Historical Science and Observational Science

I think when Lyell said that he was going to “free science from Moses”, that is a pretty clear anti-Biblical motivation.

Ah, yes. My mistake. You were citing her in support of your position that there are two forms of science, but you never said that she does NOT support your claim that historical science is somehow inferior and less reliable than experimental science and, in fact, directly refutes that idea. For some reason, you conveniently neglected to mention this. Just a completely honest oversight, I am sure.

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That does not follow. If people are holding to false beliefs because they refuse to abandon a book they think was written by Moses, it’s understandable that a competent scientist would seek to free science from this. The only bias evident is that in favour of doing science correctly.

Again: Why did all these geologists, mostly observant Christians by and large, decide to misinterpret and misrepresent the evidence (in your view) to support a world that is billions of years old? What worldview did they hold that necessitated this?

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If he had said that before beginning any of his geological investigation, I’d agree with you, but he didn’t, did he? This is a statement made after he’d already performed a lot of his research that led him to the conclusion that the “Mosaical” view of geology was incorrect. If I found out that a particular view of history was wrong, I’d want to free science from it too, that doesn’t mean I have some kind of predetermined agenda.

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I thought you were arguing that Lyell was a Christian who believed the Bible (or maybe that was somebody else), but your answer here is incompatible with that notion.

I have no clue whatsoever what Lyell’s beliefs were. There is nothing incompatible in what I wrote, unless you are going to insist, against all reason, that the only way to “believe the Bible” is with YEC.

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Amazing you’ve been able to determine so many of the Christian scientists in the 18th and 19th centuries who did work disproving a young Earth were secretly atheists out to destroy the Bible. :slightly_smiling_face:

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He also falsely claimed for a while that she believed historical science wasn’t empirical.

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How odd. YEC’s base their entire worldview on a book, that they are convinced they have read and understood correctly. Shouldn’t they then be better at understanding the things they read?

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You won’t do either if you send it privately. There’s a messaging system here.

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I think that @PDPrice is afraid to go to the primary scientific literature. At some level, he knows he can’t accommodate the evidence.

And when I write “go to the primary scientific literature,” I mean the evidence, not ignoring figures/tables and pulling quotes from the Discussion section.

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I don’t see any evidence that she thinks that. I suggest that you stick to what she wrote instead of claiming to know her thoughts.

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You keep eliding the fact that the more evidence you have, the easier it becomes to assign a probability of knowledge.

That does, however, explain why it appears that your strategy is to avoid the evidence.

Then again, deep time long pre-dates evolution in science, and atheism pre-dates deep time. So you seem to be implying backwards causation.

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And we also know that evolutionary science in no way precludes experimental tests of hypotheses:

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77 posts were split to a new topic: Genetic Entropy

I’v never heard of or seen an author of any descriptive science article be so afraid to address questions about what they wrote than you are. You’re pretty good at rote repetition of the standard YEC catch-phrases but when people ask to to think and explain for yourself…whoops.

I would agree. The majority of his articles over at CMI are not dealing with the science directly. What science there is represents more of a toe in the water than a full dive.

Because I couldn’t help myself, I did read through parts of the article " Our post-critical thinking society". The irony was too powerful to ignore.

Man, he came so close, and then veered away from the answer at the very last second. If only there were this method that helped us break through the biases of human perception and intuition . . . . what could it be . . .

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Shouldn’t Christianity teach him to be much better?

Can’t speak for anyone else but I personally don’t care if he changes his anti-science viewpoints or not. I just want to make sure correct and accurate scientific information is put out there for others to read as a counter to the illiterate propaganda from places like CMI and AIG.

IMHO he’s been shown much more kindness than his belligerent and holier-than-thou attitude warrants. :slightly_smiling_face: