Searching for Ancient Truth

Can you show such a map? One that it wouldn't take technical expertise to read of course.

OK, since you insist on this. Yes, you can formulate some kind of reasonable idea, but unless you have a way of researching it (testing it) you have no way of knowing if your reasonable idea is correct, and anybody else's reasonable idea is as good as yours.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-11-2006 06:35 PM

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.

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

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

Makes debate extra difficult.

Yes, I don't think it is possible to rank explanations on a scale of likelihood and the example of the Flood and how evos dismiss it as unreasonable was my case in point.

Even those are not easily rankable, no. Anything anyone said about how to rank them would take us right back into the evo-creo argument. That's what happens with untestable explanatory guesses.

Yes I suppose that's a similar situation since the truth apparently isn't definitively knowable.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 05:33 PM

Anything that involves witnesses can't be compared to the ancient past.Yes, I've been consistent. I don't think explanations about the past are testable or provable.I hope buzsaw and randman will come along and help you out. I really have nothing more to say.

Witnesses are GREAT evidence. But there are no witnesses to the events that geologists and evolutionists claim happened in the distant past, and that means it becomes nothing but a competition of explanatory systems in which there is no way to test it or prove any of it. Since witnesses ARE great evidence it didn't seem like a useful comparison with the problems we are discussing about ancient events.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 08:49 PM

There are WITNESSES to the list of items you gave, Linear -- yes, to Jesus' sacrifice and also to the Flood -- although for purposes of discussion at EvC one is obligated to ignore the witness evidence for the Flood. But the point is that we have independent ways of checking the things on the list. You can't compare such things to the situation with the ancient past where there are no such independent means of checking any given interpretation. I don't know why this is so difficult to get across.Really, it is a waste of time to keep bringing up examples from the present. To get this across better it would probably be best to stick to discussing the actual problems we deal with about the explanations for the ancient past.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-12-2006 08:59 PM

I'm not talking about the quality of witness evidence, only the fact that if you have it when you have no other evidence it is great evidence to have.