The scientific solution to the question “how old is the Earth” has already been found (although it may of course still be refined in the future). It is not a limitation of science that its conclusion is at odds with your presupposed answer based on non-scientific considerations.
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He did NOT say that—and science doesn’t say that.
Peer-reviewed science has not investigated and established an observed pattern of human resurrections, and science has not identified and described natural processes which would appear to support the natural occurrence of resurrections. That can certainly be said. However, that does NOT mean that science has declared that “resurrection is 100% impossible” or “there has never been an instance of resurrection in the history of humanity.” Science doesn’t operate that way. We should not confuse the two types of claims.
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Trinitarian Scientists have already reconciled the laws of nature with God’s ability to have arranged the resurrection of Jesus… either by miraculous means or natural means!!!
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I subscribe to Last Tuesdayism. Granted there is a lot of evidence of a last Monday, but that relies on interpretation of historical evidence only.
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“Even the strongest truth claims in science are only provision-al, approximate, temporary, and always open to revision.” ~ Joshua Swamidass
It sounds like you are saying that historical texts are a type of scientific evidence (i.e., evidence subjected to the scientific method.) Let me know if I have misunderstood you on this.
Historians often use the word evidence differently than scientists use the word. Once again, we must avoid equivocation fallacies.
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Yes, you have. I am saying that history is a legitimate field of knowledge and takes priority over science when the question is over a historical event.
Yes, they do. History and science are different fields but both make truth claims. I personally trust historical truth claims more than scientific truth claims when the subject is a historical event. I maintain that’s not merely appropriate, that’s required for anybody who isn’t into scientism.
Quite so. Nevertheless, science provides solutions. That they may change at some future time takes nothing away from the reality that they are today’s best explanations for the data.
You are trying to compare scientific models with some kind of Truth. That is a category error. We should be comparing scientific models against each other. When we do that, in the case of Old Earth vs. YEC it becomes painfully clear which one is the better one.
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For now. And if it is not, as you say, a Truth claim than I can be both rational and not believe the earth is actually, Truly that old at the same time.
As I said on the other thread, I’m sitting on the fence about whether believing in YEC is rational or not. It could be a rational conclusion flowing from a position taken on emotional grounds.
What I argue against is the claim that YEC is empirically supported. It plainly is not.
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Well I disagree, and in my experience people who say things like that have not made any attempt to listen and understand the YEC position. But that is off topic.
That is correct. The scientific consensus is that the earth is 4.54 billion years old, but future investigation could reveal that it is in fact more like 4.4 or 4.6 billion years old. Science can rule some things out altogether. The idea that the earth is on the order of 6 thousand years old has indeed been falsified for well over a century and there is no need to treat that as an open question.
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There is a need because we have historical evidence of a young earth, and scientific questions are always open. It’s not a question of degree.
Yes. And this is probably another occasion where it is worth reminding yet another generation (and everybody else) of Isaac Asimov’s classic series of essays:
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There is no such distinction. It’s solely a creationist canard. Swamidass is acknowledging no such distinction, as far as I know.
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All we have is evidence of some contemporary groups of people who believe there is historical evidence for a young earth. Actual history, Egyptian and elsewhere, predates the YEC dates for the flood. How would history limit the age of the earth anyways? Of the 4.5 billion years since the formation of the planet, written language has only been around for 5 thousand years give or take. Manetho wasn’t there, Suetonius wasn’t there, Josephus wasn’t there, nobody was there. Historical evidence is irrelevant to the question.
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Anything that does not rigorously and carefully follow the basic rules and principles of honest and accurate weights and measurements (cf Deuteronomy 25:13-16) should be ruthlessly excluded from science.
I haven’t seen this quote in context, but I’d expect that he’s almost certainly heavily qualified it. Pseudoscientists and antiscientists love to argue that just because the scientific consensus changes in limited ways under limited circumstances (specifically: in response to new evidence or improved techniques for analysing existing evidence), that somehow that gives them carte blanche to reject any and every scientific finding that they don’t like. It simply doesn’t work that way. Yes, people used to believe that the earth was flat, but it simply isn’t realistic to suggest that they’ll tell us that it’s shaped like a doughnut sometime down the road.
No! The difference between history and science is nothing whatsoever to do with “scientism.” It is simply about the different levels of rigour and quality control involved in the nature of the evidence and how it is analysed.
You need to understand that there are two different kinds of subjects: exact subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry, computing, electronics, geology and so on on the one hand, and subjects that deal with the vagaries of humans and other living beings on the other. Exact subjects draw their conclusions from measurement and mathematics: disciplines that have to follow strict, highly technical rules, that are easy to get wrong and difficult to get right, that leave little or nothing open to subjective interpretation or imagination, and that give exactly the same results no matter what your worldview. “Vagaries” subjects — the humanities, arts and social sciences — are vastly more subjective, being influenced by political agendas, ambiguities, figures of speech, and cultural and linguistic differences that are often poorly appreciated, especially by those of us hundreds or even thousands of years removed from the events concerned. Their conclusions may yield hard facts — though when they do so they have to rely on the “exact” subjects in order to do so — but for the most part they deal with data that is much, much more open to interpretation, debate and subjective opinion.
Geochronology is an exact subject. History deals with the vagaries of humans and other living beings. The problem with YEC is that it treats these subjects as if they were the other way round.
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They really are not the same.
The resurrection issue is an argument about a claimed historical event. Radiometric decay is mostly about developing reliable measuring methods, and is thus far more closely integrated with physics (and geology).
It seems to me that claims of the paranormal do not get stronger, but rather get weaker, when they become “historical” claims. In principle, at least, if a man insists he can bend spoons with his mind, we can test this by getting the man into a sufficiently well controlled environment to evaluate whether he can do it, or not. If he can, and assuming we really have controlled the environment adequately, then we have a phenomenon to explain, regardless of whether we have any good grasp of what sorts of things might explain it.
When it is claimed, however, that something in the way of a paranormal occurrence has taken place in the distant past, one cannot really evaluate it using the tools of history. In historical analysis one has to consider what the range of the plausible really is, and ask whether one account is more plausible than another, or, indeed, even if uncontradicted, whether it is plausible at all. When one account appears to involve things we have very good reason to think are impossible, e.g., a man bending spoons with his mind, we are not very good historians if we judge that it must have happened, after all, because we have indications that those who wrote about it thought it had happened. It is true that we cannot “prove” that a man cannot once have bent spoons by the power of his mind; it is false to suggest that any amount of textual evidence containing the recollections of witnesses, or folkloric traditions which may have originated from the recollections of witnesses, can convincingly establish it.
We see this in modern accounts of paranormal phenomena. The honest accounts of people who witness things can mislead us very badly. Witnesses can be mistaken; they can reshape their accounts to fit the accounts of others, or to fit their beliefs. They can be fooled. Alien abduction stories abound, and while we cannot demonstrate that so-and-so was NOT transported aboard a spacecraft by a gang of rogue intergalactic proctologists on the 3rd of July, 2015, we would be fools to accept such claims.
When the most one can say about an ancient paranormal story is that it cannot be demonstrated that it did not happen, this is as good as no evidence at all. When we can add to this the observation that some possible witnesses may have written, or had their recollections recorded by others, to the effect that it really happened, this really doesn’t help the case at all. There are far too many such stories, well-attested and honestly relayed, to be believed, and all the faiths have 'em. I think that Thomas Huxley basically got this right in his essay on The Value of Witness to the Miraculous.
Now, it remains every man’s right to decide what will convince HIM. That’s a matter of private judgment. But to suggest that historical evidence “trumps” other evidence, or that it ought to convince others, when it comes to the plausibility of paranormal stories, is just wrong. It is better to say that historical evidence is basically incompetent to establish a miracle, and that stronger stuff is needed.
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What you’re strategically omitting is that scientists don’t simply extrapolate, we actively test empirical predictions from past events.
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