Hi Percy,
We generally restrict this type of general charge of some type of malfeasance or fraud to threads designated specifically for that purpose.
Actually I'm not talking about fraud, I'm talking about faith in a worldview that requires that the age of the earth can be measured in billions of years causing people to lean on radiometric dating because it does give long ages - though based on many assumptions that cannot be proven.Throwing out dates that don't fit I attribute to faith in an old earth and the need to remain in an acceptable range and explain away, or throw away, those dates that did not fit due to a belief that something must be wrong with them -the circular reasoning way of thinking.
Beretta writes:
You have evidence that radiometric dating works, I have evidence that you shouldn't trust those dates.
Precisely. Evidence, not faith.
Yes evidence but to the exclusion of other evidence diametrically opposed to it.There's the faith issue again.
I don't think the argument that geologists and physicists were influenced by biologists to falsely produce data supporting an ancient earth has anything to do with the topic.
Personally I believe it belongs in this thread and again, I think that everyone who does science is to a certain extent influenced by a worldview that says lots of time was needed and geologists came up with suitable uniformatarian dates for sedimentary rock strata well before radiometric data helped to confirm the bias - while at the same time ignoring those dating techniques that make macro-evolution look impossible.
Beretta writes:
No, its a worldview problem. If you are brainwashed into long ages and evolution...
And if you are brainwashed into short ages and creation...
Well that's exactly the problem since it is faith all around to a certain extent but there is also a lot of contradictory evidence all around and that is what creationists are trying to address. Intelligent design may not focus on the age issues, they are divided about that as there are a lot that seem to accept an old earth.
Intelligent design is looking more at other aspects of science where purely material causes do not seem adequate to explain life.According to the evidence, materialists believe in gradual evolution and according to the contradictory evidence, intelligent design supporters believe that there has to have been an intelligence involved in the information that is in every living thing that cannot be based on physical, material causes alone.
Beretta writes:
Well Intelligent Design is doing that - using scientific arguments for design.
To the extent that that's true then I'm glad to hear it. But notice that inherent in your claim is the assumption that science is based upon evidence, not faith.
To a certain extent yes and to a certain extent a philisophical bias plays a part - faith in a worldview devoted to material explanations for all things and a reluctance for anything else outside of that to be included in the argument.There is a tendency to only allow for that evidence that supports the evolutionary worldview to be acceptable to 'science'.
To say that God or a supernatural intelligence can't be allowed
to have played a part in the production of life is to ignore the information problem of the genetic code.Intelligent design proponents are trying to propose a way of explaining that information that is not part of the material medium carrying it.Surely if God or an outside intelligence did play a part in the production of life, then 'science' has been wrongly defined and will then never lead to the truth of what actually happened in the past.
The goal is to have discussions that actually get somewhere rather than becoming mired in a confusing tangle of off-topic side-discussions and personal recriminations
None of this is personal but all of it is relevant as far as I can see. It's a discussion of how faith may play as much a part in 'science' as presently defined as any religious worldview that looks to evidence to support it.I think people are just looking for the truth and not everyone finds macro-evolution and material causes sufficient to explain what we can see.
What about the brain? Intelligence? Our ability to rationalize and understand? Could they have possibly arisen through purely natural causes? Are our brains just a chance accumulation of random mutations? Our eyes? How do they convert light energy into something that we can understand with our brains? Our ears -how do they convert waves of compressions and rarefactions into something that our brains can convert into information? We understand the physical pathways but not how chance mutations could have made our brains capable of processing the information.It takes a lot of faith to believe that material processes could have brought all this about,don't you think?