Searching for Ancient Truth

Actually, we are trying to understand how we can test the likelyhood of different possible events of the past with only the evidence left from the past and knowledge about how things work. The information was left cryptic, despite the source, to make it into a simple puzzle. Why is the source of the information such a problem? The source had no bearing on how the puzzle had to be solved.Ok, how about this example.You have read about a cult in America that sacrifices animals to their strange god. You own a cat but are not worried since the cats are sacred to this cult. You let the cat out and go to town for a day of shopping. When you get back you find the rended bloody carcasses of two pigeons at your back door.
Two possibilities are:1. Your cat, who holds you in some kind of feline esteem, has presented her kill for your enjoyment.2. The cult has determined that back side of your house is the perfect spot to provide their god with the blood of the birds on that particular day.No witnesses that can tell you anything. The cult members are inidentified and secretive. The answer seems obvious only because we have personal experiences that make one seem far fetched. But for this example let's assume, like a child, that either option appears as likely as the other.What experiments can we conduct to determine which of these two options is most likely? What can we do to eliminate or minimize one of these as an option?

You can't rule out ALL alternative scenarios, which means that you cannot certainly KNOW the explanation for a given phenomenon that happened in the past. And the example illustrates this too.

I finally answered your first example, after Modulous nagged me into it. How about we leave it there?My conclusion is that you can't rule out all other explanations about the past because you do not have access to all the conditions of the past, and while you can narrow the field of possibilities somewhat, even then there may be unrecognized elements that would make an explanation you rejected in fact the true one.

but what if all the evidence overwhelmingly points to one explanation as being true over all the others? are you going to keep saying that you can't rule out all other explanations?lets say if you found the site of an unknown battle-field dated to the 16th century (just as an example of a nice piece of history) and you found bones with blade marks on one side and swords somewhere else near the battle would you conclude they were shot or kill by swords?(they could have been shot, but more than likely killed by swords)
you still have to go with what the evidence shows, even if it disagrees with your beliefsThis message has been edited by ReverendDG, 03-12-2006 01:53 AM

I agree. It can happen that there are two competing theories about an event and simply not enough evidence to support one more than another. Happens with a fair amount of frequency, especially with historical/forensic sciences.One can never KNOW the explanation, but one can offer various explanations. One can reject explanations that could not have realistically happened. Hopefully when two competing ideas are presented, both ideas will have predictions associated with them, and falsifications...tests which may be able to be carried out in order to come to a more confident conclusion.We can't test the past, but we can test the processes that leave certain types of evidence to conclude what kind of processes can leave that type of evidence and what kind of processes cannot leave that type of evidence.

Ok. You had answered the example while I was writing my last post.Certainly you cannot rule out all explainations but this is about testing to put the various explainations in some sort of ranking as to which is more, or most, likely. Absolutely! However, this does not change the ranking of the possibilities unless that unrecognized element comes to light. It could get discovered or suggested. In either case, this element would have to be tested also, to see how it affected the ranking of the explainations.From my first example, let's say the for some reason you stuck around after the poor guy died. The police are going through his pockets to find out who he is. They find some notes with lots of equations that none of you understand and stating that he found a seam in the space time continuum in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial. There are also some newspaper clippings, from the National Enquirer and The Globe, of stories about issues of the Washington Post being found at the Great Salt Lake Park on the same day they were published.Is this new element enough to change your reasoning with regards to the level of possibility of the two explainations presented in my original example?Is there more that should be done before accepting the existance of this new element at face value?

I don't think that "realistically" is a very good qualifier in this case, although you do provide some limiters on what realistically means in this context. Realistically is very subjective and, in some cases, can be seen as an arrogant statement. Remember, "realistically" a 10 Kg ball should hit the ground in 1/10th the time it takes a 1 kg ball to fall the same distance.I also wanted to say thanks for helping out when things got derailed a bit because of my poor wording in the example.

This answer is for all three of you, DG and Linear as well. Although you all concede the point that there is no way to come to a final explanation of past phenomena, you are all pretty much arguing the idea that there are some explanations that can be ruled out as less reasonable. It seems pretty likely that you are thinking of Flood explanations but I don't find these less reasonable and easily explain their ruling out as prejudice.There are all kinds of strange prejudices I see at EvC against the Flood idea completely apart from the supposed scientific reasons to rule it out. Perhaps some of these prejudices have in fact been promoted by various creationists that have come here, I really don't know -- such prejudices as the false idea that the Flood was a supernatural event, or that the fossils were just put there by God and have no scientific explanation, or the whole accusation of creationists as supposedly resting on some notion of "Goddidit" instead of seeking scientific explanations.As long as these caricatures of creationist thinking are such a big part of the evolutionist frame of reference, it can only be prejudice that dismisses Flood theory as less reasonable.{abe: Or to state it perhaps more accurately and fairly, there is too much of a prejudicial factor involved in the dismissal of Flood theory for me to accept any judgment of it as less reasonable than other explanations.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 07:46 AM

I wouldn't say that that it's prejudice, closer to discrimination. If we look to the flood, by your own reckoning there are some problem with the scenario. From what I have seen around and about, there are pieces of evidence that could not exist if a global flood happened...unless some other (unknown) mechanism is in play. Since this is not parsimonious, it gets rejected. After all, I could easily make up a random event that I say happened in the past, and say that the reason the evidence disagrees with it is because some other mechanism came into play that I choose not to describe. Most creationists do say that the Flood was supernaturally influenced. Obviously the water wasn't supernatural, but some kind of supernatural mechanism is often put forward to answer problems with the model. I think the issues you raise are valid, but they are minor and easily corrected. Imagine what it's like for us poor evolutionists who have to constantly battle caricatures and strawmen from creationists. It is rare for a creationist to really understand the position they are attacking. So trust me, I can sympathize.However, the problem remains that the Flood has more solid evidences that suggest it didn't happen than it does non-specific/indirect evidence that it did. I have no personal issue with the Global Flood idea, but I see nothing that would be best explained by a global flood. This global flood, should it have happened, acted like no other flood has ever acted, and somehow managed to create a geologic column, and sort fossils not only vertically but also geographically...in such a way that radiodating and the molecular clock would agree with one another. In such a way that radiodating and historical records, tree rings, supernovae and many many other dating methods all give the same results.Personally, I look at that and think, if a global flood happened, all those pieces of evidence saying what they are saying can't be a coincidence. So either the evidence says what it says and there wasn't a global flood, OR there was a global flood and some other mechanism sorted all these things to tell us what they seem to be telling us.The latter is anathaema thinking in science, for good reason. It's not prejudice when you consider all the facts and arrive at a conclusion, but I agree that some people are simply not listening to what you are saying and are seemingly attacking a position you don't hold. All I can say is that both sides of the fence get that, you'll have to develop your own method of dealing with it.I post this, not trying to attack your position or engage in debate. I'm just both sympathizing with your problem and trying to express as best I can why your opponents hold the contrary view and exactly why they see the flood as an untenable idea to consider.This message has been edited by Modulous, Sun, 12-March-2006 01:42 PM

Do they really say that, or is it only that the physical conditions that are considered to have existed in the pre-Flood world are very unusual by current standards, and that suggests something supernatural to evolutionists? That is, such things as the "fountains of the deep" and the "waters above and below" and the idea that this was the first time it had ever rained on the earth, and so on. None of that is supernatural.

Of course to a creationist or at least a YEC, other unknown mechanisms are a very strong possibility. The quickness of evos to make judgments like "pieces of evidence that could not exist if a global flood happened" is offputting to creos, who are sure there is a reasonable explanation yet to be found and that evos just don't have the motivation to think further about it. All the stuff that evos throw at floodists, coral reefs, carbonates, supposedly lethal temperatures, whatever, it all has an explanation in flood terms, we just don't know what it is yet, and we know evos aren't interested in discovering it. But the Flood is no random event or made up. Creationists are trying to be true to the Biblical account and understand the science necessary to explain it. There is nothing arbitrary about it, although because the Biblical account is so spare there is a lot of room for speculation. Under those circumstances, and with the certainty YECs have that the Flood did in fact occur, there is always the reasonable expectation that some unknown factors have to have been involved. This is frustrating for evos of course, but it's not unreasonable given the actualities involved.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 08:56 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 08:57 AM

I've seen 'God' or 'miracle' posited as a defense for the inconsistencies the flood has with physical evidence. I've even heard that God sped up radioactive decay to make doubly sure all life died in the flood.

Makes debate extra difficult.

To me, born and raised in Australia, the idea of a relatively recent global flood is a non-starter. The geographic distribution of biological species is incompatible with a global flood. I'm thinking of kangaroos and koalas in Australia; opossums and sloths in the Americas; pandas in china; the differences between old world monkeys and new world monkeys.

Its not really a question of motivation, more 'reason'. There is not reason to hunt for an explanation when there is a functioning explanatory framework in place that has yet to be falsified. If anyone can come up with a more useful model, it'll be used - but most geologists are not in the field for changing the already existing model. Most geologists simply work with the model to develop explanations for smaller things.The only reason to suppose that a flood happened is because a religion says it did. Science has to reject all of religion, lest its biases get in the way of the truth. Imagine if astronomers were still trying to explain Ra going into the underworld every night? Critical thinking. If a model has major problems, its not worth pursuing...otherwise they would have no time to do practical work, which they get paid for. I'm fine with that, but the issue is, that my made up scenario uses the same reasoning the flood does. Whose to say that I wasn't inspired by God/aliens to make up my tale? The flood story suffers because it is not possible to differentiate it from a story that somebody just made up. More power to them. But science cannot have preconception about what happened. We have to say, 'if the Bible didn't say anything about a flood, would there be any reason to suppose one had happened?'. I haven't got a problem with people starting with the idea that the flood happened and trying to explain the evidence around it, but it doesn't hold up to the level of scrutiny demanded by science. It makes the explanation unparsimonious because it is adding unexplained undescribed entities into the explanation.Therein lies the divide. Science works from tabula rasa, and YECers don't. 'evos' work by criticising and seeing if a model holds up to scrutiny, if it doen't it gets rejected. You should be able to see the sense in it at least - after all, that kind of enquiry has been of immense practical use. 'creos' work from the assumption that there was a flood, and try to seek ways to confirm this idea and falsify long geological period.