SCIENCE: -- "observational science" vs "historical science" vs ... science.

I will entirely agree that there is an arbitrary line between proven and unproven (beyond a reasonable doubt). That is part of the art of science, and the human aspect of science. A consensus is a recognition that a particular theory has very compelling evidence behind it, and that the theory should garner respect and attention. The consensus theory sets the bar that challengers must meet. I find that interesting, given that your position departs from my own. In my experience, there are theories that undergird our collection of facts. A CCD camera that measures the luminosity of a type Ia supernova does so on the basis of many different theories, and your acceptance of the data is based on the provisional acceptance that the camera and methodology will accurately measure luminosity.Or I could be failing to understand your position and have everything wrong.

I read Faith's blog post, and her update. I found it kind of amusing that she spent so much time trying to argue that I was wrong, and then proved me right in her update.My post that she commented on in post 459 of this thread stated . . .

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Of course, you don't observe the hypothesis. You test the hypothesis. Nowhere in the scientific method is there an expiration date on valid observations. A 100 million year old fossil is as valid a piece of evidence as a 1 hour old ELISA plate. Both are repeatable observations, and both can be used to test hypotheses.

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I was stressing that the scientific method requires observations to be repeatable, not the hypothesis you are trying to test. In this context, the explanation for what happened in the past is the hypothesis. What mistake did Faith make in her update? The exact mistake I told her she was making.The Fantasy of Evolution: What I mean by the Unwitnessed Past

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I didn't say you can't do science on the unwitnessed past, all I said was that you can't be sure of your results with one-time unwitnessed past events the way you can with replicable testable phenomena and that all you have in such a case is interpretations and hypotheses, more or less plausibility thereof.

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I guess Faith forgot that fossils are replicable and testable phenomena, as are the genomes of living species, the geographic distribution of species, and all of the evidence we have presented her. She once again makes the mistake of requiring the hypothesis to be repeatable which the scientific method never requires.

Faith has a massive case of psychological projection. For example:

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In this case, the evidence claimed for events in the distant past is all heavily biased, that is, it's bound to interpretations already determined by your theory.

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Faith is talking about herself. She starts with the conclusion that Noah's Ark was really witnessed and that it has to be true. All evidence is filtered through this bias.In order to create a semblence of equality, she tries to make it look as if everyone else is doing the same. However, all she can ever do is make the accusation and never backs it up with examples of how evidence has been misinterpretted.

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The Dover cliffs didn't form where they are either, but just as the entire British Isles are layered like so much of the rest of the planet, that chalk was layered there along with all the rest of them, it didn't form in place, as none of the layers did, which were all laid down one on top of another and then after they were all in place (which took hundreds of millions of years according to standard theory, but only a year or so on Flood theory) the whole stack was upended by tectonic force, as indicated on those diagrams I posted over there.

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She never explains how modern geologists arrived at the interpretation of millions of years, nor did she explain how that interpretation is biased. She just makes the accusation that science is wrong, and the attaches "it makes obvious sense" to her unsupported claims.

What Faith needs to do is separate observations from evidence, and then show how each relates to the hypothesis AND the null hypothesis. Evidence is a set of observations that satisfies the hypothesis and disproves the null hypothesis.One of Faith's greatest weaknesses has always been her lack of a null hypothesis which means that she is unable to evidence her claims. In order to have evidence, there need to be potential observations that would be inconsistent with her hypothesis. As she has shown, she will claim that any and all geologic observations are consistent with a flood, no matter what. She can not describe the features a geologic formation would need to have in order to satisfy the null hypothesis.