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”.
Richard, if you are trying to generate a negative response to your post, just say “evolution” and claim that it is wrong. If you want to have a meaningful discussion, then be very specific about what you are objecting to.
I think I read somewhere that you do believe in theistic evolution; if you believe that anything that includes the word “evolution” is actually true, then you really have to be very explicit about what aspects of evolution you believe are true, and what aspects of evolution you believe are not true. For me as a “newbie” I strongly suspect that you and the people you are arguing with so very forcefully actually agree on much more than you disagree.
What aspects of evolutionary theory do you agree with, and what do you disagree with? Then maybe there can be some specific discussion of why us outsiders should choose to agree or disagree with those specific aspects that would be useful.
This reminds me of something my older brother told everyone at a Thanksgiving dinner at the parents’ house back in the days when he had completed all the requirements for the advanced/accelerated PhD program in mathematics at Berkeley (and was arguing with them over the requirement that he sit some additional number of hours in classrooms even though he had mastered the subject matter of every remaining listed course) and along with tutoring others for their PhD degree work he earned some chunks of bucks by assisting researchers in navigating through the basement stacks where all the PhD theses in math Berkeley had ever awarded were stored: Berkeley had begun the effort to make every one of those theses available on electronic media.
BTW, those researchers were seeking versions of mathematics that might fit what they were discovering; he said that a good deal of the time they found at least one bit that seemed relevant within a week, the majority found some within a month, and almost all found something within three months – and the ones that hadn’t found one in that time would pose their problem to the mathematics department in hopes that someone might be working on something relevant.
The hardest part of getting them all on electronic media was tagging each one with labels indicating where in the realm of mathematics each one fit for the simple reason that for nearly every one of those theses there were only a few dozen people in the world who could pick it up and understand what was being read!
At any rate, I presume that grad students no longer get assigned reviewing journals for relevant papers for their advisors’ research and needing physical copies of the journals; now they just do electronic searches.
Evolution adapts and refines to fit environmental or other pressures
What I do not believe is the ability to change beyond that. And therefore I do not believe that everything is derived from a single organism. And this cannot be proved. one way or the other.
However, recent advances in DNA assessment would seem to show similarities across species. I dispute that this proves a heredity connection. (don’t go there now)
Therefore I insist that there is more to the development of creatures than just random deviations (tempered by Survival) and that evolution is guided in some way. And that similarities are as much a sign of design as they are heredity. The designer being God. The building bricks being DNA. The control method? I have no idea (probably not true but there is none that I wish to propose)
As a Christian I believe that God designed humanity rather than it being a fluke of evolution.
And those who adopt the label most eagerly, such as adherents of AiG and CMI, would adamantly exclude EC. In the face of that mutual agreement of the meaning and association of creation science, it is just going to cause confusion to disregard this broadly held understanding of an alternative to conventional science (which is really just science).
In contrast to JEDP, I was more of a “MD” guy – Multiple sources, Deuteronomist editor.
Though by the end of grad school I’d pretty much gone over to the German school of thought that had pointed out that even if J, E, D, and P were all real, what counted was the final redaction which has come down to us because (1) with some exceptions we really don’t have any significant stretches that belong to any but D or P, plus (2) it is the resulting text that we are told is inspired, besides which (3) the resulting text is what we actually have and (4) it is the resulting text that the Holy Spirit led the church to canonize.
Items (2) and (4) weren’t important to some members of that school, but (3) was firmly held by all. I think that (2) and (4) could be counted as a single criterion, though some noted that while (4) is not the same as (2) it is the affirmation of (2).
[Without my files I can’t point to any specific scholars; heck, even if I had them it might not do me any good because my (theological) German has gotten so rusty it’s little more than ‘pigment’, and I only recall one paper on this in English – and it did little more than say, “Hey, everybody, while we’ve been doing the JEDP thing the Germans have moved on without us (again) and maybe we should catch up (again)!”]
So you are sayng that the OT was redacted by the Holy Spirit (or at least an HS filled person). If so, why do you interpret Genesis 1-2 differently to Genesis 2-5? (if they are redacted by the same source).
Regarding how we are to understand the Genesis accounts, our friend Mark who used to hang out here, has linked me to an essay by Conrad Hyers: “Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance” which I found to be quite informative.
Here’s a teaser from it:
One of the ironies of biblical literalism is that it shares so largely in the reductionist and literalist spirit of the age. It is not nearly as conservative as it supposes. It is modernistic, and it sells its symbolic birthright for a mess of tangible pottage.