Posted on 01/16/2006 8:20:59 AM PST by dead
I AM a scientist and I have no beliefs. At least, I don't think I have.
But isn't that the point? If I knew I had no beliefs then that would itself be a belief. And that's the difference between science and belief, a point missed by advocates of intelligent design, who want their beliefs taught alongside science. A believer knows things, but a scientist tries to discover things. Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against beliefs or religion. I have enormous respect for religion, and am fortunate to count Christians, Muslims, Wiccans and indigenous Australians among my friends.
And my respect for their beliefs is tinged with envy. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be supplied with a User Manual for life, an omniscient mentor who you can ask for advice, and a knowledge that if you screw up this life then there's always another one?
I am awed by their beliefs, which have inspired some great human achievements. Oh yes, and some of the bloodiest moments in our history, too - but we scientists and rationalists haven't done too well on that score either, have we?
Which brings me to morality. Every religion claims its own system of ethics and morality. Well, funnily enough, my morality is much the same as yours, whether you're Christian, Muslim, Wiccan or whatever. We all think it's bad to lie, steal, kill or rape. Most of us think tolerance is pretty good, too.
So who gave me my morals? Since they're shared by most of the world, regardless of religion, I expect it's coded in my genes. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe it originated in the Creation.
US creationists ask why a belief in mainstream science should get special treatment in schools, while a belief in creationist science is relegated to religious instruction. They miss the point. A believer in science is not a scientist. A true scientist has working hypotheses, any of which can be discarded if evidence for a better hypothesis comes along.
That's what science is - a pragmatic method for exploring our world. If creationism was able to predict discoveries and generate technology, science would embrace it in a flash. But it doesn't. It obviously works in a religious sense for its adherents, but it doesn't do much for the rest of us. It's simply a set of beliefs, not a technique for finding out about the world.
And that leads to a curious asymmetry. I can never come up with a scientific argument to invalidate the beliefs of my religious friends; they have rock-hard, first-hand experience of their faith. But my self-doubting "working hypothesis" of science is always open to attack. As a scientist I must always be open-minded and take seriously any competing idea that might have mileage.
And as an astrophysicist, I really ought to be paying attention. I'd look pretty silly telling St Peter I'd dedicated my life to finding out the secrets of the universe, and had overlooked this awesome Being who had created it.
I don't believe it's going to happen. But I could be wrong. Sorry.
Professor Ray Norris is an astrophysicist with the CSIRO Australia Telescope.
Lots and lots of words, at the link.
Many scientific errors and other errors of fact.
No explanation.
"The greatest marvels of human existence and experience utterly defy and mock materialist science's feeble attempts to explain them. But materialist science refuses to concede. The high priests of materialism "win" simply by denying honest critics and fresh thinkers a platform from which to pose questions, and by mischarcterizing every criticism as unscientific (in other words, as not comporting with their 19th Century materialist prejudices)."
"Any science that cannot stand on its own without the crutch of a legal injunction to support it is in sad, sad shape."
Is it the "Science of Theory," or "Theory of Science"?? :-)
Either way, you're right....
Evolution is at best science fiction based on imaginary smoke and mirrors while masquerading as "truth" in the halls academia for far too long.
Actual "Evidence" -- the hallmark of science -- somehow eludes Materialists and Evolutionists.
Nice non-sequitor.
While your at it, what's the price of tea in China these days?
If the creator happens to be the Christian God there are several things you ought to keep in mind when you demand perfection from Him.
1. I think He's a bit smarter than you.
2. Before the fall all was "Good" not "Perfect"-consider the difference.
3. Man was supposed to subdue the creation initially (Which meant it was in some sense in need of control.)
4. There was a thing called the fall of man which altered creation itself.
5. We continually find things scientists assumed were meaningless DID have meanings.
Just to get you started on the list of reasons so many evolutionists get written off as blockheads when they open their mouths on non-scientific subjects like the nature of perfection.
Such as the rate of decay being constant.
Such as the assumption that the sample has never been contaminated.
Such as the rate of diffusion is the same on the edge (or surface) of a sample as it is in the middle (or center).
Prove the above assumptions, and I may allow for it to be a little more accurate. The problem with all the forms of dating is that they do agree with each other within a few percent, but that's not proof that they are accurate within a few percent.
Actually is is quite easy to take care of all three of these objections at once. Simply date something for which you have a known age. Compare actual age against radiocarbon age.
Try dating sea shells collected in the 1800s and see what you get. This also gives a correction factor for deep water marine upwelling.
Try dating Greek, Roman, and Egyptian artifacts of known ages. Compare actual age against radiocarbon age.
Date trees, whose age can be established by counting tree rings. Use long-lived trees, such as bristlecone pines, and overlap the distinctive rings for older and older samples. Date a particular ring and see what you get. This technique goes back some 11,600 years currently. This allows a calibration curve to be established which accounts for all three of your objections.
By the way, the only folks who propose a wildly shifting decay rate are creationists, not scientists. And, they have no evidence other than the results of radiocarbon dating fail to agree with their young earth beliefs.
For this reason the creationist websites are not a very accurate source of information on this subject.
You still have not proved that the rate of decay has been constant through time. Sure--it's been constant for the last couple of hundred years of so. But that's all you can prove. You cannot prove that it's been at this same rate through thousands (much less millions) of years.
These assumptions may be very basic (the speed of light), or they may be very limiting ("There is no God, so how can I explain this?")
But humans and chimps shared a common ancestor more recently than their common ancestor with gorillas, which in turn comes after their common ancestor with orangutans. So if you say that the human-chimp common ancestor was not an ape, you have to explain how orangutans and gorillas--which by that time were separate species--achieved ape-hood independently of the chimps at some later time. In that case, the term "ape" loses all taxonomic meaning, as it's not an inherited distinction.
You did not understand what I posted concerning radiocarbon dating.
The tree ring calibration would show any changes in the decay rate--if there was one. There is not. Again, the only folks proposing such changes are creationists who disagree with the results of radiometric dating and so are grasping at straws to find any flaws in the various methods.
The tree ring calibration does show some fluctuations in the atmospheric constant, and allows correction for those. That is why you end up with a calibration curve rather than a straight line.
Radiocarbon dating is useful back some 50,000 years. Other forms of radiometric dating must be used for older dates. That is outside my area of expertise.
It isn't really like that, it's more abstract. It doesn't have "size" so much as it has "dimension". Try to think of the abstract concept of a line. It doesn't have an end, or a beginning, it's just a line. Now when the line "expands" it doesn't actually get bigger in any normal sense of the word, because it's already infinitely long, but things on it get farther apart. This is more like what we have with physical space, except that physical space is more complicated then a line, so the dimensions aren't all infinite (imagine more like a circle, so when it stretches out there is actually more room on the circle for things). But we're still talking about the dimensions of space, not the size of an object. It's complicated, I agree, but it's also sublimely cool to contemplate.
There's a diference between faith and confidence.
Evidently, the author has never read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity (for those of you who have never read it, it's brainy, deep, and deeply intellectual as is all of Lewis' work), especially Book I, where he specifically discusses the issues the author mentions in the above article.
Sauron
I guess you're right, now that I think about it. Confidence is a more appropriate word, once something has succeeded many times over. Faith is more appropriate for something there is no data on, I guess.
But we can show that there's no evidence for accelerated decay. The faster isotopes decay, the more heat and radiation they give off. In order for the dates to support a young earth, the decay would have to have been accelerated to the point that the heat and radiation given off would have (quite literally) cooked everything on the surface of the earth. No plants, no animals, no oceans - nothing. Nothing but a big molten ball of radioactive rocks, anyway. However, here we are, not having been cooked off, and we have evidence for life in antiquity, ergo radioactive decay cannot have been accelerated to the point required to support young-earth creationism.
Of course, this does not prove the constancy of decay rates, but it does blow a pretty big hole in the notion that they could have been accelerated to the point that it materially affected our understanding of the age of the earth. Accelerated decay has consequences, so the easiest way to check it out is to look for evidence of those consequences. The effects of accelerated decay we would expect to observe do not exist, ergo, the evidence weighs against it.
Behe's argument is fallacious.
The thing I like best about myself is that I never boast.
Not a non-sequitor at all.
Look at the common dictiuonary meaning of faith, and you will find words such as "Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing." Faith is not weak or blind. It always has an object.
It hinges on what you mean by "ape." Evolutionists do not claim that we descended from what are "apes" today. However, many creationists falsely represent that evolutionists claim exactly that. It's a semantic point, but it leads to fallacious straw men arguments all the same.
I appreciate your discussion on decay constancy. How about contamination? As I understand it (and IANAS), the measurement methodology measures the ratio of two elements, depending on the type of dating being used. For carbon dating, the elements are C14 and C12, while for others it is uranium and lead, etc.
Why is the assumption (it seems to me) that the initial element (Uranium, C14, etc) the only initial element in the sample? Why couldn't a rock sample intially contain both uranium and lead? That would lead to an incorrect ratio of the two elements, thus leading to an incorrect date. The same goes for any other method of dating.
It seems to me that if a sample contains one element initially, then it must also contain some amount of the decayed element as well, since the decay process begins imediately after forming. Also, the decayed element would exist without the decaying process as well, forming from other processes.
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