Thursday, July 24, 2008

Created and Rational Disagreement

Not sure if any of you know, but Created and Rational wrote up a blog post that seemed to express strong disagreement with a post I made about Creationists not being able to trust their own thoughts. Here is his post of which I will quote:

AiG creationist thinkers at least have adopted almost a form of Critical Realism in regards to the past. Nothing can be absolutely proven in relation to the distant past before human presence in the region. Therefore whatever theory you make about the past is not independent of your presuppositions. This is how I have basically explained it, and earlier I criticized it on the grounds that it was an attempt on the part of the creationists to avoid the obvious evidence for evolution. Either way their position appears to have been mishandled by several people such as AiGbusted. It has been interpreted as saying we cannot trust our own thoughts because thoughts. The misunderstanding probably stems from this quote form the AiG article, "Is nature the 67th book of the bible?":

"Many who trust in humans as the highest authority reject the Curse as true history and thus deny its effect on our observations. Some point to the effects of the Curse as proof of “bad design.” For Christians, however, it is foolish to ignore the Curse when considering what nature can “reveal” to us. After all, this would be like someone trusting a funhouse mirror to show them how they really looked. They look into the mirror and see a distorted view but assume that this mirror must be “right.”"Now at first glance this does seem to say that we cannot trust our senses and this does seem to contradict what creationist have claimed about evolution being anti-science and anti-knowledge since it means our brain is just an assortment of chemicals which evolved over billions of years and can't be trusted. Is this a contradiction made by the author? No, creationists such as Ken Ham say that there is a distinction between what they call "operational" science and "historical" science. Operational science is everyday repeatable science which has been used to build technology and send humans to the moon. Historical Science on the other hand has to do with the distant past and origins which are affected by our presuppositions and is therefore not science in the same sense that operational science is. Furthermore in regards of repeatable, testable, and operational science the senses are very reliable and they believe that science requires "biblical presuppositions". loved and hated Creationist astrophysicist Dr. Jason Lisle explains:

"The biblical creationist expects there to be order in the universe because God made all things (John 1:3) and has imposed order on the universe. Since the Bible teaches that God upholds all things by His power (Hebrews 1:3), the creationist expects that the universe would function in a logical, orderly, law-like fashion. Furthermore, God is consistent and omnipresent. Thus, the creationist expects that all regions of the universe will obey the same laws, even in regions where the physical conditions are quite different. The entire field of astronomy requires this important biblical principle."

Here is how I responded:

C&R,

What do you think "biblical presuppositions" means? They mean that they assume the bible is true above any and all. By their dictionary, you look up truth and it says, "See Bible."

If you look at my post and the AiG article I referenced:

http://aigbusted.blogspot.com/2008/07/can-creationist-trust-his-own-thoughts.html

You see, they state that no amount of evidence for an old earth would convince them (They would always assume the evidence was in some way flawed).

This means if they look at varves, ice rings, tree rings, radiometric dates, plate tectonics, the approximated age of the sun, Stars that are millions or billions of light years away from the earth, and so on...

They cannot even consider that the earth might be older than 10,000 years. In conclusion, They will not trust the evidence right in front of their faces.

I did not say this in the original comment so I will write it now:

Creationists may try and distinguish between "operational" science and "historical" science, but they are forgetting that so many things, like Forensics science in murder trial, is used making the same assumptions as evolutionary or modern geological/astronomical sciences do (They presuppose the laws of nature to be constant and the same effects always have the same causes, and no magic).

2 comments:

Created Rationalist said...

http://wwwcreatedrational.blogspot.com/2008/07/response-to-aigbusted.html

Anonymous said...

God is consistent, huh? Well, according to the OT he sure is consistently horrible. I just don't get these people sometimes. They look at the Bible as truth, scientific truth, and look at real, observable evidence, and just say, eh, no, that can't be, we're being deceived by Satan.

Well, let's look at some of the "truth" in their Bible. According to Judges 11 it is perfectly kosher to offer up a child for sacrifice to god. And he accepts. Great truth there. Even if there was a god, if we were to assume that it was a loving and merciful god, which there is no reason to assume, then the Christian/Jewish god fails this test completely. If I had to pick a religion, it could never be Christianity simply based on the terrible morals found within their "true" book. Anyway, I like your blog and I'll be sure to look back in. Check mine out some time.
http://godmasterginrai.blogspot.com/