely they do what is done here and dismiss them out of hand.
Forget that. Anyone who is competent in any career knows why there is a right way and the reasons the wrong way is wrong, what works and what doesn’t. You cannot understand the arguments for something if you are not fully aware of the arguments against. No one should expect less. You cannot understand relativity if you do not understand the limitations of Newtonian mechanics.
Yes. If that is your area and you do not know garbage when you hear it, you are not up for your job.
To quote @St.Roymond quoting Martin Luther, excrementum tauri.
Of course a subject matter expert will understand the arguments against a scientific theory! They will understand a heck of a lot more than that—they will understand the basic rules and principles that distinguish between arguments against it that are legitimate and arguments that are not. In fact they will understand the advanced rules and principles that distinguish between arguments that are legitimate and arguments that are not as well. They don’t need to be familiar with the details of the arguments that every unqualified armchair critic comes up with—knowing what the rules are is sufficient to enable them to assess them as they encounter them. Arguments that don’t follow the advanced rules may warrant an informed response to the naysayer explaining to them what they have overlooked. Arguments that don’t even follow the basic rules can and should be dismissed out of hand as the aforementioned excrementum tauri.
Most unqualified naysayers don’t even seem to be aware of the most basic rules, let alone follow them. In fact many unqualified naysayers even go so far as to take offence at the suggestion that there are any rules at all, claiming that they’re somehow “rigged” against them. As if the rules of mathematics, measurement and laboratory procedure—algebra, trigonometry, geometry, calculus, logarithms, linear regression, standard deviations, error bars, calibration of equipment and sample preparation and handling—were some sort of Illuminati conspiracy.
Much of my business relies on what some people call worthless and others see value in. And there are so-called experts on both sides of that fence. There is nothing to say that scientists are perfect or infallible.
You only have to surf the net to see how much opposition there is to evolution. You know the saying “There is no smoke without fire”. Science aside, philosophy would suggest that there are ctiticisms that are being dismissed or railroaded.
Oh, what the …
I thought I had signed off from this a while back.
How many hours of university courses have you had that are relevant to being able to distinguish fossil proto-feathers from fossil blades of grass? and in that number, did you have one where the process of petrification was examined in detail?
If you had even three you’d know that there is no way anyone would mistake fossil proto-feathers from fossil blades of grass – it’s just not possible; the structures on the molecular level are completely different.
And the scientists who went back to look at dinosaur fossils and discovered feathers would have been perfectly happy to have found fossilized grass instead. That wouldn’t have made for quite as startling papers in terms of dinosaurs, but it would have been publishable.
Alternate viewpoints are for when the data are not clear. The difference between fossil feathers and fossil grass would be something like the difference between a Toyota Corolla and a Ferrari Monza – total amateurs might get confused, but not anyone who actually knows anything about cars.
I KNOW you are not qualified: you repeatedly show you don’t understand the theory of evolution, you have a poor grasp of scientific method, and you make claims about subjects you plainly haven’t studied. From your scientific knowledge shown here, you would not pass the freshman science pre-test that was given in one school where I student-taught to find out if remedial courses were needed.
No, you should go get up to date on the topics you discuss – or at least catch up to twenty years ago so you wouldn’t look so clueless.
Actually that turns out to be a very bad idea for research scientists. As I found out in writing a term paper in an upper-level geology course, at least as much time has to be spent searching the literature for anything that might possibly turn out to be contrary to what is going into the paper as goes into searching the literature for whether the particular subject matter has been covered before. If a university professor failed to do due diligence and find everything in the literature that might discredit the paper it looks bad enough; to dismiss anything out of hand would be practically begging for any career advancement to be gone. In a glacial geology course, to miss one significant paper relevant to a midterm or other class paper was to lose an entire letter grade regardless of how good the paper itself was, because a large part of the point of papers for upper-level courses was training in how to be a professional in the subject.
Geology grad students had a sort of hobby, finding and listing papers that never should have been published.
I don’t know about other departments, but whenever one grad student was up to present and defend his thesis in geology, all the other grad students in the department were expected to be there and to do their best to rip the presenter to shreds – and the way to prep for that was to track down and find everything in the literature that could possibly be used against any part of their thesis. They didn’t just have to know the arguments in general terms of their field, they had to be able to cite papers backing every point they might have to defend.
I didn’t actually get a page count, but one friend who did his thesis on some geology local to my home (which was how we became friends; he grilled me on the best ways to access various places) had a stack on his desk of folders containing papers he would have to argue against for some of his points, but that stack was easily twenty times as thick as his master’s thesis ended up being (including all notes and appendices).
For a course in metamorphic geology we spent several lab sessions (plus many extra hours) making it possible to do the actual lab exercises because the grad assistants purposely screwed up every piece of equipment in the undergrad labs, forcing us to recalibrate.
We were very thankful for the ones they screwed up wildly enough to be obvious; it was when they set something off by 0.1% or less that was a real pain.
Quantity of opposition is not a measure of actual opposition; quantity is more likely to emerge from ignorance with an agenda that from substance.
And surfing the net is not research; the real research is behind professional “walls” to keep the ignoramuses from compiling compost.
Thanks for sharing this. It’s always helpful to hear first-hand accounts of what geologists and geology students actually do when they get into the lab. It’s also helpful to hear about the lengths that professional scientists go to in order to maintain scientific rigour, integrity and scrutiny.
This is the one thing that never ceases to amaze me about discussions about science and faith. Evangelists and apologists love to wax lyrical about the philosophy of science—concepts such as assumptions, presuppositions, worldviews, methodological naturalism, falsifiability and so on. They will happily quote (mine) and name-drop famous scientists till the cows come home. But when it comes to the mechanics of science, they are completely tone deaf. They don’t seem to have the slightest shred of awareness that science is actually done in laboratories, that it involves measuring things, that it starts off with studying evidence, that it is constrained by basic rules and principles, that it is mathematical and technical in nature, or that you learn how it works first and foremost through actual hands-on experience. When they do try to address these matters, their claims are often inaccurate, incoherent, or even completely false. On the other hand, if you try to address these matters, they will often tell you that you are “overthinking things.” Or something like that.
Bible Colleges and seminaries that teach courses in science based apologetics really need to include compulsory modules in lab work, mathematics and computer programming as a part of their curriculum. If someone doesn’t have a firm grasp of the mechanics of science, they aren’t really qualified to discuss the philosophy of science in any meaningful and coherent way.
The only major exception that I have encountered to “must find everything relevant in the literature” in my field is “I am writing a monograph. I am physically unable to review all 10,000+ papers that contain something relevant. Instead, I will settle for reading all of the ones that I can find that are especially relevant.”
I will dismiss most papers by a few specific authors as “I can better spend my time looking at ones where the author actually does a good job.”
Wait – that’s a thing? A four-year seminary program that (hopefully) includes a one-year internship being mentored by an exceptional pastor barely has time to cover the essentials (and usually neglects spiritual formation), so why are they wasting time on such things as “science based apologetics”??
Only in “special” seminaries that probably exhibit that approach as their distinctive feature to separate them from all the other ‘compromised’ institutions. I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I imagine that the majority of seminaries (probably affiliated with mainline denominations) do not promote this ‘feature’. Some probably tolerate it at best - or just stay away from it entirely so as not to needlessly antagonize supporters. I think most even here in the U.S. recognize creation science and call it out for what it is - the best and quickest way to shipwreck a person’s faith.
I am intruiged. Do you think that it is impossible to marry creation to science? Or is it just the particular “flavour” of creation science that you are referring to?
Isn’t Theistic Evolution a form of creation science?
“Creation Science” might as well practically be a trademarked thing - because it refers specifically to YEC and flood geology as would be promoted by ICR or AIG. So, no - nobody here would begin to use that label for anything other than that. People here are interested in science. All of it. And just like we don’t have “Creation Cookery” or “Creation Meteorology” or “Creation Auto Mechanics” … so also, it makes zero sense (to most thinkers here) to have anything called “Creation Science”.
Since all truth is God’s truth, the descriptor is simply redundant and unnecessary for any here who already think that God presides over the whole shebang anyway, so no need to try to carve out a little piece of it all here and there to pretend like you’re reserving those bits for God. And to be fair - that’s a bit of a caricature, as the proponents of those things would deny that they’re doing any such thing. And they would go on to insist that science - i.e. ‘real science’ (you know, the kind that starts with the ‘biblical’ understandings of YECS and works backwards from those non-negotiable conclusions) can still be a useful tool to help bring the skeptical nonbelievers into the fold. They would also say that the world’s secularized science (sorry @jammycakes - but we’ll have to declare a national holiday the first time any of them show any signs of acknowledging - much less being able to answer - all the biblical commandments of honest measurements, weights and scales that you tirelessly point them to) … they would say all science that doesn’t line up with their personally recieved tradition is not the real science. The challenge for them with that is that the only way their ‘science’ works is if one starts with their needed conclusions and then invokes multitudes of pointless miracles all in the service of a vast deception - and requiring the further miracle then of also needing an unprecedentedly big unity of all the world’s scientists to all agree not to blow the whistle on it. So I guess if you can believe all that … you can believe about anything (and true to form … many do.)
That’s my rambly answer to why EC people will all (without exception as far as I know) eschew the term “Creation Science”.
[… if that’s okay with you.]