Equating science with faith

Sounds like facts to me -that's a bit different from a theory which is more like a proposition based on incomplete factual evidence.The thing is whether, from what you know for sure, you extrapolate back through the human race or go the whole hog and take it back to your precambrian unicellular cousins or all the way back to the original hydrogen. That would of course be rational thinking based on material assumptions.If matter is all there is, then that is all that we suppose we have to work with.

Hello Granny Magda,
Good to see you're still up and running, mutating and surviving!
Actually I didn't really bail, I just went on a bit of a vacation from discord,nursed my multiple stab wounds and found that with time, I felt like coming back and arguing the point another day.
Sometimes these arguments really go round in boring circles and one doesn't seem to be progressing but now I feel my inspiration returning and so here I am. One doesn't really want to get stuck on any particular one of these topics but it happens since we are discussing evidence and whether science can be equated with faith. My point in all of this is to point out that since some evolutionary assumptions seem to be based more on faith than on evidence, the ruling scientific paradigm could easily be equated with religion and faith. Evolutionists seem to imagine that religion is about faith regardless of evidence but the same can be said about evolutionary assumptions.In reality, we all have evidence for our points of view and I just happen to find the 'intelligent design' perspective to be more faithful to the evidence than the evolutionary perspective.Moving onto a specific area of contention is just my way of demonstrating the point. No,not at all, it doesn't seem weird and freaky and therefore unreasonable. I fully understand why some people believe it but then those people start out with assumptions that matter is all there is. That's not weird and freaky, just prejudiced. Like what? Why don't you choose a less contentious area to discuss in order to illustrate our respective points of view? We can take it from there.

Well you may not have a starting point based on direct evidence but you have a theory about that starting point.You either believe, based on philisophical considerations, that your family tree goes all the way back to the apes and beyond (that would be your worldview) or you believe based on what we can actually see happening (the evidence) that humans give rise to humans and that your family starts and ends with humans.Somewhere in your view of reality, you have a starting point -perhaps you just haven't thought about it much but theoretically a starting point must exist in any worldview. Well that's the problem we have which is why we chat on this site -we differ as to just how much extrapolation we consider to be reasonable according to the evidence. We have facts and then we have interpretations of the facts. If matter is all there is, the extrapolation must go all the way back to the simplest matter and then back to the chemicals that arranged themselves fortuitously into living cells. Does the evidence actually show that or is that a philisophical extrapolation based on faith?Do you realize that matter is not all there is -information is there as well. Information is separate from matter just like a computer program allows intelligence to be transferred by a material medium. The information is not the matter and the matter is not the information. You could move that information from one medium to another but the source of that information had to come from intelligence.
The same appears to be true of the genetic code.

Not if the Bible was inspired by our supernatural creator as a truth message for mankind. Is it the Word of God or is it manmade rubbish?
If it is a supernatural message based on the truth, there should be no clash with reality, I mean real reality not just man's version of what is real. Actually we do somewhat. You say 'faith-based beliefs will inevitably clash with reality." I say any faith that is worth having will not clash with reality or it's not worth having.Only a faith based on truth is worth having.Your 'inevitable clash' only works with faith based on rubbish.You clearly equate faith with rubbish - I equate the big picture of evolution with rubbish and don't believe that it is a faith worth having since it is not based on truth. Well that's the thing you see -if your faith is not based on reality, I don't believe it is worth having.That would be called 'delusion'. Our basic controversy here is which faith is based on imagination (evolution or intelligent design)and which is based on reality. You believe that truth is evolution and matter being the base of everything that is real and I don't. I believe we were created by an intelligence beyond the realm of simple matter and what if that is the truth and you just simply don't happen to believe it? There you go, the facts don't speak for themselves, conclusions have been drawn from the evidence. I have just drawn different conclusions from that same evidence. No you're right, they would assume God's non-existance and extrapolate from that starting premise -which may not be true. That's what science should be but unfortunately philosophy has crept in and now science makes pronouncements about reality beyond that which the evidence shows. We believe in the existance of protons and electrons by observing physical things -we can't actually see them but we know that they exist by the effect that they have. The same works with God -you can't see God but you can see what God has brought into existence.There is an intelligence out there and our ability to reason is enough to convince me that something beyond mere matter does exist. There are so many personal discussions going on here -maybe you haven't noticed but I do because I believe in Intelligent Design so I am a legitimate target in this forum I suppose.I am dishonest, delusional, ridiculous, blind to reality, stupid (by implication) and so on....I will attempt in future not to respond in kind - perhaps you are an exception so I take your log back.

Unfortunately there's a follow-up to that original Urey-Miller experiment. By the 1970's most geochemists were convinced (based on rock analysis) that the earth's primitive atmospehere was nothing like those used in the original experiment. They redid the experiment with a more realistic mix (CO2, notrogen and water vapour). Organic compounds were produced but NOT amino-acids.Instead toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and cyanide were produced.Miller himself conceded that glycine was the best he could produce in the absence of methane.In 1984, Heindrich Holland confirmed that mixes of CO2, nitrogen and water vapor yielded no amino acids at all.
The strange thing is that you won't hear of any of this in biology texts. Why? Because it doesn't support the hypothesis that the building blocks of life can arise naturally. These are the sorts of evidences that Intelligent Design supporters would like aired.
There are many more examples like this of selective evidence being used to promote a worldview/philosophy.
We should put ALL the evidence on the table not just that which is convenient.

Not the basic laws of physics only the interpretation of the geologic record.

Well that's the problem you see. Nobody can necessarily know the mechanisms by which the world was originally formed because that is historical/origins science. What we can do is find what is happening now and guess what happened in the past but if God created the original forms of life, then one form of life giving rise to another form of life in long periods of time would be wrong. I don't say it is wrong, only that it may be completely wrong because none of us was there. We know how things vary now but we can't extrapolate it to include all biological forms because we can't know that, we can only guess and we will come to different conclusions in the presence/absence of 'God' in the equation. So it takes faith to attempt to explain it without God.Operational science is completely different.We can work with operational science and the laws of nature but not outside this because it is not testable, we cannot do repeatable experiments, we cannot afford to make philisophical statements in the absence of proof and for that we would need a time machine.Because biological systems have biochemical similarities and homlogous structures as well as a common genetic code, we cannot conclude direct relationship, because a common designer may be an equally valid explanation. Cars may have a basic design principle but that doesn't mean that the one evolved from the other. All were intelligently designed using common ideas and principles.If they evolved at all, it was in the intelligent mind of the creators of the different cars. Unfortunately evolution is taught as a fact in science because we can't prove that God exists but if He does, which presumably you believe, we have no right teaching it as if because 'science' says it is true and 'science' can only works with possible material causes, therefore the material explanation is the best we can do.
If God exists then what we are teaching may be a lie. Then we have indoctrination instead of teaching people to think and allowing for other possibilities which includes supernatural and instant creation of different life forms with built-in varability. Now there we have complete agreement. So with all these observations, we make various assumptions. The problem is when we use the evidence selectively to support our basic beliefs. We observe basic stasis in the majority of the fossil record
and we decide that gradualism is true but the record is not complete so that is an assumption based on what we believe we are missing. Nothing appears to be a problem for evolution to explain but is it true? Just because we can invent an explanation that fits our basic prejudice does not make it true? It makes it 'faith' in our basic assumptions. Fragile is a good word to use. Therefore it should not be taught as fact without allowing for the opposing evidence to be taught so that everybody may be allowed to think. Experimental science will not be affected if we allow for open doubts about the current paradigm belief system.what is being taught about origins in science is true.

Great thicknesses of sedimentary rock can be produced by little water over long periods of time or a lot of water over short periods.
It is a philisophical decision, not a scientific one to prefer the former interpretation to the latter. After all if evolution occurred, you need vast periods of time.
Because sedimentation usually occurs slowly today, it is assumed that it must have always occurred slowly...uniformatarianism.Guy Berthault's experiments showed that fine layers are formed by a self-sorting mechanism and the same layer thicknesses were formed regardless of the flow rate.Since fossil formation is a rare event perhaps something major occurred to produce such vast amounts of fossilization. Fossils don't form slowly, they would rot.
Bias and faith in evolution accounts for the general acceptance of uniformatarian principles.Got to turn this computer off before it gets zapped by lightning so can't finish now.

Helium in zircon crystals in granite does not allow granite to be more than thousands of years old or it would have disappeared from the granite. The helium in the atmosphere is way too low for the apparent amount of radioactive decay if millions of years have passed. The fact that it's still in the granite and not in the atmosphere and we know how fast it escapes from rock shows that something is not right with the geologic column dating methods.
Apart from that -I think we are off topic for this so will mention no more here. Yes it is difficult for some scientists to be heard -we are hoping to rectify that but if they won't publish it in peer-reviewed journals than they mustn't complain about its authenticity if it doesn't appear in peer-reviewed journals.
Apparently the journal "Nature" reported similar experiments to Berthault's a decade later.I think that "Expelled -No Intelligence Allowed" should help expose these peer review publishing issues that have been around too long. That's if you have faith in radiometric dating methods that for rock of known age are so often and incredibly wrong.There is no good reason to trust it unless you just have to have long ages and slow evolution just has to have happened. Which doesn't necessarily imply that these bugs will be anything but bugs of the same recognizable kind as long as life continues on this planet. I'd be more impressed if those bugs changed into some kind of a reptile or something completely different that couldn't be called a 'bug'.

Well it seems that a lot of people believe that the answer according to the evidence should rather be "I don't know" Which is why it seems that the fossils we have must have been rapidly buried, not slowly built up over millions of years -they are in sedimentary rock layers after all so they must have been transported and buried rapidly.Why is there residual C14 in all the sedimentary strata? 'Contamination' appears to be the explanation that seems to cover up the issue rather than explain it.It must be 'contamination' because according to the millions of years idea,it can't still be there.

Sunset Crater -dated by tree rings at about 1000 years
K-Ar put it at 200 000 years
Mt St Helens (produced in 1980) radiometrically dated at 0.35 +/- 0.05 mill years
Wood buried by a basalt flow in Australia -the wood was dated at about 45000 years by C14 and the basalt at 45 million years by K-ArMt Ngauruhoe In New Zealand -five K-Ar datings of andesite lava flows. Dates ranged from 0.27-3,5 mill years but one occurred in 1949,three in 1954 and one in 1975So many examples, I won't repeat them all.Too many assumptions and the original 'dates' were invented using 19th century theory about how old the rock layers should be.
Each strata is a certain age because of certain key fossils in it
AND the fossils in the strata are a certain age because evolutionary theory says they should be that age.No wonder the real dating that happens is so off. How can we possibly trust it when it is so wrong for dates we are absolutely sure of.
Faith in evolution.Radioactive dating is just so popular because it gives long ages and you know why we need those!So many suppositions, none of which can be confirmed - but long ages are what we need.
I think it is just self deception that keeps this thing going. What I wonder is just how many 'dates' had to be thrown out to get these tables of 'acceptable' data. Nobody ever asked for special treatment -just to be heard and not to be penalized just because they don't follow the current party line. It's not got to do with the quality of the research, just with the conclusions which are not acceptable to the ruling orthodoxy. Since large scale evolution doesn't happen today, that appears to be evidence against evolution but the amazing thing (and I have seen it before) is that evolutionists take even the lack of evidence to be evidence for their theory.
These thought convolutions just prove to me that they don't need real proof to be convinced -faith is all that is needed.When we look at the inherited changes actually happening in living things, we see information either staying the same (recombining in different ways) or being corrupted or lost (mutation, extinction), but never do we see anything which could qualify as a real informationally uphill evolutionary change.
Fossils are dead things and it takes a lot of faith in the absence of evidence to imagine (as Aig puts it) that fish could turn into philosophers given enough time.
The reality is that loss of information is occurring -the train is going in the wrong direction.

Well you sure are a dedicated fundamentalist!(people that get really excited about their beliefs) There's no chance of anything being wrong with any of your arguments since your support crew at talkorigins is as dogmatic and convicted as you are and they squash every argument and you trust them.(faith I believe).
So we have a problem - you trust your sources that support your argument, I trust my sources and they're all scientists as well.
How about we get to the point where we understand that these historical concepts are interpretations of the same data?!We see dogs begetting dogs of all kinds and never anything but a dog and we interpret that to mean that these varieties have limits -assumption based on evidence.You see all different dead things in the rock layers and interpret this to mean that the "earlier" ones (assumption of time) can, over time,mutate and select to produce the later ones- assumption based on faith in the principle of evolution.
In other words, matter is all there is and so new kinds can only be produced by pre-existing kinds changed over time.We, on the other hand, believe that an intelligence beyond matter injected order into matter and produced a genetic code.There is no proof that matter organizes itself into intelligent information that can change into new and different intelligent information with time -which is why we don't believe it!So we have faith that there is a creator that has actually done things with matter and you believe that since you can't prove the existance of the creator therefore only material explanations can possibly account for everything that exists.So we all have faith.If you have 5 different samples all under 100 years old but you get a date excessively beyond any one of them then I don't think the mixing of samples has anything to do with the problem here.

Origins science is not observable or repeatable -that works for us and for you. Creationist geology I presume refers to our interpretations of the evidence in attempting to explain what has happened in the past.
Every geologist, creationist or evolutionist, uses the laws of matter for technological advancement. The difference is only in our interpretation of what happened in the past. Well we all know how to use geological processes to our advantage now. Our difference of opinion is only in what may have been the case in the distant past. We all use present radioactive decay rates to our advantage as a civilization. Just because it is quite feasible that there may have been a burst of more rapid radioactive decay in the past doesn't mean we are going to use those past possibilities in our now technology.You appear to be determined to misunderstand and not differentiate between experimental science and origins science. Well yes, we know what the rate is now and we apply that rate to technology -I would think that would be obvious and practical and have nothing to do with the real argument here. Tell me what assumptions you are talking about. Different elements currently decay at measurable rates -that is not an assumption, it is an experimentally verifiable fact. Uniformatarian assumptions about the past have nothing to do with this. Everything I say is a massive lie in your book -you repeat yourself. Calm down.Hyperbole is unnecessary.
If I cooked something yesterday and it burned, it does not mean it is going to burn today. Different heat, different outcome. Perhaps something happened in the past to cause a rapid burst of decay. How do you know what the graph looks like? You can't extrapolate into the past according to what you want to believe.We don't know what happened in the past -we weren't there. We interpret according to the evidence in the present and lots of assumptions are involved.
If you're so determined to believe that everything is exactly the same now as it ever was then why do you believe in macro-evolution? We both know what an allele is so what's your point? My face has remained straight throughout -it's only you that interprets everything I say as a lie or a deception based on an underlying desire to fool myself and anybody else I can in the process.
How can you possibly interpret my intentions the way you do? Or is that just a characterization you apply uniformly to all non-evolutionists?

You have data -I wonder how many results were chucked out in the gathering of the data -I hear that it is a high percentage that doesn't come out saying what it should according to the age theory invented in the 19th century.
Again you have too many incidences of dating carried out on rock of known age that come out completely vastly wrong -there is something very wrong with the method. Why trust it for rocks of unknown age?
You have evidence that radiometric dating works, I have evidence that you shouldn't trust those dates. Without long ages the whole humpty dumpty of 'evolution from a common ancestor' bites the dust. You have to ignore all the dating techniques that indicate thousands not billions of years because evolution would not be feasible under those conditions. No, its a worldview problem. If you are brainwashed into long ages and evolution and you "know" what results you should be getting according to the paradigm, those are the dates that you're going to submit -and you're going to believe that your other results must have had contamination and other preparation problems. Nobody wants to fail to fit in, it's not good for their careers.Humans fool themselves -if I know that something is 60O years old and I don't get that result, perhaps I will keep trying until I get something close enough to be acceptable.It's human nature. People that believe the geologic column dates are not going to be submitting what doesn't even vaguely fit - it's inconvenient and there'll always be some story to explain the 'wrong' dates away.Luckily radiometric dating is the dating method that keeps coming up with the correct sort of range (millions of years) so it is the most popular long age dating method by far. I frankly can only assume that you get that sort of rubbish from your over-enthusiastic cohorts. Often the laws that they try to amend don't even mention creation or evolution but try to eliminate problems with logical additions to law. For example there was a bill, I can't remember all the details, where they tried to get a clause in that insisted that textbooks be current and not full of outdated and disproven information.The idea was to get rid of all the 'proofs' for evolution that had been proven to be fraudulent -(for example Haeckel's embryos and some of the more well known ape-man farces). How can a battle be fought fairly when children all over the world are being taught known rubbish in the guise of science.
Yes it was an attempt to make the battle fair but there is nothing in the addition of that clause that should upset any fair-minded individual.
The other main battle through the courts is to allow for evidence against evolution to be allowed to be presented alongside the evidence for it. 'Science' should welcome such things in the interests of fairness - but they shun it because up till now every bit of rubbish that sounded like a support for evolution had to be taught uncritically -it's a protected worldview and it is time to put everything on the table and not allow evolutionists to act as the priests of a religion where the people dare not question those authorized to speak for 'science.' Well Intelligent Design is doing that - using scientific arguments for design. They are starting to be heard by those that realize that a new paradigm is coming and this state of unfairness that exists in what is supposed to be science will not survive the scrutiny aimed at it. It's been a long battle just to be heard but now it can no longer be ignored.
The problem with evolutionists which is particularly obvious on this site is that you keep bolstering each other up with your PRATT story so that half of your own people don't know what's really going on out there.You're not even going to be able to understand the argument if you don't start listening to the original sources rather than submitting to propoganda that mocks and demeans something they refuse to understand. 'Science' has become like a certain religion (which will remain nameless) - deaf and dumb to their own problems, shouting the party line with unrestrained enthusiasm, mocking the unbelievers -believing them to be infidels to be silenced or exterminated and beyond all that,ready to die without even really investigating the possibility that they have spent a lifetime believing a lie. Well they have to first re-establish freedom of thought and expression which is being squashed and penalized in 'science' due to a minority priesthood that holds the microphone. There are far more that 1% of scientists questioning the current paradigm but they won't declare themselves openly because they know they will be criticized for daring to dissent, not to mention victimized and very possibly fired for their efforts.
You have to be brave to stand up for the rights of Judaism in a Muslim country you know.It's not all that easy in society to stand up for an unpopular opinion but if you believe it to be the truth, it's worth it.
The other problem, despite all the rubbish that evolutionists publish about funding for creation and intelligent design, is that evolutionists get funded by endless tax dollars while dissenters get nothing unless they can get private funding.That slows down research efforts though I have heard that a fair bit is going on under the noses of the evolutionary overseers by people who don't support the regime.How do you declare yourself if the price you pay is to lose your job and not be able to support your family? With any luck and good management that will be the future. First the old guard needs to retire and give way to new ideas. Well now that is public relations propoganda for you. That's like saying that Zimbabwe loves all that Robert Mugabe has done for their country -completely out of touch with reality.Do you really believe that??? The problem with that statement is that it is often non-evolutionists that invent these technological marvels but their evolution/creation leanings have absolutely no bearing on the state of technological advancement. Evolutionists seem purposefully blind to that distinction -operational science and origins science. It's like a public relations ploy to make the uninformed believe that the lights would go out if creationists were allowed to have their say.It's all hype. I'm sure they will. They probably are already doing what they can under restrained conditions but will be free to research in different directions with time and an openness to the problems of the current paradigm. I imagine I will also have to obtain an education and be able to define the words "allele" and "cogentic" for 'obvious child' who is apparently sure that I don't even understand that much.All in good time -I'm enjoying my ignorance for the moment.

If this post hasn't been modified to focus strictly on the topic by 11 AM eastern time today, I'll be suspending Beretta for 24 hours. --AdminSorry can't answer that question specifically -off-topic question. Well how would you explain the high concentration of helium still in the rocks and the lack in the atmosphere? Faith in an old earth interpretation of some data to the exclusion of other data. Off topic question Except that we are talking about something that may have happened in the past - exceptional circumstances. We have a now rate and work with that.Knowing that it was always so doesn't change how we operate with the rates as they are right now.Observation and calculation shows us that the rates are pretty predictable now. If something else happened in the past, it really would be a stretch to worry about it now.It's history. How about you define 'historical'and 'origins' so that I can be sure that you know the difference between experimental and historical(origins) science? Definitions would be off-topic so google for your answers. A lack of helium that should be in the atmosphere if all this radioactive decay has been going on for hundreds of millions of years.An excess of helium still in the rocks when it should have permeated out if all this vast time has passed.That is the evidence. As for the cause, I wasn't there. There are people with various theories though. It's a whole lot easier to gather evidence now than it is to put together a clear picture of the past when absolutely no-one was there.I really don't think you can equate the two.You have to have far more faith to put together a picture from selected evidence especially when it was, apparently, hundreds of millions of years ago. Exactly.Other evidences defy the uniformatarian assumptions and no-one was there so it isn't recorded anywhere.We need to weigh up all the evidence not just the stuff that agrees with our worldview. Experimental science allows for commercial applications not historical assumptions. What if the laws of biology, genetics and reproduction haven't changed and macro-evolution is just faith-based wishful thinking extrapolated into the distant past? And you ignore everything I present in any case or refer me to the PRATT department of denial.We're supposed to be dealing with why evolutionary science is as much faith-based as other religions.I think we should stick with that. Go ahead, they're onto me already for off-topically answering your off-topic questions anyway.Edited by Admin, : Add note at top.Edited by Admin, : Sign note at top.Edited by Beretta, : Off -topic