How does one go about separating the geologic column from its origins?
I can visit a library. I can read a textbook. So can you. But will you?
So any appeal to the peer-reviewed science of the academy is an Ad Populum fallacy? Seriously?
Then why should I care about Tim Clarey? After all, that’s “his business”, right?
I believe you. Discussing Glenn Morton’s scientific and scriptural evidence is something you avoid. Have you ever considering reading Glenn Morton’s writings on geology and Genesis so you can understand why not all Christ-followers agree with you?
You have made this claim before, as as previously my response is that you too Paul, can in principle personally verify experimental results. No eyewitness at all required. Whatever the relative merits of the eyewitness discussion, it has zippo to do with experimental results.
In principle, me, you, or anybody else can replicate an experiment - it does not matter if I trust the scientist or believe there is some tin foil hat conspiracy going on. When results cannot be replicated, the questions heat up very fast. Read the boring methods section at the bottom of most academic papers, and have at it.
Where does this fixation on equivocating experimental science and eyewitness testimony come from anyways?
You’re getting confused. We’re not talking about conspiracies here, we’re talking about the basic reliability of human sense perception. When people make ludicrous statements like “eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable”, they don’t consider the fact that they are cutting their own legs as well. Everybody is an eyewitness of everything they see. That includes scientists making observations.
Do they? Can you replicate the transition from apes to humans? Can you replicate abiogenesis? If you did, would that somehow change the fact that you are also a human observer? If human observers are “notoriously unreliable”, then so must be human science.
It comes from a desire to help you see your massive internal inconsistencies.
If I may step in for a moment, speaking as a now retired Earth Scientist who has been working in the oil and gas industry for 35 years.
The way we go about exploring for hydrocarbons is by building models. To justify investing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in an exploration well that will be worthless if it fails, we need to present to management a comprehensive risk and cost/benefit analysis. We do this by splitting the problem in essential elements: is there an oil source rock? Is it mature to generate oil or gas? Is there a reservoir rock? Can the oil or gas migrate from the source to the reservoir? Is there a seal to prevent the hydrocarbons from escaping? Is there a structure that traps the fluids? Was that structure already there when the fluids migrated or was it formed later? And so on and so forth.
We try to answer all those questions, and others, by interrogating our models that we build from collecting, interpreting and mapping large amounts of geological and geophysical data (data that don’t come cheap in their own right). We can only assemble the data, interpret it and build it into coherent models if we, among other things, assign depositional histories to the rocks we model; understand their burial and possibly uplift histories; can tell for how long they have been buried, how deep, at what temperatures and at what pressures. We reconstruct the deformation history of the area under study to understand the sequence of events relevant to our exploration prospect - events that can make or break the prospect because of mismatch of structure vs. hydrocarbon generation and/or migration; deformation that may have caused faults and fractures that in some cases impair, in other cases help our traps.
None of this work could be undertaken without having a basic framework of time and space in which these events have happened. This framework is provided by the mainstream geological sciences (several hundreds of years of them) that give us the integrated history of the Earth over billions of years with a great amount of detail and often at remarkably fine resolution.
YEC brings absolutely nothing at all to the table to help build such models. It simply doesn’t provide a necessary framework in which to fit our data and arrive at an understanding of the local geological events in time and space.
You don’t have to replicate a historical phenomenon to scientifically study and understand it. It’s enough that tests on the evidence the phenomenon left behind are repeatable. I know you’ve had that explained to you many times before but for some reason you keep making the same blunder in reasoning.
To quote Nikki Haley, With all due respect, I don’t get confused. At least not here.
Note your original use of the word experiment, and my reply being in regards eyewitnesses to experiments, as distinguished from observations. You persistently attempt to deflect the central attribute of experimentation - that it is repeatable, and unlike personal recollections is expressly not dependent on any particular eye witness.
With that careful choice of words, my statement stands - it is ridiculous to assert an equivalence between experimentation and eye witness.
YEC is not intended to “bring anything to the table” in drilling for oil. And one could easily drill for oil without a belief in millions of years. YECs usually don’t disagree with mainstream geology in terms of basic features like uplift, stratification, etc. We disagree on the timescale and proposed causation (in some cases) of these changes. From the point of drilling for oil, that makes no difference. Oil drilling is operational in nature, having to do with the features that actually exist in an observable way. Oil companies don’t make any money on stories about the past. They make money on oil.
The lack of a stratified record full of fossils would be very odd if there were a global flood. We would then ask, “where did all the animals go that got buried by the Flood, and why can’t we find them?”. We would also find it puzzling if there were no evidence of massive erosion in recent history. Thankfully, we find plenty of that as well.
Yet all experiments are conducted by eyewitnesses.
If you want to say, “the more eyewitnesses of some event or process that we have, the more confidence we can have”, I have no problem with it, excepting of course in cases where we believe there is divine inspiration involved (i.e. the Bible). In the case of the Bible, we are not depending upon merely human witness.
However, I still do not agree with the blanket statement that “eyewitness testimony is unreliable”. I think those who make this statement have an ulterior motive for making it (namely, they want us to dismiss particular testimonies they don’t like, in favor of their own preferred ideas).
I am a major champion of the idea of replication in science. It is exactly that feature which distinguishes operational science from historical science. If you understand being able to replicate experiments, then you’ll also understand that distinction very well.
Of course we find lots of things which are physically impossible to form in a one time one year Flood but YECs just can’t find the courage to discuss them.
The way they find oil is by understanding the Earth’s deep time geologic history and knowing for a fact a global Noah’s Flood only 4500 years ago never happened.
