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Author Topic:   Equating science with faith
Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 242 of 326 (462086)
03-30-2008 10:56 AM
Reply to: Message 237 by Granny Magda
03-30-2008 9:15 AM


Re: Uniformitarianism
Hello Granny Magda -
some people use those "assumptions" to find oil.
Do they use age assumptions or just particular layers of sedimentary rock based on particular properties that may not be the age they think they are?
Consider this; if the radioactive mood swings that you appear to be proposing are real, how could any nuclear reactor be safe?
I wouldn't call it mood swings really, I'd call it an event in the past that was associated with a rate that no longer applies. Perhaps when the planet was created/evolved there could be something there that could have caused it. Just because I can do something fast now, doesn't mean I always will be able to. Perhaps everything is running down like with entropy and a slowly approaching heat death and decay rates might slow more in time though possibly barely perceptible now.I don't imagine imminent danger at all just that some things change and we can't always extrapolate and state as fact what we can't know. There's a certain amount of faith involved in some forms of extrapolation that may be inappropriate.Perhaps we have a hyperbolic graph not a straight line one even if all we see is a straight one now.
These suppositions are based on other techniques that show that the earth may in actual fact be pretty young and so we need some kind of explanation for why the old age contradicting dates give the results they do.The evidence available out there is not consistent with regards to the age of the earth.
since changes in decay rates are only considered important by creationists because they are aimed at explaining away all the evidence the contradicts an old Earth),
I think you mean a young earth there and I take your point but do you understand mine? Techniques that give young ages are plentiful and yes, they are contradicted by radiometric aging techniques but that doesn't mean we need to throw away all the aging techniques that point to a young earth. If it's young we must try to fathom the contradiction on the basis of all the evidence and just as we try to give a possible cause for all the old age dates, evolutionists who prefer them due to their faith in an old earth (due to its necessity for evolution from a common ancestor to have occurred) need to try to explain why other techniques point to a young earth - otherwise their faith that radiometric dating is the only reliable indicator is not based on the whole picture and that would be a faith-based decision.
Ok big storm coming -got to shut down.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 237 by Granny Magda, posted 03-30-2008 9:15 AM Granny Magda has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 244 by Admin, posted 03-30-2008 11:47 AM Beretta has not replied

Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 245 of 326 (462192)
04-01-2008 10:29 AM
Reply to: Message 243 by Percy
03-30-2008 11:43 AM


Faith in Science
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?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 243 by Percy, posted 03-30-2008 11:43 AM Percy has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 246 by Admin, posted 04-01-2008 11:04 AM Beretta has not replied
 Message 247 by Rahvin, posted 04-01-2008 11:58 AM Beretta has not replied

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