Correct. Until evidence is discovered, that evidence is unknown to scientists. That’s how data works. It is not a complicated concept. Our understanding of the world grows as more evidence is gathered.
Is that kind of taunting likely to convince a reader of your position? Also, we try to avoid attributing motive in our forum discussions for reasons which should be obvious.
In any case, why would new discoveries be “embarrassing”?
Complaining that science and statements of facts are “hairsplitting” and obfuscation does seem to be a theme in many of the creation.com articles.
Is this an example of the rigor you claim?
Because we are highly limited in the amount of evidence we are practically able to collect about the past, as well as in our ability to conceive of all possible causes of a given piece of evidence, eyewitness testimony will always be preferable to speculative reconstructions.
For some reason you felt it was important to include your remark about “ancient” vs “modern” coelacanths. I don’t know what that reason could possibly have been, other than as a kind of smokescreen.
Because it proves that animal has clearly (according to an old earth interpretation) been living for many tens of millions of years without the slightest trace of it showing up in the fossil record. That raises all kinds of questions that are uncomfortable for old earthers, who are hanging their hats on the idea that we can draw conclusions about “Extinctions” from the record. This shows we cannot.
Yes it is. Did you actually read the article, or just skip down to the bottom?
I see PDPrice is going to completely ignore the evidence presented for erosion between strata (paleocanyons) and the slowly deposited finely detailed fossils (lagerstatten). Evidence which totally disproves his earlier assertions,
Actually, I trust trust the evidence of both history and science. You trust neither, not even eyewitness accounts.
Your literalist YEC places Noah’s flood at 2348 BC. That is some 300 years after pharaoh Djoser built the Step Pyramid out of fossil laden limestone, which is in turn a few hundred years older than cuneiform script. All of this is of course comes after the millennia long pre-history of human civilization in the ANE as found in sites such as Gobekli Tepe.
I’m throwing a flag on the play for your egregious changing of the subject midstream here. Rather than responding to what was said, you’re bringing ancient Egyptian chronology into the mix. Off topic (even with regards to our previous off topic discussion about light time travel).
Why do you think presenting scientific facts relative to the topic are a “smokescreen”? You seem to think all scientific evidence is some sort of rhetorical device to hide DA TROOTH.
Why do you bring up topics like strata geology and fossil formation then run from them when scientific evidence against your claims is presented? I’ve lost track of how many times that has happened.
You, egregiously or otherwise, initiated the subjects of both history and the horizon problem my friend, and history does pose a real problem for the YEC definition of the Flood.
And you are interpreting my words very badly if you think I meant that all claims based upon any historical record anywhere are to be blindly believed.
Even when their scientific understanding is completely wrong as yours demonstrably is. “Makes sense to an untrained layman” does not equal “is scientifically verified to be true”
Have you considered that your lack of knowledge of this topic may explain why you dismissively call it a “smokescreen”? You regularly dismiss forum participants’ efforts to educate you on science. That is why @cwhenderson spoke of the futility of engaging you on science topics.
You are missing out on one of the great perqs of Peaceful Science. I’ve learned a lot from the scientists who post here.
Why do find the absence of a particular modern day species in the fossil record somehow disturbing or surprising? You haven’t explained why you think any of this is “embarrassing” to anyone but you.
Do you find it “embarrassing” that “flood geology” and YEC advocates have no explanation for the various geologic formations we’ve asked you about which decisively debunk your claims of rapid catastrophic explanations (e.g., lagerstatten phenomena; the Haymond Formation of 15,000+ alternating layers of shale and sandstone, each with its own independent networks of animal burrows and tunnels)?
On the contrary, you seem very selective as to what evidence, historical or scientific, you are prepared to recognize.
You start out with the grand claim that without the recent global flood, we would not have a geologic column, because of abrupt transitions and erosion, neither of which registers as problematic to geologists, and then claim the fossil record as support despite the obvious problem of the segregation of the fossil record by geological age, as if that is some technical detail that can be sorted out later.
@PDPrice, do you have an explanation for paleocanyon erosion and lagerstratten—both of which totally invalidate the arguments in the Creation.com article you posted? (This “flood geology” thread seems to be running out of gas and merits a timed-shutdown but I want to give you ample opportunity to respond. If “flood geology” is actual science, it should have compelling explanations for such significant and ubiquitous evidence against its claims.)
And now that you know of the massive contrary evidence to the CMI claims, will such articles be revised?
Actually, you claimed to know the answer and also claimed not to.
First you said
but then you said
I consider obfuscating to be close enough to ignoring for practical purposes.
I can’t. I’m just going to assume that the solution cosmologists favor makes sense. Of course, your question is just more obfuscation, introducing an irrelevant issue in response to a question.
If your assumption that whatever the (secular) “cosmologists favor” is fair, then so is mine regarding the YEC light-time-travel problem. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say.
Good morning everyone. After I took a bit of a break last night (for steak, chips and a pint at my neighborhood pub), and now I see that this thread has grown somewhat.
I would like to thank @PDPrice for reminding me of the article by Michael Oard. I would agree that the correlations among Milankovich cycles and climate cycles are by no means perfect, but I also agree with MO’s implicit agreement that the Milankovich cycles are real, that they span over hundreds of thousands of years, and that they are seen in many geological records clearly documenting cylce after cycle.
Oard seems to accept that the Earth is far older than 6,000 years, and makes no mention of the Flood or its role in his arguments.
He cites only 3 references, the youngest over 40 years old, in claiming that cycles are not anchored in independent dates. Since then, numerous studies, i.e Campisano, 2012, report correlations with ice cores, desert dust deposits, radiometric dates in speleothems (which record annual layers), and stable-isotope records that are proxies for sea and atmospheric temperatures.
As a side note, Dr. Roger Anderson, whose paper I cited above, is a Emeritus Professor at the University of New Mexico whom I first met in the 1970’s when I was a wee undergrad at UNM. Roger has done a large amount of research on microscale stratigraphy in the Permian Basin; so much as his colleagues awarded him the sorbiquet of “the Varver of Castile”.
You have not expressed anything about the YEC light-time-travel problem except “I don’t know”. And you have avoided entirely the point that astronomy is all about the distant past.
Whataboutism seems one of your major response tactics. I think people generally see through that sort of thing.
You misleadingly call it history and contrast it with speculation. But the claim that it is history is itself speculation. We don’t have any actual eye-witnesses to interview. We have millennia old documents, the truth and accuracy of which you simply take as axiomatic.
No, it is obviously not true that eyewitness testimony will always be preferable to “speculative reconstructions”.
I can think of many forensic reconstructions of past events made on the basis of circumstantial evidence and inferences, that contradict testimonies from eyewitnesses, and where I would trust the reconstructions over those of eye-witness testimony. Just to take a simple example that shows this to be reasonable, imagine taking the testimony of the accused in a murder trial over a case built on forensic evidence like DNA, fingerprints, and so on. Even if the accused has alibies from 3rd party individuals who claim the accused couldn’t have done it, there are circumstances where I simply wouldn’t believe them.
It’s just not true to say that we would always believe eyewitness testimony over “speculative reconstructions”.
Of course, it gets much, much worse when the purported eyewitnesses have been dead and missing for millenia. Then the claim that we are dealing with eyewitness testimony itself becomes extremely dubious.
The motives for possible dishonesty must always be examined and taken into account. This is true with historical accounts of all kinds. I address this issue of forensics:
