People Don't Know What Creation Science Is

In another thread, Kelly wrote: Actually, some of us understand all to well what creation science is based on the personal experience of having been creationists. I was raised in a creationist faith and attended a Christian college. It was while enrolled in a science program at that Christian college that I realized that there was no such thing as creation scienceI had grown up secure in the knowledge that someday I would go to university and find out the truth about how science supported my religious faith. What I discovered instead, thanks to some devoutly religious professors who were, above all, honest, was that there were not subdivisions of science. There was just science. If you were engaged in the process, it didn't matter what you believed, you were still doing science.The need to append a prefix to the word "science" inevitably meant that it was not really science that was being done. Then, as now, a search for the elusive hypotheses and supporting papers of creation science always came up empty. What is always found instead is an a priori desire to support religious faith with empirical evidence, such desire then supported with rhetoric about science, rather than actual evidence.Unpopular scientific ideas (like evolution, plate tectonics, old earth, etc.) did not succeed because their adherents pled for fairness or set up hoops of understanding through which the skeptics were required to jump. They succeeded by brute force. They provided evidence of such quality and volume that the opposition was simply steamrolled. Please quit your special pleading about our lack of understanding. It is simply naive and untrue. Give references to the evidence you claim exists. And please, Dear God Please, do not whine any further about how "actual scientific studies...can get very detailed and complicated." We know that. Just post the damn science.KP

So you keep saying. Have you come up with an example yet of the kind of hypothesis a creation scientist might make? Of the kind of evidence she would examine in an attempt to falsify that hypothesis? Since CS has been around for a long, long time, it seems like it ought to be easy to explain some of the ideas that have been examined and rejected or examined and found supportable. Evolution says nothing about a creator either way. In fact some people believe that the God of the Bible created the first life and let it evolve as he knew it would (what with being omniscient and all that.) Could you please quit dissembling about evolution and get on with the task of giving some living examples of creation science in action. Of course you have. You have been caught with your pants down and are unable to support your claims. You will now proceed to try and make it someone else's fault by accusing them of being dishonest and unfair. See! I'm psychic! Actually I cheated and read ahead. But seriously, accusing the people here of being unfair and dishonest is a pretty weak shot when all that has been asked, over and over and over again, is that you provide some examples of creation science that are analogous to the hypothesis/prediction/test/publish format used in all the other sciences. It is you who have endlessly run off on tangents (and now have just plain run off) to avoid this seemingly simple task.I sincerely hope that you will look inside yourself for some understanding of this situation. Take some responsibility for writing a cheque you couldn't cash instead of shooting the messenger (or teller, if you want an unmixed metaphor). As I pointed out in an earlier post, you are not breaking any new ground here. I and many others were once in your position and had to face the fact that we were unable to support our claims with real science. It then fell to us to learn the difference between doing science and having faith. You have the choice of following the path of people like Collins and Miller and a significant proportion of scientists in your country who do good science and have honest faith and are widely respected, or that of Dembski, Morris, Gish, et al, who only pretend to do science and are widely viewed as lying weasels.EDIT: To add kudos to dwise for an excellent summation.Capt.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : No reason given.

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Electronics must run on smoke, because when the smoke leaks out they stop working.

Fine. What we're just dying to hear, though, is the part of CS that isn't microevolution. What you seem to be offering is science where there is no particular creation component required (eg. microevolution), and philosophy where there is something that you claim is unexplainable by conventional science.Let me give you an example that may help you understand how it looks from here. Let's imagine that I propose a concept called Scientific Last Thursdayism (SLT). SLT suggests that everything, including our memory of things that we think we remember from before then, was created last Thursday. All the stuff we can observe going on now has been going on in the normal fashion since last Thursday, but on that date something of a completely different nature took place. Studying what happened from then until now is just regular science, and isn't really affected by SLT.Now I could be busy explaining all the reasons I thought SLT was correct when somebody else showed up saying no, no, no, Scientific Last Wednesdayism is correct. What is the skeptic to do? What possible test could he undertake to find out if SLT or SLW was correct? Talking about all the stuff that happened this week doesn't help, because SLT and SLW are about what happened before things got the way they are now.Since both SLT and SLW define their creation event to have resulted in things seeming to be just the way they are, what kind of experiments could we run to tell which is correct? Would it be much different if a third person came onto the scene espousing Scientific 6000 Year Agoism ?The scientific part of SLT would be the part that explained how we could undertake tests, or examine evidence, to show that the world and all our memories of it weren't created last Thursday. My explaining why I believe in SLT without giving you a way to test it out yourself is philosophy, not science. Science is the stuff that comes out the same way no matter what you believe going in. Science is the clearly explained pathway that would disprove what you claim. This is what has been missing from all your posts to date. What can we do that would disprove creationism, and who has performed those experiments? Where are they published? What are they working on now? In any real science, these questions are easy to answer. In fact, it's sometimes difficult to get the people engaged in a particular enterprise to shut up about what they're doing.What you are giving is a philosophical (religious) testimony about why you believe what you believe. I am not interested in what you think confirms creation, I want to know what would disprove it. That is what would make creationism scientific.Capt.

Again, fine. But, just as Last Thursdayism is all about The Really Big Thing that happened Last Thursday, so creationism is defined by what it says about Creation. Please start to address the specific claims of SC that differentiate it from the rest of science and explain the kinds of things that would show it to be wrong. Then tell us when this science was done and how it turned out.Capt.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : typo

You mean since last Thursday, when it all started?Capt.

Yes. Exactly. Now please tell me how your "scientific creationism" differs from my claim that all your memories from last year are an illusion? Remember that when I consider my own memories of the last 50 years I find they are exactly as they would be if they had been created to look that way just last Thursday.Capt.

The fact that it can quite explicitly define the kind of evidence that would falsify it, and has a lot of literature demonstrating attempts to do just that.Oh, and thanks for acknowledging that it is a theory, btw, since that means it has done just what I described and thus distinguished itself from creationism.Capt.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : No reason given.

So you keep saying. Perhaps you could kill two birds with one stone in that regard. You could demonstrate both your own open mindedness and the scientific nature of creation science by telling us some specific type of evidence that would change a creation scientist's mind about their belief, and then following that up with the scientific papers that describe how this subject was investigated.To this point all you have done is recite observations about how the world is and claim that that is what creation science predicts. That isn't science. Science means you have to describe exactly why you think certain observations can only mean the thing you are claiming. This is done by describing all the ways you can think of to prove yourself wrong, and then going out and setting up experiments to test those possibilities. Most of the hard work in science is spent trying to eliminate those possibilities, in trying to prove yourself wrong, not in confirming the observations that you think make you right.I'm sure that you have heard the saying "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Well, in order to earn the right to call your ideas science, (and as a good protestant, I'm sure you don't want your ideas living off some sort of affirmative action intellectual welfare program, which is what they are doing now) you have to explain how you have tried to disprove them. So far, all that you (and to be fair to you, the authors you quote and whom you mistakenly believe to be honest) have done is run around hitting everything you see with your hammer and saying "Oooh look, I can hit it, so it must be a nail!"Just to stretch the welfare metaphor** a bit, since you seem to have difficulty understanding science qua science, have you ever wondered why creationism so often ends up in court trying to get its way? Well, it's for the same reason a lot of people end up there trying to get what they want: they haven't earned their place honestly. If CS had, this thread would be filled with arguments about the scientific papers you had quoted instead of repeated pleas for you to just please, for the love of God, provide some. And again, the book you recommend isn't science.I, among others here, grew up on that stuff. (I inherited one of Morris senior's books from my dad.) Grew up in the church. Grew up in religious colleges. And I can tell you with certainty that the good, Christian men and women who taught me science cringe when they encounter that stuff. I remember very clearly a day early in Biology 101 (at Walla Walla College, Sept. 1970, Dr. Carl Forss presiding) when one of the students asked when we were going to get to the part about proving evolution wrong. Dr. Forss quite delicately explained that while we all believed that the Bible was the literal word of God, and that Christ died for our sins, and that Ellen G. White was his inspired prophet, and so on, that his mission in biology class was going to be to teach biology. He further explained that what that meant was that if we continued in the biology curriculum, we would come out of that program able to converse intelligently with other biologists about the material that was found in the literature of biology. He then further clarified that that literature, for better or worse, did not embrace our certain, faith-based knowledge of God's will and ways.I owe him, and others like him, a debt for providing me with an opportunity to examine my religious beliefs in an honest context with respect to the physical world around me. I am truly sorry, Kelly, that you have fallen into the company of individuals whose view of faith has made them liars. I wish you could have talked to Dr. Forss.** - yes, yes, I know. Just trying, vainly I suspect, to find something she can relate to.Capt.Edited by Capt Stormfield, : typoEdited by Capt Stormfield, : typo

Oh dear. Do you think it might be just a tiny bit relevant that the theory of evolution as it is now understood didn't exist in Newton's day? Newton didn't believe in relativity either. That was because it hadn't been theorized yet either. Does that have any relevance to the evidence for relativity that exists today? What do you think Newton's response to Einstein would have been if the information had been made available to him? Can you think of any good reason his response to the evidence for evolution would have been different than his response to the evidence for relativity?Would a scientist today who ignored the work of Einstein, and those who have expanded on his work, be a good scientist if he proclaimed that he was just "thinking like Newton"? Would a scientist today who ignored the work of Darwin, and those who have expanded on his work, be a good scientist if he proclaimed that he was just "thinking like Newton"?Did your fingers tell your brain about that post before they typed it?Capt.