I would say regardless of field and level, facts and logic beat authority any day. But I guess we must agree to disagree on this point.
I gather you probably haven’t read my last post at all yet then … as the point you repeat here is already subsumed (and agreed with) in mine above.
God’s authority beats EVERYTHING. He’s the timeless observer. What he says is true. Evidence is always open for interpretation. The question always remains whose interpretation is right - that of those who interpret it in line with God’s word or those who trust other standards. It’s never about the science. It’s about the scientists and their respective worldview lenses which color the observed data. The data itself is pale.
same hardware - different software.
I read it all. You don’t really agree. You state in probabilistic fields and when teaching appeal to authority is very strong. I disagree, e.g. Lysenko’s agricultural theories that wrecked the USSR.
Which came at the birth of modern science
Both of which subsumed previous theories within the new theories as accurate approximations for some domain. And neither of which was really resisted by mainstream physicists.
The closest example I can think of is continental drift.
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Is that really true?
What if God lies? Or, those teaching, interpreting, translating, and transcribing God’s scripture lie, or are mistaken?
None of which undermines what I actually wrote. And I think I’m probably the higher authority on what I do or do not agree with than you are about what I agree with (and authority very much counts here! 
). I’ll repeat the pertinent point you seem to have missed.
So I’ve already agreed with you that empirical observation trumps authority. What I don’t agree with you about is what I take to be your apparent assertion that authority has no place whatsoever in the world of science.
Would he be God, if he lied? Would he be God, if he referred to scripture as if it was historical truth to be taken seriously, if he didn’t keep scripture error-free?
Can scripture be mistaken? Yes, but not if you didn’t have another standard telling you how to read it! Scripture always interprets itself.
I would say your representation does not match the history of the Christian religion, nor what the Bible says. God does deceive people in the Bible.
Or, another issue, which book of the Bible gives an authoritative list of the books of the Bible?
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Well, that would be the issue then. Nowhere do I say such a thing.
I’ve noticed this forum is quite creative in its interpretation of my comments 
It’s an oversimplification, but mostly true. Special relativity was very rapidly accepted in Germany, and almost as rapidly in the US and the UK, so that within a decade of its initial publication it was widely (but not universally) accepted in all three. Since these were the three of the leading scientific centers at the time, I think it’s fair to say that it met with broad and rapid acceptance. Only in France among major scientific powers was there prolonged resistance.
General relativity came later, in 1916. Its success in explaining Mercury’s orbit brought it immediate attention, and the confirmation of its prediction of gravitational lensing in 1919 gave it more credit. I don’t think the reaction was wholesale acceptance – it’s such a mathematically complex theory and its implications are difficult to grasp, that that took longer. But the situation was not remotely one of the consensus of mainstream physicists rejecting it for a long time.
As for QM, as a theory it was born in the mid-1920s, developed at blistering speed, and yes, I think it was rapidly accepted. As a complete theory there was plenty of resistance, but that it was a promising theory was not in question.
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That is the central question addressed when I first considered the age of the earth. If God falsified so much in nature, his creation, which he proclaims in scripture witnesses to him and proclaims his glory, would he be God? The alternative is that reading a young earth into scripture is wrong, and in humility we should accept that we are finite and fallible.
Ultimately, this whole discussion is nothing about science or evidence, but centers on how you interpret scripture. I chose to accept God’s word was given to bring us back into relationship with the Rock of Ages,not to tell us the age of rocks. But, that is just me. Fortunately, you are free to believe otherwise if you wish.
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Just as you have been with mine! I guess it’s a common human failing. Thank God for words, subsequent chances to clarify and for grace! I stand corrected as to what you think then. So you do allow a place for authority in the world of science, but just perhaps wish to see it leaned on less than what I am comfortable with. Is that fair?
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Specifically, when we arr debating a claim of an authority, it is no use to argue for the claim by appealing to the authority. Then, not only are we using a weak appeal to authority, but the argument becomes viciously circular.
Well … yeah. I think there is no avoiding that. We only have words and their meanings for our arguments, and so we all are obliged to lean on the authority of dictionaries, which themselves are formulated over time from … our common usages of words. Appeal to authority in some way or form is the circle we can never, ever entirely escape. But I do agree with you that it is still a very real fallacy to be avoided in empirical science to the extent that we can.
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I see this show up a lot in the evolution debate with appeals to ‘conscilience of evidence’ whenever a particular line of evidence begins to look shaky. If each pillar of the edifice is shaky, does combining them really make things more stable?
There is an analogy in the field of machine learning called ‘ensemble models’. We can aggregate a bunch of not so accurate models to get an overall mor accurate prediction. However, the rub is this ensemble is much more prone to overfitting, i.e. its results are circular.
That’s an interesting analogy (the ensemble of shaky pillars). I think it’s also fair to say that critics such as yourself see a lot more shakiness in any of those given pillars than most scientists working on or within those pillars do. I think historically there was a lot of shakiness to some of those pillars that has since been shored up. E.g. there was a lot that Darwin didn’t know and that he admitted could create great problems for his theory. Timescales themselves were quite the tottering pillar as Lord Kelvin himself could attest. I think some would say those pillars have strengthened considerably rather than weakening in the intervening years, though.
Our earlier exchange provoked this thought for me: there probably already is a word for this fallacy, or if not there should be: projecting extremism onto the other party. E.g. Eric claims that authority is given too much weight in science … and I hear “Eric sees no place at all anywhere for authority”. Or a politician claims that there should be some governmental regulation in ‘x’. Opponents hear: “government will step in to regulate ‘xyz’ as well as ‘abcde…’ and everything else in sight.” One person says “I’m not sure about the efficacy of wearing a mask” and others hear “I don’t care about the lives of anybody else other than my own.”
It just doesn’t seem to be in our argumentative DNA to allow that our opponents can actually have any nuances at all on their side. We think that the nuances belong to our side and our side alone. I know I do it a lot. Hearing logical extreme where your conversation partner has expressed nuance is just too easy.
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John Polkinghorne has said that when the smoke has cleared, scientists all beleve the same thing. And meanwhile, many religions, including Christianity, get more and more divisive and downright bizarre, absorbing political ideology, strange beliefs, etc.
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Empirical science does not at all contradict the Bible! You’ve been deceived to deduce from false evolutionary presuppositions and therefore conclude hat biblical creation couldn’t possibly be true.
Again:
Science is what you can
- observe in process
- analyse and describe
- use to predict certain phenomena
- experimentally verify
- repeat.
If you think that >anything< about evolution or an old earth anyhow fits these 5 criteria, you have been successfully sucked into believing a lie that has been intended by the devil to raise doubts in god’s people! Re-think.(!)