Your own words are probably applicable in this situation:
“Which specific topic would a reference help you with. I’m pretty sure there are none that would since you have taken the [term removed] position of casting stones and refusing to consider anything other than what you already believe to be true . . .”
No one expects an exact 1:1 correlation, year by year, between temperature and CO2 concentrations. There are many interactions between Earth’s systems in addition to other factors like air pollution. This was especially true in the 1980’s when the fossil fuels being used were higher in sulfur as was the amount of sulfur being released from smokestacks and exhaust pipes. The sulfur compounds form water droplets in the stratosphere which actually reflects heat back into space before it can warm the planet. This is why aerosols are listed as one of the cooling human factors in this figure:
It is extremely naive to think that carbon dioxide can not be the cause of warming because there is not an exact 1:1 correlation, and if you are reading a book that makes that argument then the author doesn’t know what they are talking about.
Okay people - I’m removing all the “cement-head” terms … carry on with the actual content of your discussions though!
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
63
I do not understand how a book can change science. No, really. A real science book by a real scientist, like Newton or Darwin, can. But they’re very few and far between. Papers change science. Scientific papers, written by scientists, for scientists to kick the tyres of. Not written as libertarians. Now I love Michael Schellenberger because of Apocalypse Never, because it is evidence based activism which deconstructs unscientific activism. Hypocrisy? Double mindedness? Nobody has scientific evidence, as in nobody, that IPCC science isn’t. I could not give a tinker’s cuss about consensus in any area of inquiry. Except the consensus of evidence.
within the last 1,600,000 years or so. It has been far higher, but, as a demonstration that that makes a difference, there were crocodiles, tree shrews, and bowfin near/in the arctic ocean in the Eocene (the Arctic seems to have been brackish, warm, and almost closed off from other oceans).
I don’t know how many scientists contributed to the USGCRP Climate Science Special Report, vol1: Chap 6 Figure 6.3, but it is more than 8. The figure gives hurricane data for 1970 to 2010 indexed by power dissipation index, and it sure looks like a strong trend to stronger hurricanes. However, the IPCC’s 5th Assessment (AR5) clearly states that there is 'low confidence in any long-term increase in hurricane activity, which examined data back to records available. And of course we now also know that recent years have seen reduced hurricane activity although there have been a few whoppers. The historical record demonstrates that there are wide variations in hurricane activity over time, including more active periods prior to 1950 when the impact of climate change was supposedly not yet in play.
I understand why the conversation veered off into climate change, but I don’t have to read 60+ posts to agree with the overwhelming consensus that it’s real. I want to go back and address the OP. Forgive me if it’s a digression.
Yes, concrete ideas and language preceded abstract, symbolic thought. The same is true with childhood development. “Good” and “evil” are abstract concepts, as is “morality” itself. I can give a “naturalistic” account of the evolution of language and morality, drawing on Haidt, Tomasello, and many others. Abstract concepts are products of both cultural evolution and brain evolution (globularity).
You draw the line in science, but that’s the wrong place. You demonize “consensus” and falsely equate it with an authoritarian dictum handed down by experts, but a majority of what humans accept as “true” and “factual” is learned by consensus, not proved by logic or handed down by authority.
For example, how do you know that your senses are reliable? Is what you perceive as “red” the same as what others perceive? Did you hear that noise? Am I delusional or in my “right mind”? All of the supposedly “factual” inputs from your senses are weighed against the consensus. That’s just how “reality” works. One opinion doesn’t decide the question, whether that’s the meaning of a word or the reality of climate change.
Doing science requires methodological naturalism, because the toolkit science provides cannot investigate the supernatural. This allows scientists from all different worldviews and philosophical perspectives to play by the same rules and remove philosophical bias from their conclusions. The results of scientific inquiry should be reviewable by anyone with the relevant training, no matter what their religion or philosophical perspective is. This is the consensus that BioLogos is talking about. Science can only answer questions about the natural world, and of course, Christians believe truth claims that cannot be examined using the tools of science because they are truth claims about spiritual realities, values, and morals.
Philosophical naturalism on the other hand is the belief that the natural world is the only reality. You do not have to subscribe to this belief system to do science or to evaluate science or to come to consensus in science.
Read the USG CRP document and you will have many names.
I’m sure there is nothing that would satisfy you since you have clearly demonstrated your unwillingness to consider an alternative opinion to your own. This is my last response. I hope you and yourself have a nice discussion about all the things you prefer not to discuss.
“The consensus has been wrong before” is a questionable at best type of argument- is that your goal in this statement?
I’m not sure this is an accurate reflection of a scientific consensus, but to be fair, some people and their unscientific ideas onto science and distinguishing between what science affirms and such additions is important.
I think more commonly is not that scientists who, after critically evaluating each other, often very skeptically (far more than you or I could critique some scientific finding), end up reluctantly arriving at the same conclusion (because you don’t get grants for confirming what we already know- that’s boring and affirming previous work doesn’t get you scientific game), but rather it’s that we laymen are not capable of making our own conclusions. We literally don’t have enough expertise to even begin evaluating most fields of science without years of specified advanced study. I don’t think most people (including my prior self) have the faintest clue what goes into evaluating technical claims in, again most fields.
Tldr- it’s not that scientists can’t let us make our own conclusions, but unfortunately we don’t even have a fraction of the relevant expertise/knowledge to begin evaluating the scientific data on essentially every topic.
If you or someone still don’t believe me, maybe we can find a first year grad school exam on some scientific consensus topic and passing that would barely even begin to qualify someone to judge the scientific consensus on some topic.
Thank you for your reply. I like how you start and am happy to see the fallaciousness of a blind appeal to consensus. But I am more ambivalent toward your defense of consensus. While it is true that a person who has thought about and studied something will usually have more informed responses on it, it is not necessarily a correct response.
I determine what is true or not by the evidence and the logic used to support the claim - irrespective of the authority of the person making the claim. If they have studied and considered the evidence and logic for their claim that will show in the claim they present.
Of course there are many things that are mere opinion or are insignificant where I don’t give the time to review the evidence and logic to support it. But I also don’t think I know the truth about those things either.
The Bible is not one of those areas I haven’t examined. I am a student of Greek, partly because of the question of originality of the text. I think transparency is great in all of the important questions of life and existence. There are great tools (which I am compiling in a Bible website) which are making this process so much more transparent. The NET Bible notes are great (and free online) in giving reasons that the translators had in selecting the correct Greek text or English translation with many of the more difficult texts. Also there is a great tool by an Alan Bunning correlating the ancient Greek text with links to the original manuscript evidence. (Center for New Testament Restoration). From my study I came to the conclusion that most of the text issues are merely academic and that the more major differences also aren’t of the level that are problematic. It seems to me that trying to understand what is written is much more problematic than the differences in text. I still enjoy looking into what the differences in a specific portion of text are and what the text means.
In scientific matters, I hear support for the notion of life coming from non-life based on naturalism - “We are here so it must have happened at least once”. Which assumes the cell’s origination must be natural to evidence that a cell arises naturally. Put any statement into that formal fallacy structure and I would also reject the notion that it shows the statement to be true or false.
You seem to be a philosophical or ontological naturalist. I hope to post another topic for this as I expect it to be a very entailed back and forth. It was just used here as an example of consensus not dependent on evidence and logic but a belief.
I didn’t mean to even imply that Biologos upholds naturalism as I explained the term (philosophical or ontological naturalism). I merely meant to show it as a belief that some science consensus is built upon as an example.
Transparency in evidence as much as possible is a good thing and this is something that is done fairly well in the scientific community. But the notion of naturalism is not science but a belief. Obviously what a scientist believes elucidates nothing in what is empirically shown.
One area where I accepted the evidence based on several scientists stating it was the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment. But then Sabine Hossenfelder came out debunking the evidence and explaining why. However, she also doesn’t show the actual evidence. And very germane to my post on consensus she also says that physics shows we have no freewill based on her naturalistic belief.
Yes, technology is nothing more than the extension of our power/ability to do something. And we each can use our power/ability to do good or evil as we always have had.
I meant something is scientifically true or not being on the basis of scientific consensus. I understand Biologos is a Christian group and do not adhere to the naturalist’s dogma.
I did read the Biologos book on the “Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design” where Deborah Haarsma mentioned scientific consensus at least twice in a manner I understood to be support for it describing reality. I haven’t found the references yet so it would be wrong for us to discuss my understanding of what she said versus her actual words.
When I am considering whether something is true or not I try to gather the best evidence and logic from all sides. While I tend to shy away from past unreliable sources in dealing with our human limitations it would be contrary to an honest search to consider any ad hominem attacks or generalizations of those making a statement to thusly claim it to be false or true. Hence my rejection of consensus.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
77
Of course I am. As a man of faith. I am not aware of any scientific consensus, including anthropogenic global warming understood since 1896 and proven 65 years later, that is not based entirely on the logical interpretation of evidence. Any belief that subverts science is not faith.
Thank you for your response. This is well thought out and comports with what I see also.
My background is a career in IT. I think the applied technologies do get immediate feedback when something doesn’t work. But of course even then we can have some denial of reality at a level where the process still works but hobbles along because we misunderstand the reality of it. I’ve lived that .
For you statement on foundation level science, I think there is a problem of affirming the consequent by thinking if A then B can prove A because we have B. You would need to show that there are not other causes for B.
So what are your thoughts on the scientific consensus in the early 1900’s that the universe is infinite, with a strong basis on the belief that everything is natural?
Or the NYC zoo with a caged aborigine supported by the scientific consensus and Darwin himself placing theses humans at a lower evolutionary level.
Is my history incorrect? Or maybe a no true Scotsman fallacy defense? Or…?
Or maybe scientific consensus is not to be equated to evidence and logic?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
80
That was then, this is now. The consensus evolves. With the evidence. I don’t believe everything is natural. I know. I quantifiably <=0.1% believe that nature may be of and in God. And what has that got to do with Arrhenius and Keeling? But maybe you don’t have a problem with knowing global warming, just knowing evolution.
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