The "historical vs. operational science" distinction

Do you see how that leads to a total post modern nihilism?

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What are you talking about here? Do you have access to the Journal of Creation? Do you have my article?

No I don’t. Could you explain what you mean?

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Carol Cleland’s usage of “operational science”.

I looked it up online. No citations, at least none in the text. Did I somehow find a bad version?

Which is where you find alternative outcomes from the same or similar processes, so you can compare the results to see if they corroborate each other. Like multiple independent methods of radiometric dating sitting on different decay chains, dating on different types of rock, cross-referencing between tree-rings and radiometric dating, etc. etc.

You can also go and do the tests in many different locations on similar types of rocks.

Neither is the present. You can’t travel 3 minutes back in time and re-do the exact same measurement. The world has changed since you did it, and you’re not really going to be doing the exact same thing again, by the literal meaning of exact. All your results, all your observations are always going to be inferential in nature. You’re going to be comparing things that you know, unavoidably, did not occur under the exact same circumstances.

What if I don’t have that luxury, how long do I keep going? At some point I have to stop and actually use the pipette in an experiment, someone is paying me to get stuff done. In the real world I will always, and only ever be in some constrained circumstance where I’m forced to work with the results and instruments I have within the reasonably allotted time. So now I’ll have to do statistics, and put error bars on stuff.

But then we’re back at square one, with no serious distinction between “historical” and “observational” science. We have a limited set of measurements that we can compare to models, and do statistics on and interpret.

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This is worthy of being split @moderators

Well if you can’t in principle use evidence to test past events, evidence does not matter. It just comes down to what we each personally believe, independent of evidence. That doesn’t just apply to origins, but also the whole field of history and essentially the entire legal system. If there is no meaningful way to interrogate the past, we quickly reach major absurdities.

I used to agree with you about the distinction between historical and operational science. Then I found out how all science relies on past data, and historical science can produce new data.

What happened was that I was looking at the progress of knowledge from the wrong timeline. The key timeline to consider is the progress of our knowledge, not the ordering of events in the past. From that perspective, you see that historial science in fact has predicted new data, data that certainly existed before the prediction, but was only discovered after being predicted.

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Here you go.

If you don’t have a subscription, you will not be able to view the full article online. The references are endnotes, not footnotes.

All of these different methods are leaky buckets. They are all built upon assumptions. Often they do not succeed in corroborating each other and are simply thrown out. You can put all the leaky buckets in the world together and they will not add up to a bucket that holds water. You are still not able to repeat the past.

This is the crucial difference between historical and operational science. Operational science works based upon the idea that nature has a predictable way that it operates (thus the name, operational). That is why we can do repeatable experiments. We work on that basis. It’s actually a philosophical assumption that is rooted in the Bible: God created the cosmos and upholds it in a predictable way from one moment to the next. It’s called the uniformity of nature. Without this fundamental assumption, operational science would be impossible in principle.

I agree, we don’t get certain knowledge from any kind of science. But for the reasons I outlined, we have much greater confidence in operational science because of repeatability, than we can ever have in historical science. Certain knowledge can only come from the revelation of God.

We aren’t at square one. We are at a place where we have only probabilistic ideas (not certain knowledge) coming to us by way of science. The degree of certainty is way, way less for historical science than for repeatable operational science.

I said you cannot use science to prove or disprove anything about the past. You cannot directly test the past because we don’t have time machines. But you can come up with theories and test whether you find the clues you would expect to find. That does not amount to proof, however.

You can ‘interrogate’, but as I said, the certainty level goes down as the amount of time into the past you go increases. By the time you’re talking about things that allegedly happened millions of years ago, I argue the level of certainty is essentially zero. There are far too many unknowns.

Science doesn’t give certain knowledge in the first place. It gives only probabilistic claims, and the level of certainty must decrease with the amount of time we go into the past. Repeatability is the main distinction between operational (ongoing) science and historical science, which deals with claims about what may have happened in the past.

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Some forms of mineralization can only take place within certain bands of oxygen concentration. That strikes me as an inference about the past which has significance much higher than zero. There are many other examples.

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That is quite false. We don’t have to repeat a phenomenon to understand what happened in the past. We only have to have repeatable tests on the evidence the phenomenon left behind. If you claim was true detectives could never solve a murder from trace evidence. They’d actually have to murder another victim. Do you think science knows nothing about the Chicxulub impact 66 MYA because no one saw it in real time, or because we can’t repeat the collision?

Sorry but there is functionally no difference in the testing processes for “observational” vs. “historical”. It’s a useless Creationist distinction only offered as a cheap rhetorical ploy to ignore scientific evidence and the resulting conclusions they don’t like.

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When you say, “can only”, what you really mean is that within the scope of observations and conditions that we have had access to since the relatively recent dawn of modern science, this is what we have observed. You cannot rule out that in different circumstances we no longer have access to, the situation would have been different. This is a case in point for how people overstate their case constantly because they don’t understand the distinction between historical and operational science.

But you can see enough to confirm that the extract on p125 is from the article I just linked to.

And all the assumptions would all have to be wrong in ways that they still end up systematically corroborating each other for no apparent reason. The very purpose of seeking corroboration from independent methods is that it becomes highly implausible they all systematically fail in the same way at similar magnitudes of effect.

When, where, how often, for what reason? References please. Not hypotheticals or stories, prove it.

Ironically it’s obvious how that could be false, as the different buckets could be shielding each other’s holes. But enough with the bucket, analogy, that is all it is. Just something you make up.

All measurements was done in the past, nothing is ever exactly repeated.

Wouldn’t that also hold about the past? God has not changed the operation of the world in the past either? You seem to be saying that God would be systematically changing how the world works such that historical inference is impossible, yet at the same time saying that God ensures the world is predictable and repeatable. You can’t have it both ways.

Isn’t that exactly why historical science is also possible, the long-term reliable operation of the cosmos?

Are you not here completely hoisted by your own petard?

But as discussed previously, you have an unattainable definition of knowledge, and then you just assume that God gives it to you anyway. A complete digression from the topic at hand of course.

You say this, but no argument you have advanced entails this conclusion, nor do you have any actual numbers to give for these supposed “way less” certainties. Nor does it even follow that SHOULD the certainties be “way less”, that they are so low or bad that historical inference has been fundamentally undermined or rendered impossible. All you have done is state what you think are reasons why the past is subject to more uncertainty.

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Sure, but it is still an inference about the past far above zero confidence, and [ I would argue, but not on this thread ] far above YEC interpretations of the evidence.

One example.

Miracles are a suspension of the normal operation of things. Evolutionists do their historical science by assuming, contrary to the Bible’s history, that no miracles have occurred in the past. Just as 2 Peter 3 predicted, they work under the assumption that “all things continue as they have from the beginning.”

On the other hand, creationists do their historical science with an understanding of history given to us in the Bible. We do not expect that “the present is the key to the past”, but rather, the past is the key to the present.

So Creationists ignore all the physical evidence for evolution over deep time and just assume a huge series of undocumented “miracles” to hand wave away the data. That’s why what Creationists do isn’t science. In science the data drives the conclusion. In Creation you assume your conclusion then twist and cherry pick data to fit.

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That would be the Carol Cleland who used that terminology in her 2001 publication Historical science, experimental science, and the scientific method, right? The publication where she concludes

When it comes to testing hypotheses, historical science is not inferior to classical experimental science. Traditional accounts of the scientific method cannot be used to support the superiority of experimental work. Furthermore, the differences in methodology that actually do exist between historical and experimental science are keyed to an objective and pervasive feature of nature, the asymmetry of overdetermination. Insofar as each practice selectively exploits the differing information that nature puts at its disposal, there are no grounds for claiming that the hypotheses of one are more securely established by evidence than are those of the other.

She also, incidentally, would not agree with your assertion that historical nature is not subject to falsification:

Historical scientists are just as captivated by falsificationism as experimental scientists; as three
eminent geologists (Kump et al., 1999, p. 201) counsel in a recent textbook discussion of the extinction of the dinosaurs, ‘‘a central tenet of the scientific method is that hypotheses cannot be proved, only disproved.’’ … This doesn’t mean, however, that hypotheses about past events can’t be tested. As geologist T.C. Chamberlin (1897) noted, good historical researchers focus on formulating multiple competing (versus single) hypotheses. Chamberlin’s attitude toward the testing of these hypotheses was falsificationist in spirit; each hypothesis was to be independently subjected to severe tests, with the hope that some would survive.

In fact she spends a lot of the article pointing out that very few scientists focus on falsification so it’s really a moot point.

As can be seen from the above, your claim that the “asymmetry of overdetermination” makes historical science “fundamentally less trustworthy than operational science” is diametrically opposed to what Cleland actually wrote, because she says it is as securely established and isn’t inferior. Either you didn’t go to the source (as you claimed is your practise), or you did go to the source and are misrepresenting it.

Which is it?

P.S. This wasn’t what I was expecting to find - I was just looking to see whether Cleland’s use of the terms postdated creationist usage (which it does, since AiG records the distinction being used by Geisler (a biblical inerrantist) and Thaxton (an ID creationist) decades earlier. I should have remembered the 3 stage process for refuting creationists:

  1. See what they say (“Historical science … fundamentally less trustworthy than operational science.”)
  2. See what their source says (“there are no grounds for claiming that the hypotheses of one are more securely established by evidence than are those of the other”)
  3. Note the glaring discrepancy.
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I’m curious why would have expected Cleland’s conclusions to match my own, when I’ve already stated I’ve published something rebutting her conclusions. My mention of her was to show she used the terms, and they were not terms made up by creationists. You’re changing the subject to be about whether Cleland agrees with me, which obviously she does not.