“If scientists reject intelligence design by their criteria, it is outside of science. And thus not a competing science theory, but something else.” This is my point. This is saying that, if only verifiable science is true, and science can only be natural then something that is not natural must necessarily not be true. This is horrible reasoning. But it is exactly what is going on.
If we look at the earth through the lens that all things must have happened though solely natural processes as we see them today then statistically it would take billions of years to get to this point so of course everything would point to a multi billion year old earth. But you are starting with the unprovable assumption that everything has functioned the same over the last 4.5 billion years. Darwin estimated that the earth is around 100k years old. but as things arose that were more and more unlikely under present processes that number kept increasing due to the assumption that everything has been the same.
The point is, if science says something is true or false that does not necessarily make it so. Not because truth is relative but exactly the opposite, because truth is truth whether anyone agrees with it or not just look at medicine a few hundred years ago and what happened to George Washington.
I can take something very sophisticated, such as a book, and before reading a page of it realize that it came from something much more complex than the book itself. The universe is very sophisticated, but that does not rule out the possibility of a more complex being than the universe creating it.
So then something even more complex than God created Him? After all, God is posited to act and, as Mises points out, a truly Absolute being cannot act because action entails uncertainty (a lack of complete and certain information about everything). Thus, God cannot be the Absolute.
Must a God that has existed always and forever necessarily be defined as the Absolute? Couldn’t a timeless God have, not absolute, but supreme power and knowledge?
A point of clarification: The best argument for evolutionary biology is not the evidence, it is inference.
Let’s say you live in a small tribe with an albino. You travel away from the tribe for a few years and then return. As you are walking into the village, you see a small albino child. What do you instantly infer from the age of the child and its albino condition? Why, you would instantly infer that - while you were away - the trbe’s albino had had a child. This is the principle of heredity. Recognizable traits are passed from parents to child. Of course, it gets a lot more intricate once you start looking into phenotypes, genotypes, etc.
But the principle of heredity is deceptively subtle. If two people - chosen at random - share a trait, then it is more likely that they have a common genetic heritage than two people who share no traits. This is an inductive argument. It is more likely that a trait should be shared by heredity than that it should arise de novo1. When this argument is applied not merely to a particular species of plant or animal but, instead, to all living things, the tree of life falls out immediately. This is the logical basis for the theory of common descent.
Gary North’s position on this issue is, ultimately, incoherent. On the one side, he eschews central economic planning, but on the other hand he espouses a centrally-planned Universe. His conspiracy theoretic view of the Darwinist eugenicists/etc. is largely correct but it does not follow from this that evolutionary biology is not, in fact, true.
Clayton -
1 The possibility of traits arising de novo over the course of many generations is the core part of the evolutionary argument and this is what really required Darwin’s legwork. This remains the “weakest” part of evolutionary theory and is the reason for people saying things like “evolution has never been observed in the lab” - a false claim, by the way. In any case, the logic of common descent remains intact either way.
Alternatively, he could, for whatever reason, allow what he created (man) to act on his own will even if it contradicted whatever God’s ends might be thus changing the situation.
but to answer Clayton, Mises also said that action takes place in the realm of time. If God is not bound by time then there is no uncertainty because the ultimate ends is already the “present” for him even though finite, time bound man is not there yet.
@idol: I do not believe that anyone has privileged knowledge about God; anything that someone else knows about God, I could also discover on my own. If a “supreme but not Absolute” God does not require explanation, then neither does the Universe, which is supreme but presumably not Absolute.
Am I the only who hates the careless use of the word ‘religion’.
Even in religious studies, there is not a good solid definition of this word. Many hindus, for instance, think it is a colonial invention.
It seems that it has become to mean some type of worldview. But this hardly captures what religions have in common.
It feeds mutual exclusion.
For one, Christians may reject science foolishly to avoid apostacy. And secularists will avoid religion, because Christians themselves have defamed ‘religion’ through their associating it with wrongly with apostacy. Both of these will have been the doing of Christians. This is the very thing St. Augustine had warned about:
“We must be on our guard against giving interpretations of Scripture which are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.”
@John Ess: It irritates the hell out of me, too. I think the most generalized approach to religion is to define it as that which concerns the sacred. This can be on an individual level (e.g. the memory of a beloved pet) or on a group level. It may have little, if anything, to do with “beliefs” or worldview. It may have no discernible purpose. It may or may not be connected to tradition. It may or may not have to do with the supernatural.
Don’t you see the flaw in this? You are admitting that things have changed but have no clue what may have changed or how that might have affected your scientific reasoning. Perhaps carbon dating is flawed in that carbon has not always degraded at the same rate at which we observe today. Your premises are based on faith of a different sort.
The indian subcontinent encompasses a number of different cosmologies and rituals. There are like 3 million different gods and goddesses. There is also many different philosophies, monistic and dualistic, material and spiritual. Even ‘atheism’ is acceptable. However, the British orientalists had to create a way to classify what they believe according to their own standards, and so called it ‘Hinduism’ (and also ‘Buddhism’) which is a ridiculous mirror of Christianity. Christianity is a world religion that sees all other ways of thinking as the same thing; as a rival to be beaten. Therefore it labels all heresies within this framework.
Even people in the west who like the Vedas and other things are different than Indians, because most people are ignorant of those books. It’s not like people read them like the Bible.
One of the strange things is that secularity is not much of a problem in countries like Japan, because Shinto was not framed in this manner. Hindus started believing in the myth of a singular hinduism in recent times because of colonialism, and post-colonial conflict with Islam. And Islam didn’t have intelligent design courses, until Christians started sending those books over there. Now they are most likely going to ban any mention of Darwin. Right now Turkey and Egypt mention evolution in school, but you can bet they will be gone soon.
“Don’t you see the flaw in this? You are admitting that things have changed but have no clue what may have changed or how that might have affected your scientific reasoning. Perhaps carbon dating is flawed in that carbon has not always degraded at the same rate at which we observe today. Your premises are based on faith of a different sort.”
the long-term scale seems to cohere with the calculations in astronomy. And these were made separately, and still show billions of years.
And what was the temperature of Earth 4.5 billion years ago? Was there an atmosphere? If so, what was its composition? How much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen was there? This could go on and on…at the end of the day, no scientist can answer these questions, and no experiment can ever prove this type of thing.
Scientists are pretty well aware there that there are dramatically different periods in the history of the earth. However not every single change or factoid is relevant to our question of the age of the earth.
“North’s point was not that Darwinism is wrong because 85% of the people say it is wrong. His point was that the idea of Darwinism has failed to influence more than 15% of the people because it was monopolized and totally dependent on governement.”
It’s very influential and the majority opinion outside of the US and Islamic countries. Those places teach it in public schools like we do.
Our country has a stronger resistance, because of a certain type of Christianity is more embedded.
You are confirming my belief that evolutionists are just as reliant on faith as creationists. No scientist can confirm any of the questions I posed in my most recent post. The link you just provided was nothing more than a giant list of theories on a timeline. Yet you personally called this stuff fact. It’s not. It is theory. You have to have faith to be a commited evolutionist.
@Prime: We can see the recent history of the Earth in tree rings, ice cores and varves, for example. These set a “local time scale” against which we can measure other geological processes. While there are issues with radiocarbon dating, what is clear on the face of it is that the Earth contains a “deep” geological record stretching back many, many orders of magnitude further back in time than the 6,000 years of Bishop Ussher.
Of course, the simplest proof that the Universe is much older than 6,000 years is starlight - the far edges of our own galaxy are more than 100,000 light-years distant. By definition, it requires at least 100,000 years for the light from those stars to reach our eyes. Yet you can look up to the sky and see the edges of the Milky Way.
I also reject Big Bang cosmology. But not because I believe God created the Universe 6,000 years ago. Rather, with Tesla, I hold that the Universe is eternal.