Is Evolutionist Disparagement of Creationism Justified?

Although you choose to praise this paragraph it isn't worthy of praise.

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Such as the enormous piles of layered sediments found all over the world? Such as the prodigious quantities of fossils demonstrating sudden massive death by burial or at least the burial of massive numbers of corpses that had died by drowning? Such as the many beds of dinosaurs and other creatures which demonstrate no normal way dinosaurs would die and be buried, in bunches like that, but certainly are consistent with their having been washed there by torrents of water? Such as the deep canyons at the bottom of the oceans perhaps, or the volcanoes which were released after the release of the"fountains of the deep" opened up channels to the molten areas of the earth? How would geologists recognize such evidence given the presuppositions they take with them on their exploratory treks?

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Can Faith back up the claims mentioned here ? Can she show that the "massive piles" really are best explained by flood ? We've already seen here that she is unfamiliar with the evidence and even tries to deny the existence of some inconvenient evidence (erosion between strata). Does Faith really know much about ANY of the items here or is she simply jumping to conclusions ? I think that the answer is pretty easy to work out. I'd be delighted to be proved wrong but on the current performance it doesn't seem likely.[Added]
In fact we've already seen in another thread that Faith CAN'T back up the claims. When challenged she resorts to bluster and bluff and praises hereself for "fine reasoning". (here If her reasoning was really that good then why is she unable to present ANY to back up the claims in the quoted paragraph ? Why do we see an outburst of rage instead ?This message has been edited by PaulK, 03-22-2005 03:16 AM

I think you've only got half the problem. If creationists were honest and admitted that they beleived on faith despite the empirical evidence then there would be no scientific debate, nothing to say on the scientiifc fora. But the problem is that creationists cannot or will not accept that the evidence really is against them.Worse, the arrogance and pride displayed by creationists is itself highly inflammatory. Especially when it leads - as it too often does - to groundless attacks on opponents.Too many creationists are their own worst enemies and their biggest disadvantage is their own attitude. But since they react with anger and rejection to any criticism - no matter how justified - how can they hope to even recognise their problem ?

Well I don't think that evolutionists in general ARE as bad as the creationists on this particular point. Contracycle is pretty bad but mainly on political issues. I'd be hard put to find another evolutionist as bad as Faith or Buzsaw or Mike the Wiz at his worst.As I remember Borger the main difference was that he knew a lot more than the average creationist and was able to take scientific argument that bit further. But IIRC he still ended up much the same way - which is why he's no longer here.Behe's been cagey enough on his position that I don't think that he would argue at all. I don't even know if he is a creatist strictly speaking.If there's a creationist who might be able to manage an honest and rational discussion it would be Kurt Wise, I think.

What I know of Kurt Wise is that he does have a good relevant education - studying under Gould. (So much for creationist claims of discrimination). He is also on record as admitting that the scientific evidence is against a Young Earth (although he himself is a YEC).So I think that he could do a better than Peter Borger, but I don't know if he would be a good debator. On the other hand from what I saw of "Socrates" on TheologyWeb some "big name" creationists would do even worse than Faith's current performance.But surely the real problem at hand is not what to do about hypothetical creationists who are capable of decent discussion, but what to do with the creationists we have.

I've just gone back and looked over a few Borger posts.Turns out that while he may have made a reasonable showing in some posts in others he was dismal to the point of stupidity. When somebody is reduced to claiming that it is "evo-logic" to suggest that the author of a book is a reasonable authoirty on its contents then they have abandoned rationality.

My own impression is very much at odds with yours. I beleive that the creationists ARE cut more slack than others, in all areas.

Now I remember. Of course the biggest problem was that he didn't even HAVE a "GUToB". While he may have been less unreasonable than some - at least for a while - he still ended up making grandiose claims which he could not back up.

Well it seems that you are talking about something rather different.My point is that creationists ARE cut a lot of slack in terms of the forum rules and guidelines. And they still whine about "unfair treatment".The "pile-on" effect is due to the fact that creationists represent the minority side on the main subject of the forum and that their arguments are often easy to rebut. The inflammatory attitude often displayed by creationists only encourages the effect.

Well the very fact that it IS outside of the main debate may mean fewer people taking part or consider it important enough to answer. All I can say is that I personally have not frequently abandoned debates nor have I seen others on the evolution side do so.And I can say that a good part of the reason that Buz got slammed so heavily for running out on debates is that he foolishly started a thread denying that he did it.

Creationsts are very much into an "apologetic" mode of thinking where they defend a view they've already adopted (usually without adequate thought or reasoning). One of the things they cannot understand is the importance of a coherent picture - they'll contradict themselves quite happily without noticing it. The point is not to get at the truth the point is to claim that they have the truth, no matter what.And again they handicap themselves by doing that - they lock themselves into indefensible views and refuse to budge. Usually they'll run away rather than admit that they don't have a leg to stand on (and usually they'll even refuse to admit that they ran away, utterly defeated).

Well if there is to be a chance of a fair discussion you need to be prepared to back up you claims. When you meet such requests with anger and accusatiosn of "harrassment" you make it all to obvious that you do not have a rational argument - just ill-founded guesses.If you are going to ask us to be more tentative in our views then you are going to have to do the same - in fact more so since you really know very little about the subject (not a jab - *I* know very little, but I know a bit more than you and I also do a fair bit of online research when it is useful) The fact is that you do not even know if your answers were any good or not. You simply have not provided any sound reasoning to support your assertions. If your idea of fainess is that your arguments should be accepted as good no matter how poor they are then you have a very warped idea of fairness.Well lets take one of your claims from this post:

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I say the way the actual fact of how dinosaurs were buried and fossilized is way more consistent with a flood than with the geo timetable assumptions. It simply is. It's a valid statement. It ought to be treated as evidence for the creo side. It ought to be given a Plus ranking on the creo side or placed in a column for the creo side. I don't see how that observation can be doubted

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OK so you think that it's valid. But is it ? It's too vague for a start - which dinosaurs ? All of them ? Even the dinosaurs that died in a sandstorm ? How does that relate to a flood ? Even if some dinosaurs died in some sort of flood how do you get from there to a 1-year global flood killing all of them ?Where's the tentativity you demand from us ? Be fair.

Well let's answer your points 1 by 1.1) Your argument was not FOR creationism. Secondly all you were arguing was that your hypothesis was not ruled out by thermodynamics - you were not even trying to make a scientific case FOR it. Thirdly you never adequately dealt with my criticism that your assumptions did require a net decrease in entropy contrary to the Second Law.
If your best claim to have a scientific argument was that you had a speculation that could not be refuted on thermodynamic grounds then that would be sufficient to prove my point. But you don't even have that.2) We have threads discussing ID so that its claim to be science can be exposed as false (and don't you know that the ID party line is that it IS NOT creationism ?).3) None of the things you list are scientific arguments for creationism and therefore the fact that you drag them up is more evidence for my point. That some of the arguments are downright silly (linking the supposed power of two future prophets to control rain to global warming !????!!!) only empahsises how little case you have.4) I'm not sure what thread you are talking about. Is it the Ron Wyatt silliness ? Another fine example of YEC ignorance and arrogance - in place of science.So plenty of examples of YECs failing to produce scientific arguments for creationism - so thanks for proving my point.So what it comes down to is that you and Faith are upset because we won't pretend that you have valid scientific arguments. Well I'm sorry but this IS a debate board. We don't have to pretend that your position really has scientific support just because you don't like the fact that you don't. We're not obligated to to give your side undeserved credit just to keep you on board. Just as we are not obligated to accept Faith's claims that jumping to conclusions based on a superficial assessment of the evidence is a valid argument just because she says so. It isn't and no matter how much the truth upsets Faith it never will be.The rest of it is more claiming to have evidence that you don't have. I suppose that can;t admit how often you;ve been shot down in flames even to yourself but that's just a further demonstration of the very attitude that hampers YECs on boards like this.

I would disagree that there are no inherent problems in rival methods. It is not necessarily the case that a rival method need be worse - but epistemology is a difficult subject precisely because problems are hard to avoid. (I would even suggest that it would be reasonable to hold that ALL epistemologies have inherent problems and that the main goal of the epistemology is to minimise those problems).While science is prepared to accept models which do not fully cohere this is viewed as an undesirable state to be rectified - and it is accepted that it is an inadequacy of the models. For instance QM and GR are accepted as good models within their respective domains but it is acknowledged that they are not adequate to deal with extreme situations where both become important. Let us be clear that it is accepted that at least one is no more than a (usually very) good approximation within a delimited domain for this reason alone. (But it should also be noted that GR is more accurate than we need - or can even usefully use - for many applications, which is why we still use Newtonian Mechanics instead).An epistemology that does not place an equal weight on consistency has essentially abandoned logic and this destroys any chance of knowledge as it is usually thought of - indeed, it arguably abandons any reasonable understanding of truth. And the apologetic view often used by creationists does implicitly reject consistency as it focusses almost entirely on conclusions without paying adequate attention to the evidence or arguments by which the conclusions are reached.Epistemologies that evaluate an argument by the consistency of the conclusions with "Revealed Truths" have other problems, too. For instance if you view the quality of a (relevant) argument largely on whether it supports the Flood - rather than, say, on its use of evidence and reasoning (for instance if one were to consider an argument which took a vague, superficial, generalisation and jumped to the conclusion that the Flood was the best explanation to be good) then you have effectively ruled, or at least strongly biased, the debate in favour of the Flood conclusion. Which in itself undermines any claim that that epistemology can usefully be used in regard to the Flood by any argument other than those used to establish it as a "Revealed Truth" in the first place. The methodology so strongly biases the conclusions that the conclusions have to be considered a product of the methodology rather than anything else. Using such an epistemology in an argument for the Flood from the empirical evidence is effectively circular for that reason.

The first comment is that this is a very general and superficial answer, which sadly lacks a basic understanding of the view it argues against.Let's look at a famous example of such a bed
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Requested Page Not Found (404)Now the first thing to consider is that the main deposits of dinosaur bones come from dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic period - in the conventional view the extinction of the dinosaurs is around 80 million years after these dinosaurs lived and died. So theories of dinosaur extinction can't be assumed to be relevant.Nor is it clear that the all the dinosaurs even in the main bed died at the same time - the first link offers an alternative explanation, that the river flooded every year, and when it did it picked up some dinosaur remains and washed them down to a point where they all collected. (Of course it doesn't have to be EVERY year - just often enough over a long period of time)Now if we look at the geology (in the second link) we see that before the dinosaurs were buried the area was sea. It contains marine fossils such as belemnites and ammonites.By the time of the dinosaurs the rocks indicate a dry environment, watered by rivers - including the river responsible for collecting the dinosaur bones. Fossil evidence shows river life - including pollen and spores from the plants.Later formations also contain dinosaur remains - yet in the Cretaceous strata we see Cretaceous, not Jurassic dinosaurs. If the dinosaur deposits represent a Flood then this is another problem since surely all must have died at around the same time.Before the periods where conventional paleontology places the extinction of the dinosaurs the sea returned and we find marine fossils again.So we see some obvious problems for a Flood explanation.If we start with the dinosaur remains and assume that the opening stages of the Flood overwhelmed them then how do we explain the underlying geology which shows the area was sea before then ? Our initial assumption has ruled out a Flood explanation for those strata and the fossils they contain.But if we say that when the Flood started the area was sea then how do we explain the geology of the area where the dinosaurs were found, which shows dry land with rivers flowing through it ? How, indeed, does fossil pollen end up in that geology when hydrodynamics would make it one of the last things to be deposited ?The marine fossils in the later strata are less obviously a problem for the Flood but they do present a real problem - where did all the shellfish come from ? Shellfish are not known for great mobility and surely they must have been largely wiped out in the early stages of the Flood by burial in the huge deposits of sediment. So why do we find oysters in the Mowry Shale, above the dinosaurs ? And more shellfish in the Frontier Sandstone above that ? The Flood year doesn't allow time for shellfish to recover from the huge disaster, let alone massively expand their range and numbers.The conventional view doesn't have these problems - it allows time for environmental change and for species to move in and occupy areas opened up to them by that change. And the river deposits are not a problem - they are a key part of the explanation.And just to make it clear, this is the very sort of area which Faith claims as support for her position - if the Flood doesn't do well here then the whole argument falls apart. But a more detailed look at the geology of this area raises serious problems for the Flood, while offering an alternative explanation consistent with the conventional view. And that is why arguments like Faith's are not valid. They don't go into the necessary details.

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Yes I've admitted there are problems with the sorting for a flood explanation, but I don't see why they should be insurmountable, considering that other aspects of the situation are quite consistent with a flood and that the sorting isn't quite as absolute as you are saying. Dinosaurs appear relatively high up in the column for instance. None of those around today. The lower you go the more the fossils are of marine creatures, which one might expect would be found at the lowest levels.

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Of course it is completely wrong to suggest that the position of dinosaurs in the geological problem represents the slightest problem for mainstream geology. In fact the only way it could be a problem would be if we were to expect no land life or modern land life at that period. But why should we expect either ? Although "high" in the geological column there are still higher strata dominated by life more closely resembling what we see today. No, there is no reason to regard this as any problem for the mainstream view.It is, however, a problem for the Flood explanation. At the simplest level, why should we find different dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period and mammals rom later periods ordered in the geological column at all ? Even if we consider the supposed expectations of the Flood we can see that it is not as simple as finding marine life at the bottom - we should not expect to find marine life in the lowest levels of areas that were originally land. The lowest levels there should be the original terrain. But at Dinosaur National Monument we find rivers in strata deposited on top of earlier strata containing marine fossils (see Message 205 for links). They can't BOTH be the original pre-Flood condition of the area.Let me repeat the core part of Message 205 - if even a simple look at one of the sites you invoke as support shows serious problems for your claims then how can you possibly be confident in what you say ?