And if you think you witnessed the victim being stabbed, it could have just been convincing performnce with makeup and special effects. Then, after you ran away to get the police, someone else could have poisoned the victim and then stabbed the corpse in order to mislead.
I mean, sure, we can always come up with outlandish scenarios to explain away what is otherwise the most likely conclusion. That applies to “operational science” no less than to “historical science.”
If that makes you feel better, I suppose you will run with it. But there are plenty of other examples. How about Nicolas Steno, or any other geologist you might care to name?
True to a very large extent. The catholic church at the time was far from a monolith, there were many factions. The views on Copernicus polarized more as the issue rose through the ranks. But many DID oppose Galileo based on their Biblical understanding, which is what Galileo was responding to with the following in his letter to the duchess Christina:
The reason produced for condemning the opinion that the earth moves and the sun stands still in many places in the Bible one may read that the sun moves and the earth stands still. Since the Bible cannot err; it follows as a necessary consequence that anyone takes a erroneous and heretical position who maintains that the sun is inherently motionless and the earth movable. With regard to this argument, I think in the first place that it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify. Hence in expounding the Bible if one were always to confine oneself to the unadorned grammatical meaning, one might; fall into error.
Incidentally, that article, though filled with misunderstandings and falsehoods, makes my point for me. Until Copernicus, it was universally held that the bible affirms the centrality and stationarity of earth. After the empirical data had piled up sufficiently to make that view untenable (and we can argue about when exactly that happened), the interpretation changed. You can do the same with other conflicts between science and your biblical interpretation.
Fair enough. Perhaps you could provide an argumentative outline of the article, or at least the section where you critique Cleland.
I’d need to dive back into her specific article, but I recall it being more about the notion that certain streams of evidence will more likely (I’m using probabilistic terms) decide in favor of one hypothesis over another. However, Cleland would be the first to admit that means explanations can change as new evidence is discovered or other evidence is re-evaluated.
She is really not suggesting more than what we do when we misplace our car keys.
So Galileo agreed that Scripture is infallible. He disagreed on that particular interpretation, but there is no solid biblical case to be made for the immovability of the earth. Just some misapplied proof-texts. The creation account is a very different matter from that.
I think so too, but it’s not going to be meaningful outside a broadly biblical worldview. Why was he resurrected? And look how many people, even at the time, refused to believe nonetheless.
But here the conversation is moving beyond scientific method and beyond the science/values discussion. Here the move is to some framework larger than science (philosophy/theology). That is okay to do, but one needs to be careful to distinguish this move, even if our interlocutors sometimes do not. I do not think that Cleland makes a “meaning” move. The method of historical science, including Cleland’s, CAN establish whether it is more likely or not that Jesus was dead at time A and then seen conversing/walking/eating with people at time B. This idea has been kicked around on this forum at various times…
This is also true of the YEC apologetic model. Look how many people refused and continue to refuse to believe in it. An interesting experimental control on YEC thought might be to find some people who are not Christians/Muslims/Jews or religiously committed to see if they would agree with some of the YEC conclusions regarding age/flood/dinosaur remains etc… Do not read this as flippant, I’m generally interested if there are young earth thinkers that do not carry a religious worldview. That would be interesting and important to know about.
The thing about work like Cleland’s is that it methodologically speaks to Christians and non-Christians as a viable way forward to try and understand the past. If a method of knowing cannot remain relatively neutral or be very precise in where it is allowing for certain values to enter the equation, then it is always going to be suspect. I mean, even the God of Christianity chose plain old written words to reveal/preserve His Truth. You really can’t get much more methodologically neutral than that!
I remember hearing at one point that Shaun Doyle became a YEC before he became a Christian, but I don’t know the details of that.
Something that often puzzles me about the claim that rejection of YEC is based on rejection of particular worldview related to Judeo-Christian Scripture: How did the idea of a universe that is billions of years old first arise? What worldview required this, that necessitated interpreting empirical evidence that (according to the YEC argument) is otherwise ambiguous on the question in such a way to reach this conclusion?
That is to say, what motivated these people to go beyond what the evidence showed and start believing in a timeline that is billions of years long?
Evolution requires deep time, and atheism requires evolution. Simple. The worldview was decidedly freemasonic. That’s the origins. I’ve personally visited the freemasonic lodge that was James Hutton’s hangout in Edinburgh.
This implies that all the progenitors of the idea of deep time were secretly atheists, which I think you’ll have a hard time supporting.
Have you applied this to your own worldview? It seems rather obvious that you have a very strong bias against modern science. You have strongly implied that no scientific evidence will budge you off of YEC because you believe that scripture requires YEC.
Let’s look at this from the other direction. If we wiped everyone’s mind and hid every Bible, that is we start fresh, what scientific observations would lead anyone to the conclusion of YEC? If the only reason you conclude YEC is your beliefs about scripture, then that is a rather large bias.
I will quote you, from a previous post:
I would also point to this quote from Cleland:
It is the arrow of time that puts historical and experimental science on the same footing. Causes in the past have consequences in the present, and we can use those consequences to test our hypotheses.
Many Christians at the time would have disagreed with you there. Do you ever wonder whether a Christian 200 years from now will be saying “there is no solid biblical case to be made for the earth and life being young. Just some misapplied proof-texts.”
No, I hope and pray Jesus will have returned by then.
Evolution doesn’t require deep time. Deep time is a fact established by the scientific evidence, as is evolution.
Did you visit Siccar point, the angular unconformity geologic formation which convinced Hutton and other Christian geologists the Earth couldn’t be only 6000 years old? That was 240 years ago and some Creationists still haven’t gotten the word.
There were atheists before there was a theory of evolution. If the theory of evolution is disproven tomorrow I will still lack a belief in deities. What I would need to see is positive evidence for deities, and disproving a natural cause does not automatically evidence a supernatural one.
Do you ever wonder about the Christians living 200 years ago who would have said the same thing?
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
(Dawkins, the Blind Watchmaker)
What I would need to see is positive evidence for deities
Then this is the article for you!
Just as did every other theory in science. The Germ Theory of Disease allowed atheists to explain infectious diseases in terms of natural causes, as one example. You are really fighting against the entirety of science, not just evolution. If finding a natural cause for a natural phenomenon is a blow against your beliefs, then you are fighting a losing battle.
Lol. Your article asks people to use historical science.
