The Official Perfection KOs Creationism Thread Part Four: The Genesis of Ire!

[Eran of Arcadia]

Yes, I think that pre-Darwinian Creationism was actually scientific - they made observations and everything. I just bough Gould's collection of essays, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, and he talks a lot about them and the contributions they ended up making to biology and paleontology. The modern incarnation of Creationism is quite different and not scientific at all.

 

[Perfection]

Damnedif i'm going to go back and look, but wasn't the first use a clumsy way of saying creationism was invalid (as a) scientific theory, ie; not a scientific theory at all valid or otherwise.

Well, i intentionally choose the wording to include both cases of creationism being an invalid scientific theory and not being a scientific theory at all.

 

[brennan]

Why? (10chars)

 

[skadistic]

Creationism is a valid lemon.

 

[Urederra]

I found this pdf when I was looking for a link between HIV and the bubonic plague, I think it is an interesting read and watch (they are actually powerpoint slides) It is entitled Molecular medicine and Evolution, and they describe experiments with the HIV virus (a virus with a extremely high mutation rate) to test many detailed hypotheses about natural selection.

http://www.nslc.wustl.edu/courses/Bio4183/templeton/2005/L6.pdf

You may find the first slides a bit hard to understand. The evolutionary experiments are at the end of the document. I don't recomend skipping the first slides if you want to fully understand the experiments, though.

 

[warpus]

Yes, exactly.

But to get a little more back on topic, I would agree that since Creationism is in no way a theory, it can't be an invalid scientific theory. I would say that phrenology could be argued to be an invalid theory - it made testable claims which were shown to be false - but Creationism doesn't even do that.

A scientific theory which has been proven to be false is still a valid scientific theory - it's simply been shown to be incorrect.

 

[The Last Conformist]

Yes, I think that pre-Darwinian Creationism was actually scientific - they made observations and everything. I just bough Gould's collection of essays, Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, and he talks a lot about them and the contributions they ended up making to biology and paleontology.

I'm not sure that calling 18th-19th C natural theologians and their ilk "creationists" is entirely fair.

Be that as it may, I was refering to modern creationism. The ideas about natural history and the origins of biological diversity of, say, Cuvier, were incomplete and partly outright wrong, but they were scientific. The catch is that no modern creationist adheres to such ideas.

 

[Perfection]

Why? (10chars)

So if on odd chance someone made Cuvier-like claims, I'd just show them evidence and claim that the tests that they viewed supported thier claims is false and that they should shift thier support to a more valid thepry (namely evolution)

A scientific theory which has been proven to be false is still a valid scientific theory - it's simply been shown to be incorrect.

I'm using valid as in empirically correct. You might whine about my usage, but I'm not gonna change it because everyone else has no problems with it except you.

I'm not sure that calling 18th-19th C natural theologians and their ilk "creationists" is entirely fair.

Be that as it may, I was refering to modern creationism. The ideas about natural history and the origins of biological diversity of, say, Cuvier, were incomplete and partly outright wrong, but they were scientific. The catch is that no modern creationist adheres to such ideas.

Well, I think that is generally correct, but I don't want to make assumptions about what every CFC creationist believes.

 

[nihilistic]

I'm not so sure. I think treating Earth as moving around the CM of the Earth/Sun system seems more like a mere effort in mathematics.

This is the same kind of bullfeathers that creationists often use: claiming that currently accepted scientific theory only have roughly the same amount of evidence going for it as rudely constructed non-arguments. Have you personally done any of these "mere efforts of mathematics"? Do you know or even know of what they are?

The original geocentric theory had to compensate with Epicycles, essentially theorizing that the other planets orbits around orbits around orbits around ... orbits around the earth. Yes, that crap completely hits the fan once you consider that they have no justification of why heavenly bodies move as so, and then comes the theory of gravity. When you consider gravity it is quite obvious that the earth and other planets roughly orbit the sun. The solar system roughly orbit the black hole in the center of Milky Way, and so forth ...

For everyday living and the verses in the Bible it makes perfect sense to consider the Earth stationary, since that's the way it feels. Or do you feel like you are spinning through the heavens at 30km/s?

How do you feel 30km/s? I myself never ever felt 30km/s, though I may have seen .2 km/s. What you feel is not the speed, but the acceleration. That's why you can still fall asleep on a cruising airplane.

Attempts at "common sense" arguments without any actual thought put into them don't work.

 

[The Last Conformist]

This is the same kind of bullfeathers that creationists often use: claiming that currently accepted scientific theory only have roughly the same amount of evidence going for it as rudely constructed non-arguments. Have you personally done any of these "mere efforts of mathematics"? Do you know or even know of what they are?

The original geocentric theory had to compensate with Epicycles, essentially theorizing that the other planets orbits around orbits around orbits around ... orbits around the earth. Yes, that crap completely hits the fan once you consider that they have no justification of why heavenly bodies move as so, and then comes the theory of gravity. When you consider gravity it is quite obvious that the earth and other planets roughly orbit the sun. The solar system roughly orbit the black hole in the center of Milky Way, and so forth ...

In his "defense", I believe he's refering to the fact that using a sufficiently perverse coordinate transformation (from sensible reference frame) you can make any point stationary (ie. give any timelike world-line spatial coordinates that are constant wrt time)*. This has precious little to do with physics, Aristotelo-Ptolemaic or otherwise, so he's basically being disingenious.

* Well, it goes to hell in singularities, but what doesn't?

 

[nihilistic]

In his "defense", I believe he's refering to the fact that using a sufficiently perverse coordinate transformation (from sensible reference frame) you can make any point stationary (ie. give any timelike world-line spatial coordinates that are constant wrt time)*. This has precious little to do with physics, Aristotelo-Ptolemaic or otherwise, so he's basically being disingenious.

* Well, it goes to hell in singularities, but what doesn't?

Well, what I was really incensed about was his fake appeal to "common sense". He grabbed a random example and without thinking through it, applies it in an idiotic way to an unrelated concept as a pathetic attempt to discredit well-established scientific results. While I'm not saying that such scientific results are anything sacred, but to argue against them without any actual research is quite disrespectful. Also, casting scientists as "without common sense" via one's daydreaming is pretty disingenious too.

 

[brennan]

Not debated with Creationists before nihilistic?

 

[Souron]

Creationism is a valid lemon.

I'd say it's more of a bad apple.

 

[Stile]

Well, what I was really incensed about was his fake appeal to "common sense". He grabbed a random example and without thinking through it, applies it in an idiotic way to an unrelated concept as a pathetic attempt to discredit well-established scientific results. While I'm not saying that such scientific results are anything sacred, but to argue against them without any actual research is quite disrespectful. Also, casting scientists as "without common sense" via one's daydreaming is pretty disingenious too.

Random, without thinking, idiotic, pathetic, disrespectful, disingenuous, rude. Wow! For your next post I bet you'd need a thesaurus. You're definitely strung a little tight today.

I don't need credentials to post on this board, but I've done plenty of physics. I don't need to be a football player to comment that the Jets are going to suck this year, so I don't have to solve every problem to comment on this. I'm not trying to discredit scientists or scientific results. My point is motion is relative. Portraying the Bible as geocentrist is what I had a problem with, because it should be self-evident that someone standing in the holyland won't say "Wow, the earth has stopped rotating." Instead they'll comment that the sun has stopped in the sky, or moved backward if that was the case. And you don't need to know the sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth's tilt, rotation, and orbit, to carry about your normal stuff during the day or recognize seasons or years.

Also, since scientists don't recognize a center to the universe, why not pick the Earth?

PS: I'll be gone until next week.

 

[Cheetah]

Also, since scientists don't recognize a center to the universe, why not pick the Earth?

Because it goes against logic when looking at the motions of the heavenly bodies relative to each other. Especially when one also considers gravity and the newtonian laws.

PS: I'll be gone until next week.

See you then.

 

[brennan]

My point is motion is relative. Portraying the Bible as geocentrist is what I had a problem with, because it should be self-evident that someone standing in the holyland won't say "Wow, the earth has stopped rotating." Instead they'll comment that the sun has stopped in the sky, or moved backward if that was the case.

I think what you are missing though is that a bible literalist won't be asking what someone in the holyland would see, they'll say 'the bible said the sun stopped moving so the sun stopped moving; PERIOD'.

 

[The Last Conformist]

I don't need credentials to post on this board, but I've done plenty of physics. I don't need to be a football player to comment that the Jets are going to suck this year, so I don't have to solve every problem to comment on this. I'm not trying to discredit scientists or scientific results. My point is motion is relative.

That's no excuse for defending geocentrism. Geocentrism doesn't refer to picking your coordinate system to zero out certain values, and you know it.

Portraying the Bible as geocentrist is what I had a problem with, because it should be self-evident that someone standing in the holyland won't say "Wow, the earth has stopped rotating." Instead they'll comment that the sun has stopped in the sky, or moved backward if that was the case. And you don't need to know the sun is the center of the solar system and the Earth's tilt, rotation, and orbit, to carry about your normal stuff during the day or recognize seasons or years.

You know, if you'd just stated your this, your alleged point, instead of blathering on about geocentrism not being wrong, you'd saved yourself a whole lot of abuse.

Also, since scientists don't recognize a center to the universe, why not pick the Earth?

For the same reason you don't call a point on the perimeter of a carousel stationary.

 

[brennan]

For the same reason you don't call a point on the perimeter of a carousel stationary.

funny

 

[Cheetah]

Actually, if you stay on the carousel long enough, it may very well seem stationary.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

It would be interesting to see what the orbital path of, say, Mars, looks like on an Earth-centered coordinate system.

Probably not pretty