XXXX Science

This is actually an interesting question to me. Everyone thus far has said creation science is not science because there is a predetermined conclusion about the existence of God. This is the way in which most creationists approach the issue, but is it the only way? In other words, what if someone entered the debate with no preconcieved notions, but used the Bible as a primary source of evidence?Now I know that the validity of the Bible is strongly debated in other threads, so I don't particularly want to get into that. But if the Bible can be treated as a historical book worthy of use as evidence, then this creation science tends to look a bit ike anthropology. It seems that this is the sort of reasoning that many creationists use to justify their form of science. So now, the question becomes slightly different.Is creation science analogous to anthropology? And is anthropology science? For the sake of argument, let's assume that our creation scientists are in fact entering the dialogue without preconcieved notions (even if this does not tend to be true in reality).

I believe the intent was "belief-based science," not a "belief based on science." The difference being, I believe, that a belief-based science is one which will only accept preconcieved ideas, in other words only reach certain conclusions which agree with its belief and not others. Is this what you believe?

This is exactly what I want to know also. Let me add a question to this post. Is there any way to study the world using the Bible as possible source of knowledge which could be scientific? Sure there are plently of obviously biased people in the world who enter creation science with preconcieved notions. It seems all refutation of creation science in this thread is based on the way individuals have practiced creation science, though not neccessarily on the discipline itself. Although in practice creation science is biased and not true science, is there a way in which one could theoretically practice something like creation science and still have it be considered science?

Let me explain my concern. Although nearly every Ider and creationist we have yet come across has obvious preset religious conclusions, is this a feature of the people studying Id and creation science, or is this a fact of the field itself? This is important, because in court someone may always claim that "Well, so-and-so was doing illegitimate creation science because of their preset conclusions, but I am doing legitimate creation science." This has been tried in court, of course unsuccessfully because these statements were flat out lies- the person making the claims did have preset conclusions. Is there something about creation science which is inherently unscientific, or is it simply the way creation science has been practiced that makes it unscientific? This seems to be what this thread is really about, and I think we have enough information to definitively answer this question, I just want to hear someone give a concise, convincing answer.

Buzsaw,At this point, I'd actually like a clarification of your opinion. Are you implying that if any portion of the Biblical account is true, then all of the Bible is true? It may be quite easy for one to find evidence that the Jew were sent into Diaspora however many thousand years ago through a scientific investigation. But this does nothing to show that Jesus performed miracles, or that God created the world in 7 days. Each and every fact in the Bible must be separately confirmed by independant scientific studies in order to be determined true.This is true for any historical reference. If you are performing "creation science," or here defined as determining the accuracy of Biblical accounts, two things must be true in order for this to be considered science. One, you must be willing to accept evidence which argues against Biblical accounts, and two, you must treat the Bible as you would any other historical reference- that is, treat it with a grain of salt. Are you willing to accept these two things? If there is a historical manuscript which contradicts the account of the Bible, it must be given just as much weight as the Bible, and the only arbitrator in this conflicting circumstance is discovered archeological evidence, or something like that depending on the nature of the conflict.The point of all this is that if someone performs "ID science," as you call it, the term ID science is misleading. Someone can perform a scientific investigation about the Bible, sure. But there is nothing that should distinguish this from regular old science. ID science is only science in so far as it confirms facts about the world, if those facts also tend to be Biblical accounts, that is secondary and inconsequential to the fact that this is science. On the other hand, if someone is trying to claim that the Bible as a whole is true, then they are most likely not doing true science. This is because proving the Bible to be true requires independantly proving every fact in the Bible to be true, which is more work than anyone can reasonably be expected to pursue in their lifetime.Doing science has nothing to do with the conclusion you reach, it has everything to do with the way you reach the conclusion. Therefore, a statement like is obviously trying to force someone into basing science on its conclusions, not its means. Percy has refused to answer your question in the way you want, because you have framed it in a misleading fashion. He has said that no IDer that he knows of is doing science, which simply means that no IDer he knows of is using the correct scientific means, not that no IDer can ever do science, or even ever do science that supports ID. So don't do around claiming Percy has said that no one who supports ID is a scientist, even though I know you want to, because that would be extremely libelous.Sorry for answering for you Percy I didn't mean to, but it kinda came out. I was tired of watching Buzsaw contort your words to mean what he wants, rather than accept what you obviously mean and is the logical conclusion.

Sorry, but this is a ridiculous argument that stems from a basic misunderstanding of science, that you obviously still need explained to you. This different between science and religion is that religion claims certitudes, whereas science claims tenuous facts. In religion, something is either true and it should be believed, or it isn't true and isn't believed. In science, data is analyzed to produce a fact with varying degrees of certainty, know as the error. For example, g=9.8m/s^2 +/- .1 m/s^2 means that we know the value of g is between 9.7 and 9.9, based on the accuracy of our measuring devices. Or we perform statistics on a graph and get a line with an r^2=.66, which means that the current fit can explain 66% of the data. This uncertainty allows for alternate explanations of the data to exist, which often do come about later, which is proabbly what you are referring to as fact changing. For example, part of the uncertainties in Newton's gravity calculations were later accounted for by Einstein's relativistic effects.So facts may be altered in the way I have just described. This does not mean that all this "boils down to belief." Scientists don't "believe" that the current repetoire of fact is true. Rather, they understand the uncertainty inherent in scientific facts, and accept current fact with a certain amount of uncertainty which may later be explaned by new facts. There is no "belief" in scientific facts. Scientists don't believe that g=9.8 m/s^2. Rather, scientists know that g=9.8 m/s^2 to within 1 decimal place, (or rather 15 or so decimal places, or whatever it is they got it down to now.)On the other hand, religious belief is inerrant, quite a stark contrast. I really find it hard to believe that this has never been explained to you before.

Are you treating the Bible as one book, or several different works? Does historical evidence supporting events in the Book of Job affirm the reliability of the Book of Mark? It depends. From a scientific standpoint, reaffirming that a "miracle" could happen in our time also means scientists will work out the mechanism by which such a miracle happen, and be able to reproduce the miracle at their convienance. For science to reaffirm a miracle, it must not be a one-time only event. Also, once science determines the mechanisms that produces one miracle, it will not reaffirm the possibility of other miracles which could not have occurred by that mecahnism. For example, say we understand how infinite bread and loaves could be produced by a generation or cloning of matter. This would not lend any credibility to Jesus defying gravity by walking on water. On the other hand, we can look at the DNA of the tribes of Israel, and determined whether they have been an isolated population or not through statistical comparison to close neighbors and regions they might have dispersed to during the Diaspora. Also, the statistical test you describe is unrealistic because humans have the ability to make decisions and decide where to move and to communicate with other humans, whereas the stastical test you are thinking of probably assumes random motion. I'm not familiar with the lingo, what is Imo and BB? I think your argument is that biologists cannot proof every portion of the evolutionary tree, so their acceptance of evolution is similar to a belief in the Bible. Here's the difference. Evolutionists have proposed several mechanisms which could give rise to the diversity of life on this planet, ie. natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, etc. These mechanisms have all been shown to act in the world today. There is no reason to think they were not acting in the world in the past. There is no evolutionary gap which cannot be accounted by the mechanisms evolutionists proposed. (I'm sure you disagree with that last statement, but that is the topic for another thread. I'm simply stating the form of the argument.) You can object to this theory by arguing that the mechanisms are wrong or incomplete, the mechanisms do not produce the assumed affects, or that there are points in the evoluionary tree which cannot be accounted for by the known mechanisms. Evolution is not a collection of facts, like the Bible, but a cohesive theory with underlying mechanisms.Here's why the Bible is different. There is no unifying set of mechanisms which can reaffirm the Bible as true. In fact, there are many parts of the Bible (like the miracles) go directly against confirmed and accepted scientific principle (like Cons. of mass). To prove these parts to be true involves falsifying or creating an exception to a scientific theory, which in principle is always possibile, but highly unlikely given the support that these scientific principles have.Believing that the Bible is true involves believing that one day accepted scientific theories (mostly in physics) will be falsified, or that how we understand our world is wrong. "Believing" in evolution involves believing that the proposed mechanisms have produced the diversity of life on earth. I think it is silly to call the latter a belief since the diversity of life on earth can follow logically from the proposed mechanisms. Science must always be correctly performed and must arrive at conclusions which logically follow from the correctly performed method. I think Paul's description is accurate.