Because I still had two years of active duty when I received my Computer Science degree and I only needed four more classes to earn the Applied Math degree, I just went for it. However, my main strength in math was less in proofs but rather more in understanding the concepts and in problem-solving and practical applications. Needless to say, the Math Dept's Numerical Analysis classes were much more proof-oriented (ie, much more theoretical with very little attention given to implemention), so I kind of just squeaked through them. Good thing that my money degree has been computer science.
The main thing I remember of the proofs was that we used them to determine the upper bound on that method's error, the maximum amount of error that we could possible incur. I was reminded of that recently in some exchanges with Dredge, such as:
DWise1 writes:
Message 842Dredge writes:
Message 816What I'm going on about about is, scientific explanations can be wrong.
Yes, that is true. It is also very true that
religious explanations can be wrong. In fact, you know that is true because you can point to all the other religions and their explanations and denounce them all as being wrong.
The difference between science and religion is that science knows that it can get something wrong, so it also knows that it needs to test its results and detect those errors and then correct those errors. Furthermore, science and scientists are very motivated to find and eliminate errors.
What about religion? When errors creep into religion as they inevitably must, how does religion handle them? It doesn't! Religion has no protocol for testing, error-detection, nor error-correcting.
I then referred him to my unfinished page,
Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists, which also discusses how we differ in our motivation and the great differences that that motivation makes (eg, scientists want to actually learn or discover something and have a vested interest in the validity and veracity of others' research that they are about to base their own research on, whereas a creationist just wants to convince others and himself, so all he is interested in is how convincing a claim sounds even if it happens to be completely false).
Of course, Dredge has avoided those questions, but rather has continued to fault science for being subject to error while ignoring the fact that the same goes for religion which is worse off than science since it has no process nor mechanism for testing for and correcting errors. I sought to clarify that with the following (which I guess I had never had a chance to post yet):
DWise1 writes:
I have repeatedly tried to discuss this with you and you have repeatedly avoided it, namely the fundamental difference between science and religion. Science knows full well that error exists, even in each and every one of the very measurements we make, so it has worked out means to deal with that -- it simply has had to! Religion appears to be indifferent to all that, because it is based on Revelation which contains no error (or so they baldly assert!), even though that is ignoring the fact that once it gets into Man's hands Revelation can only become corrupted and degrade as error after error creeps in. Science is very strongly motivated to detect and correct error. Religion appears to be completely oblivious to the problem, in denial of the problem, and can even actively oppose any attempts at detection or correction on the pretense that such actions question God. Science has mechanisms in place to detect and correct error and it uses them both actively and
pro-actively. Religion simply ignores errors and denies that they exist.
My experience in Numerical Analysis class verifies how science tackles the problem of error head-on. My science readings repeatedly address the problems of observational and other forms of error and how to deal with them. The very first lab in Physical Science class in junior college involved taking exact measurements of the same things and using the results to illustrate observational error, which shows that it's a problem that students are made aware of from the very beginning.
In contrast, religionists refuse to acknowledge the existence of error and have no clue how much in error they are. Well, the honest ones recognize the problem, but unfortunately they are not the ones we encounter.
The fact that science knows how to deal with error and can even determine the amount of error that is present leads to the other side of the issue.
Most creationist claims and arguments involve a lot of hand-waving. They point to maybe one value (eg, the rate at which the sun loses mass due to fusion, about 4.6 million tonnes per second) and then they wave their hands and make incredible claims (eg, that the sun 5 billion years ago would have been incredibly huge and massive and would have sucked the earth). Unfortunately for them, when we actually do the math we find that their claims are false (eg, although the rate was right, the effect of those billions of years of mass loss only amounted to a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's mass and hence had extremely little effect on the ancient earth's orbit). The same thing with their claim that the ancient earth would have been spinning impossibly fast -- sometimes they give a rate (which is wrong and greatly inflated) and sometimes not, but with rare exceptions they never work out just how fast the ancient earth would have been spinning, but rather their versions of the claim consist almost entirely of hand-waving.
{ NOTE:
Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim,
Earth's Rotation is Slowing }
More to the point, one way in which they will "disprove" radiometric dating is by proposing all manner of things such as massive neutrino bombardment as causing decay rates to change thus causing dating errors. Yet again, they do a lot of hand-waving and show no indication that any actual calculations had actually been performed to see just how much effect their proposed rate-changers would have. They just simply assert the results that they desire.
Another form this takes can be found in recent articles at Answers in Genesis which admit that certain classic bogus creationists claims are indeed bogus (eg, the "shrinking sun", Niagara Falls), but then they try to grasp at straws by pointing to a slim sliver of doubt which they take to mean that their YEC theology could still be true after all. We often see a variation of that from creationists who take any amount of uncertainty or of honest ignorance as leaving a gap for their god, kind of a variation of the "God of the Gaps".
In responding to claims of there being enough error in science to leave room for their claims, one approach we could take might be to calculate how great the error they claim would have to be, which is where that error calculation from class comes in. Not trusting my memory over 36 years, I consulted Wikipedia (
https://en.wikipedia.org/...nge_and_difference#Percent_error) for the formula (and I did remember it correctly after all):
% error = 100 × abs(experimental-value - theoretical_value) / abs(theoretical_value)
where:
theoretical_value = the expected value
experimental-value = the measured value
For example, let's assume the expected value to be 100 million years, but the dating method gives us a measured value of 110 million years:
% error = 100 × abs(110,000,000 - 100,000,000) / abs (100,000,000)
= 100 × abs( 10,000,000 ) / abs (100,000,000)
= 100 × 10,000,000 / 100,000,000
= 100 × 0.1
= 10 %
10 million years is a lot of time to be off by, but compared to the actual age it's not really too unreasonable.
Now let's assume the creationist case where the expected value is 10,000 years, but the dating method gives us a measured value of 100 million years:
% error = 100 × abs(100,000,000 - 10,000) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × abs( 99,990,000 ) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × 99,990,000 / 10,000
= 100 × 9999
= 999,900 %
Now that is a helluva lot of error!
Or more to the point of the age of the earth, let's calculate the amount of error it would take to measure a 10,000 year old earth as being 4.5 billion years old:
% error = 100 × abs(4,500,000,000 - 10,000) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × abs( 4,499,990,000 ) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × 4,499,990,000 / 10,000
= 100 × 449,999
= 44,999,900 %
Nearly 45 million percent error? Absolutely ridiculous! Obviously it is the assumption of a 10,000 year old earth that's wrong.
From what I've read over the decades, most creationists schemes for things that might possibly change decay rates would have the effect of adding less than 1% error. I remember a list of isotope half-lives accompanied by their margins of error and that those margins of error ranged from about 2% to about 5%.
Compare that 44,999,900% error that creationists actually need with the less than 1% error that their claims would actually buy them. Borrowing from the camel-and-needle metaphor, they are trying to open a millimeter wide crack of lack of total certainty in order to slip an adult blue whale through it. Ain't going to work.
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