It seems to me that you have exactly the same kind of problem in your worldview as I do in mine. It doesn’t appear to bother you to leave the horizon problem to other people to figure out. And yet it’s supposed to be a problem for me to do the same with the light problem. This is a simple observation I’m making of your clear hypocrisy.
That’s an ironic response to a complaint about your whataboutism. Unconscious irony, I presume.
Are you familiar with the phrase, “People with glass houses shouldn’t throw stones?” I think of this every time an evolutionist attacks the biblical worldview.
Well, that’s certainly easier than actual thinking.
Yes. Eye-witnesses are well known for being notoriously unreliable. Countless experiments have demonstrated in spectacular ways how a crowd of observers will differ widely on what they observed—even just a few minutes after an event staged by scientists.
I would bet that our retired attorney participant, @Puck_Mendelssohn, could tell us some interesting stories about eye witness reliability and accuracy.
Meanwhile, it is apparent that @PDPrice will not be providing any compelling “flood geology” explanations for lagerstratten and the Haymond Formations’ 15,000+ alternating shale-sandstone layers filled with independent networks of animal tunnels and borrows. (Are you sure they were produced in a single year of a global flood?)
And before this thread closes in a few hours, I hope he will explain why “flood geology” has never provided evidence or reasonable explanations for why the fossil record preserved by a one year Noahic Flood stratified animal “kinds” into such consistent orderings of layers. Why are there no whale and porpoise fossils among the trilobites? Why no elephants alongside Nyasasaurus?
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Have you played the LucasArts game, The Secret of Monkey Island?
No, and I’m curious to know where this is going. Some kind of insult, I presume?
No, it’s just that our back-and-forth here reminds me of how the swashbuckling works in that game. Trading canned insults. Look it up sometime.
Another question I hope we will address before this thread closes is one that I asked Duane Gish during a telephone conversation back in 1974. We discussing a recent conference where this audience question had gone unaddressed: “Why has flood geology yielded no benefits in oil field explorations while mainstream geology based upon the geologic column has been spectacularly successful?”
Dr. Gish’s answer was something like: “Both are irrelevant to oil exploration.” He later said something akin to “finding oil is just a matter of hit-and-miss searching.” @PdPrice, do you agree with Gish? Do you have an explanation for why “flood geology” has not proven useful in finding oil? Secular companies don’t care about the religious implications. They are eager to apply whatever works in producing a financial payoff. Do you disagree with oil geologist and former YEC, the late Glenn Morton, who claimed that there was nothing about his “creation science” knowledge which helped him in any way in his career as a geologist? Or do you know something which Morton did not?
I agree with Gish. I think it’s mostly irrelevant. Maybe you should be asking former oil industry geologist and YEC Dr Tim Clarey of ICR? He would be able to give better insights into how the debate about origins does or does not affect oil industry operations.
That’s less interesting than I had hoped. I haven’t been trading canned insults. I’ve been complaining about your behavior.
So here’s what we have established so far: Science is unable to answer any questions about the past; it’s all just speculation and isn’t really science at all. Therefore astronomy is not science. We can say nothing about distant objects, since what we can see is only patterns in photons, and their interpretation is speculation. For some reason we can know that galaxies exist nevertheless, but it isn’t clear what that reason might be.
And for some other reason, if I can’t explain the horizon problem to your satisfaction, that means YECs don’t have to confront the problem of distant objects. I’m familiar with the frequent claim that if we don’t know everything we therefore know nothing. But I’m not familiar with the claim that if I don’t know everything you therefore don’t have to think about anything.
Now, how does YEC solve the horizon problem?
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I did. He never gave me a straight answer.
But let’s assume for the moment that he entirely denies the usefulness of the geologic column in oil exploration. Why does the entire geology academy and the thousands of geologists employed by the world’s oil companies disagree with him? Why did this fact (and a lot of other geologic realities) lead Glenn Morton to eventually abandon “flood geology” in favor of what both Tim Clarey and Glenn Morton learned in their scientific training?
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YECs don’t have a “horizon problem”, because we’re not restricted to naturalism and uniformitarianism in our explanations. Not knowing why something happens is not a refutation of our worldview, since we’re not trying to build anything from scratch like naturalists are.
In searching, I found one explanation from Humphreys, but it goes over my head quickly in the theoretical physics. So I’ll leave it to you if it’s your thing:
That’s not right. This new article may help you understand:
If I can translate that, you’re saying that YECs don’t have to make sense of data, because it doesn’t matter and anyway God can do anything.
It isn’t. I’m a biologist, remember? But it doesn’t matter anyway, right? It’s all speculation, and data don’t matter.
No, I’ve looked at too many of your articles to believe that a real explanation can be found in any of them.
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Indeed. I’m afraid that most of the tales are too boring to be worth relating in detail, but I will say that even when one is dealing with a group of witnesses who are thought to be completely sincere, it is cruelly difficult to get their stories to cohere sometimes. When people have an interest in the outcome or a particular strange point of view, it’s even harder.
Now, the problem greatly multiplies when one is dealing with unattributed sources, friend-of-a-friend stories, and the like. In the law we can use things like that as leads, but seldom, if ever, as evidence, because these sorts of things are known to be fundamentally untrustworthy. Even written accounts of past events are rarely admissible unless they meet very specific standards, for the same reason.
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Or of course the late geologist and forum member Glenn Morton, who left a legacy to Peaceful Science.
If true, that doesn’t bode well for the enterprise of science, which depends upon eyewitnesses to record the results of their experiments accurately and faithfully.
Wow. Incredible.
Literally. He’s going to shred those straws, he’s clutching at them so hard.
Misdirection again. We aren’t talking about the existence of the geologic column, we’re talking about stories concerning its origin.
Everybody disagrees with Tim Clarey? How do you know? Have you interviewed them? How do you not see yourself using the argumentum ad populum fallacy here?
I don’t really care why Glenn Morton decided to think what he did. That’s his business, isn’t it? I’m not interested in discussing Glenn Morton.