Interpretation of the data is one thing. But equally important, and the point Creationist fail spectacularly at, is testing your interpretation. If you are just interpreting data, you're not doing science.
what you think of Kent Hovind?
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Interpretation of the data is one thing. But equally important, and the point Creationist fail spectacularly at, is testing your interpretation. If you are just interpreting data, you're not doing science.
timtofly
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Then it would seem that trying to prove the Bible wrong or right would be futile. How can you test something that happened over 2000 years ago? I doubt that I will get a straight answer to the question why do humans feel the need to use science to prove or even rule out what the Bible says?
I am trying to get my head wrapped around the term: God of the gaps, because I think that is the spin that humans who use science have come up with to wean people away from what the Bible has to say. I really have no clue what that term even means. The only thing that I ever associated it with is that some people used it to represent a gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. I don't think that is how people use it though. I could never see a gap there, even to this day.
However, recently in the latest cosmos show and the book on physics, I may be getting a better grasp on what they mean by the term. If people just use God as an excuse, IMO, it would make some sense.
OK. After many 'adaptations' in two different directions, we end up with 2 species from a common ancestor. Adaptations is not the right word, but no worries.
Citation, please? By '"jumps" that have not been found yet', what do you actually mean? That there are gaps in the fossil record from the suggested evolutionary path? That we think it went A (ancient ancestor) ---> D --> E --> F (modern animal), but we don't know exactly how it jumped from A to D? Problem with that logic, say we find a fossil of C, that is an intermediary between A & D. Now we've got two jumps to explain, the one from A to C, and also the one from C to D.
There is lots of evidence of various local floods happening.
My hypothesis is that if I toss this coin, it will always show heads. I run one test, I toss the coin, it comes up heads. Hypothesis proven?
What if you tell me you've tested, and coins always come up heads? Do I just accept your test and agree with you, or should I say 'that's interesting, I'm going to run the same test you did, and see what results I get'?
Having theological debates on the meanings of stories is a big tangent to the rest of this thread, so I'll simply say that to me, the main message of that story is that it's better to live in ignorance, to take the authority figures at their word, than it is to question the authority figures, be curious, seek out knowledge. And that I can definitely see why the writers of the story might think that's a good idea. Anything beyond that is for a different thread.
It absolutely would prove things wrong. If a human gave birth to a snake, evolution as we know it is completely wrong. If there are fossilised rabbits discovered in the pre-cambrian, geology as we know it is completely wrong.
Again, can I have an example of what you mean by this 'observable window'? There are lots of ideas that sound promising, but turn out to be wrong. There are lots of ideas that sound promising, that have some stuff right, but a lot of specifics wrong, and get refined and more accurate. I do not know of ideas that sound promising, but do end up on the outside of the "observable window". Can you list a couple of those ideas?
If I know more about the ancestry of an animal, more about how it relates to other animals, surely that's going to help me in caring for it, providing a habitat for it, treating it for disease, etc? Even if it doesn't, if this idea of kinds is science, then me, as an aspiring creation scientist, should be able to learn how it works, yes? How do I know which stuff from 200 years ago is now outdated?
I don't know. My knowledge of biology isn't deep enough. But off the top of my head, I doubt we'll ever be able to prove exactly how life got started. I doubt we'll ever be able to prove exactly how many times life got started, whether it was once, or more than once. I guarantee we'll never be able to construct a complete family tree, that my grandfather was Bert, and his grandfather was Fred, and his grandfather was ... and his grandfather was the first eukaryote. But that's not something wrong about what we do know, that's an unknown part of the wider picture that we do know.
It is absolutely a misunderstanding. You are taking a misunderstood version of biology, and based on that misunderstanding, explaining why biology doesn't make sense. Because information can't be added. Because a single celled organism can't contain the information for so many different descendants. And so on.
What Uppi said. Start with a mindset that you DON'T KNOW if the bible is factual. Gather evidence. Does the evidence agree with what the bible says? OK, that's circumstantial evidence that the bible is right. Gather more evidence. repeat.
Or, does the evidence contradict the bible? OK, that's evidence that the bible is wrong. Gather more evidence. Repeat.
All of the big scientific stuff you can extrrapolate from the bible, e.g. that there was a global flood, the age of the earh, that humans have been around as long as all the other animals, around pretty much as long as the earth itself, every single one of those has turned out to be wrong. How many more tests do we need to run before we can agree the bible is not factual?
By looking at the evidence left behind.
I think it's mostly because there are so many people intent on seeing the bible as fact, and therefore trying to teach others to accept the bible as fact. Because so many people want the bible to be relevant, want to insist that it is TRUE, and not a bunch of stories. I think you'll find most people doing experiments couldn't care less what the bible has to say about the results, because what the bible says is simply irrelevant to the experiment.
So type the phrase into google. Seriously. If you don't know stuff, then be curious, be inquisitive, go and find out stuff. Despite what that genesis story says, curiosity is awesome, a thirst for knowledge is a positive trait. It got mentioned earlier in the thread. Learning to do it will make more difference than anything else to your understanding of things. If you are interested in biology, then go and learn some. Read up on it. Discover stuff for yourself. Look at evidence yourself. You do that, you learn how to learn, and you'll start finding out all sorts of amazing stuff just because something has piqued your interest.
I'm going to type these paragraphs, and then type 'god of the gaps' into google and see what I get.
God of the gaps basically means that if we don't know stuff, we attribute it to god/s. Few thousand years ago, there was a heap of stuff we didn't know. Thunder & lightning? Angry god hurling thunderbolts. How life got started? (A) god breathed life into it/gave birth to it/masturbated and made the earth fertile/etc. Wide range of animals? That's god getting creative. Lunar eclipse? Sign from god. Rainbows? God creating pretty stuff for our pleasure. Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, tides? All done by god(s). Magnetism, electric currents? God. And so on and so on. When there is/was a gap in our understanding, the answer is/was god.
But, as we studied more, we discovered that many of the answers weren't god. Thunder & lightning, rainbows, lunar eclipses, electricity, wide range of animals? All now can be explained in great detail, and happen god-free. Literally every single time we've studied a phenomenon and found out more about how it works, the answer has turned out to be 'not god'. So if all the gaps in our understanding previously attributed to god have turned out to be not god, then why would/should we attribute all the current gaps in our understanding to god?
And now I'm off to google...
The very first thing google suggests is the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps which does a quite reasonable job of explaining it. If you don't know what something means, if you want to get a basic knowledge of a concept, look it up. Learn how to learn. Be curious.
timtofly
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Having read your replies, I get this vibe that creationist have developed a version of science separate from the science every one else uses.
I have read three of Dawkins books, and unfortunately for me, I do not have time to go back and cite where I read what gave me the idea that he said there are jumps.
I am presenting to you my thoughts. If this is some kind of debate where we are proving what we know, then I can not give you such proof. Just because I say I do not know something, does not mean I am too lazy to figure it out. It just means that it is not a high priority for me.
So, I am not going to debate the points, but just point out what I think, and maybe how I got to the point of my thoughts. It was never my intent to prove the Bible is 100% scientifically accurate. Can you convince me that science is going to get to a place where it is dogma and nothing will ever come up that revolutionizes the thinking that already exist? On one hand you want me to be curious and learn, while at the same time point out that science has settled the fact that the Bible is wrong.
I have read three of Dawkins books, and unfortunately for me, I do not have time to go back and cite where I read what gave me the idea that he said there are jumps.
I am presenting to you my thoughts. If this is some kind of debate where we are proving what we know, then I can not give you such proof. Just because I say I do not know something, does not mean I am too lazy to figure it out. It just means that it is not a high priority for me.
So, I am not going to debate the points, but just point out what I think, and maybe how I got to the point of my thoughts. It was never my intent to prove the Bible is 100% scientifically accurate. Can you convince me that science is going to get to a place where it is dogma and nothing will ever come up that revolutionizes the thinking that already exist? On one hand you want me to be curious and learn, while at the same time point out that science has settled the fact that the Bible is wrong.
That's pretty accurate, yeah.
Fair enough. Which three? I thought The Blind Watchmaker was excellent, I think that was the first book of his that I read. God Delusion was an interesting read, but gets a bit ranty in places. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I can do a bit of that myself.
Is what you mean by 'jumps' similar to what I mentioned?
OK. But if you're interested enough to take the time to post about it, to take the time to discuss the topic in a thread like this, to take the time to read at least 3 books on the topic, I assume you will also be interested enough to take the time to research some of it yourself.
If you are interested enough to read more, I strongly recommend The Science of Discworld series. Especially the first one, and especially if you've ever read any of the discworld novels.
Fair enough. But what do you do if the method you used to get to that point is flawed? If the evidence you're basing your viewpoint on is incomplete or even wrong?
Not sure what you mean with that second sentence.
Yep. What's incompatible about those two things?
Though I wouldn't really phrase it as 'the bible is wrong', but instead say that 'the bible isn't factual.' Most of it is story. Saying 'the bible is wrong' is like saying 'stories about the titanomachy are wrong', or 'Animal Farm is wrong'. But if you take the bible as fact, not story, then it says that this planet is quite young. It says there was a global flood. It says humans have been around for almost as long as the planet has, and for just as long as other life has. It says humans are not related to other animals. It says that birds are not related to mammals, mammals are not related to fish, etc, etc. That all these different creatures, as well as humans, were created independently. All of those things, science has absolutely settled that they are wrong. You can indirectly examine evidence yourself, and settle the fact that those hypotheses are wrong, that animals are related to humans & each other, that humans are a relatively recent arrival on the planet, that there was never a global flood, and so on.
Harv
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The discussion moved quickly and I am not always able to keep up. My weekly schedule tends to be pretty packed and posting takes time and thought. So if I seem to jump in and fade out, I am sorry.
This statement is puzzling because there is a mismatch between my understanding of the sentence, and the maturity level of the discussion.
This. Exactly. The premise in their textbooks is the world is no more than 6000 years old, not billions and billions of years old. I still want to chase down the citations when I have time one day.
Here is a quick analogy. Let's say I show you a shape and challenge you to draw that pattern without lifting your pencil. So a 'jump' would be when you have to lift your pencil to finish drawing the shape. Similarly, we are talking about a 'jump' in logic, where the logic does not a continuous pattern that can be followed.
This jump would be how did we get from a monkey to a human?
I think you are saying interpreting the first 11 chapters of Genesis literally as a historical narrative leads to issues.
Here: Read the first nine verses of Genesis Chapter 11. I went ahead and grabbed it.
What does this suggest?
This statement is puzzling because there is a mismatch between my understanding of the sentence, and the maturity level of the discussion.
This. Exactly. The premise in their textbooks is the world is no more than 6000 years old, not billions and billions of years old. I still want to chase down the citations when I have time one day.
Here is a quick analogy. Let's say I show you a shape and challenge you to draw that pattern without lifting your pencil. So a 'jump' would be when you have to lift your pencil to finish drawing the shape. Similarly, we are talking about a 'jump' in logic, where the logic does not a continuous pattern that can be followed.
This jump would be how did we get from a monkey to a human?
I think you are saying interpreting the first 11 chapters of Genesis literally as a historical narrative leads to issues.
Here: Read the first nine verses of Genesis Chapter 11. I went ahead and grabbed it.
What does this suggest?
I hope you're not trying to suggest I'm being mature. If I am, it's probably only a temporary aberration.
To remove any puzzlement, I'm not christian (despite my parents' best efforts), not particularly young, and have no desire to be either a vet or zoologist (though snakes are definitely interesting). That was more of a hypothetical, because I really do want to know how the creationists suggest an aspiring creation scientist can actually go about learning stuff. I really do want to know how kinds are supposed to work, how to classify newly discovered animals, or how to classify all the non-obvious animals running around here in Australia.
I'd say axiom, not premise. They KNOW that the earth is that age, and therefore all evidence found must agree with that axiom. If your conclusion is that the earth is older, then your evidence must be flawed.
Yeah, that's my understanding of it, too. And finding an intermediary would then leave us with two jumps to explain, one from monkey to intermediary, one from intermediary to human. I *think* those are the jumps that Timtofly means, but I'm not certain.
Yep, basically. More than just those chapters, too, I think.
To me, it suggests more of the same message I mentioned earlier, that too much knowledge is bad, that you should be content with what you're given, that too much ambition will result in god smacking you down. Probably also gives a good reason to not play nice with the foreigners who don't speak your language, because god prefers you not to communicate with them. So once people are living in a larger, more organised society, it's a story that can be pointed at both as reason to be obeying those in charge, and also that can be pointed at for whipping up some jingoistic fervour when needed.
Also raises the question, since the land was called Shinar *before* the split, of which, if any, of the post-split groups is using the true, original language that nobody else can now understand. I assume that the ones writing the story would view themselves as using the original language, and all the other, dispersed groups as now using an inferior new language, therefore making them an inferior tribe.
Or, if you take it as a factual account, it suggests that all humans alive today are direct descendants of those who lived in Mesopotamia, before being scattered and having their language changed. Which is a hypothesis that can be tested. Which we can find evidence for or against.
The Bible makes certain claims that we can try and find evidence for. Harv gave a good example. To my reading of that passage, we should expect to find linguistic uniformity across cultures at about 3500 years ago. Or, at most, 6000.
So here's a test:
Let's look at some ancient languages and see if we can tell how closely related . This is a routine linguistic task, there's a wide body of comparative studies and historical documentation underpinning it.
An early written language in the Fertile Crescent should have a certain degree of relatedness to an early written language far-away, say, China. So what do we find?
We have archaeological evidence from Sumeria and China that show different languages being spoken. Seemingly deeply-unrelated languages. Like, so unrelated that if they shared a common proto-language then it must have been before the Genesis creation. It's true that dating linguistic splits is not as accurate as radiocarbon dating, but it's still a useful tool for bracketing possible time frames.
The Bible told a story, we deduced a hypothesis from that story, and it turns out not to be consistent with the evidence.
So in this case, as with many (but not all!) others, the Bible is wrong.
And for those radicals who insist on a literal interpretation of the Bible, a single inconsistent observation *should* be fatal. But they usually find a way to explain away the conflict. For the impossibility of a young earth they claim that Noah's Flood (yes, I'm blaming him) was so violent that even the nuclei of atoms were disrupted in ways inconsistent with quantum mechanics. Because gad can do anything.
The 'jumps' are probably referring to punctuated equilibrium.
Harv
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A Linguistic Big Bang?
A week ago, I stumbled on a site (I think it was called bigmyth) and you could point to a culture on a world map and it would give you a cartoon story about their creation myth. I might try to link it here - or it might be interesting enough start a thread in OT and get feeback from a broader range of people.
EDIT: Added the link.
timtofly
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God Delusion, Ancestor's Tale, and Greatest Show.
That would be an example of a "jump".
So what we are referring to is historical science that is separate from history and science? Referring to the past is history. How things work is science. When science settles on an idea, it is considered a fact and that is just another way of saying dogma.
I do not see how humans rely on history to the point they cannot move forward in gaining knowledge. I don't think all Creationist can be accused of that, and neither would all scientist be free from doing so.
@ Peter
IMO it is futile. It will not change anything. Humans will keep finding ways to distance themselves from God. Humans did not accept God's word before science, having science prove there is a God is not going to change that.
You bring up the concept of time even when it comes to languages. I guess we will have to agree that time changes everything.
Ancestor's Tale is one of my favorite books ever. It's awesome. Every time I read it I learn something new. My copy is now pretty brow-beaten, as it's a cheap paper-back. I consider buying it in hardcover, but no way am I willing to hold a tome like that in bed! Too unwieldy. I'll just have to buy another paperback.
There's no such thing as 'historical science' that's separate from any other 'science'. Science is a method, and it can be applied in various degrees to any inquiry. According to the creationist's artificial dichotomy, even a court investigation into a crime would be considered 'historical science', since by definition the people investigating were't there at the moment of the event. It's a really stupid idea that's been inserted into the creation/science dialogue, and it's further evidence that 'creation scientists' aren't at all willing to engage in honest debate. It's nothing more than obfuscation.
Well, clearly I disagree. It's not at all futile, and I'd think that regarding claims made in one of the most important books ever distributed everyone would have an interest in knowing whether or not its claims are true. Especially for the people who value it the most: Christians.
Seriously, I just don't understand the unwillingness of Christians to examine their founding document with all the best tools available. I think this ties into what Sanabas mentioned above - curiosity isn't valued in an autocratic system, and the people that were sculpting the messages in the bible had/have a vested interest in perpetuating the existing power structure. Not to get too political, but if people question the document and find it wanting, then naturally they'll question the other claims made by the ruling authorities. That's just human nature.
But I disagree with you that it's futile. If nobody had ever bothered to look into these questions, assuming it's futile, then we wouldn't know as much as we do now. And I think it's safe to say that humanity would be far poorer and suffering a lot more (on average) than we are. So questioning everything is good in my estimation.
I agree and would go even further: All science is 'historical science'. When analyzing data, you are always figuring something out about what happened in the past. That might have been a second ago, a day ago or billions of years ago, but there is no fundamental difference.
In fact, there is a lot of data, which is taken automatically. Which means, that nobody is actually there to take it. So the scientist tasked with analyzing it, only has the recorded evidence. Whether that is from yesterday or left over from the Big Bang is not conceptually different in any way.
Thanks. Sowhat do you think of the idea that if we find a fossil that fits somewhere in the middle of that jump, we've now two new jumps to explain? Do we have a better understanding, because of a new fossil that gives us a more refined view, or do we have a worse understanding, because now we have more jumps to explain?
Not separate from science at all. Science is not just 'how things work' or 'how things worked in the past'. It is a way to test your ideas about how things work or worked, it is a way to improve your understanding of stuff, etc. There's a benefit to science of being wrong, because in order to know you're wrong, you have to find evidence that gives you a better understanding of what's actually right.
NO! I can't say that strongly enough.
Fact does not equal dogma. Much of what science has to say isn't considered fact, anyway. It's just our best guess based on the evidence, and all we can say is we're probably right.
But the really, really important bit: It's not considered a fact because the scientific authority figures say so. It's considered a fact because that's what the evidence & experiments tell us.
Anybody who doubts it's a fact is able to check themselves, by repeating the experiment, by examining the evidence. It can make predictions. If the predictions turn out to be wrong, then our 'fact' isn't completely correct, and needs some refining, too. e.g. We can predict when Halley's comet will next be visible, we can predict when the next lunar & solar eclipses will be. If we reach that day and there's not an eclipse, then the fact we used to predict it isn't right. That's not dogma.
I may be wrong, but you seem to have a view that religion = religious authority figures (including the bible) telling us 'facts' that relate to god, creation, etc. science = scientific authority figures telling us 'facts' about how things work. history = historical authority figures telling us 'facts' about what happened in history, e.g. a biography of Julius Ceasar. That what separates them is simply the topic they're telling us 'facts' about. Is that close to the truth at all?
I'd call it science. Taking a hypothesis put forward by a 3500 year old document and testing it to see if it's accurate is fundamentally no different to taking a hypothesis put forward by a 35 year old person and testing it to see if it's accurate.
Why is deciding that the bible isn't factual discrediting it?
classical_hero
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You mean like Planetary Magnetism, how a Creationist Scientist accurately got the magnetism of Uranus whereas evolutionary models were massively out. http://www.icr.org/article/beyond-neptune-voyager-ii-supports-creation/
A creationist predicted that Uranus would have a strong planetary magnetism compared to the low magnetism predicted. That is a big whoops.
http://creation.com/creation-in-the-physics-lab-creation-magazine-russell-humphreys
There's no 'evolutionary model' of Uranus formation. You must mean 'classical models of planetary formation'. Yeah, a bunch of those old ones are getting discarded these days. The new planets being found around other stars have been forcing some rethinking. This 'Creationist' model seems not to have taken off with all this new data, either. Stopped clock is right twice a day?
Harv
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Point of clarification, the number should be 3.0 x 10^24 A m². Unfortunately copy and paste does not work in all cases, and this brings up another question:
What is the best way to express scientific notation of numbers on this forum?
3.0 x 10^24
3.0E24
Anyway, welcome back!
Stopped clocks are better than creationists at being right: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/magfields.html
Selected highlights:
So, the 'creation scientist' coming up with a successful, predictive model? Crap.
That same creationist's model of how the earth's magnetic field works? Utter crap that relies on ignoring most of the evidence, cherry-picking the bits that seem to support his idea, and calling that proof.
You wouldn't pass a high-school science assignment doing that.
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