Lambo:As long as we view things from different glasses we will continue to see things differently, even if we look at the same thing.
You can read the full write up here
http://www.answersingenesis.org/cre...i1/creation.asp Past and present
We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present. When one is trying to understand how the evidence came about (Where did the animals come from? How did the fossil layers form? etc.), what we are actually trying to do is to connect the past to the present.
However, if we weren’t there in the past to observe events, how can we know what happened so we can explain the present? It would be great to have a time machine so we could know for sure about past events.
Christians of course claim they do, in a sense, have a ‘time machine’. They have a book called the Bible which claims to be the Word of God who has always been there, and has revealed to us the major events of the past about which we need to know.
DDH: Actually, those of us who are scientists or who teach science do, indeed, have such a time machine. We call it “science”. Imagine for a moment that you are charged with investigating a fairly recent event such as a train wreck, a plane crash, or a murder. There is an entire branch of science dedicated to the investigation of such past events. We call this branch of science “forensic science” and we often ask people adept at the practice of this science to tell us what their best scientifically informed guess is as to what has happened in the past, such as what caused a plane to crash or what triggered a mine explosion or what caused a building or bridge to collapse, in order to keep it from happening again. Of course, the most obvious reason that we would need to ask these people to practice their expertise in this science is that we weren’t there and the people who WERE there as witnesses or participants are now deceased.
The interesting thing about forensic science is that it uses exactly the same techniques, methodologies, and mathematical equations as the more common and mundane fields of science such as physics, chemistry, biology, physiology, climatology, and engineering. These techniques, methodologies, and mathematical equations are the same for forensic science as they are for regular science. And the mathematical equations of regular science have a very unique characteristic: they have great predictive capability. The prophetic capability of Newtons’s F=M X a or Einstein’s E=m c**2 is without peer. Biblical prophecy can’t even begin to approach the success of the predictability of the differential equations of ballistic motion that hold communications satellites in orbit around the earth. Of course, the only difference between the various scientific fields is whether we run the equations forward or backward. For fields like architecture, chemical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, weather prediction, ballistic missile design, astronomy, bridge building, software design, electrical engineering, designing weapons of mass destruction, etc. we run the mathematical equations forward. For fields like archaeology, pathology, forensic engineering, forensic pathology, medical diagnosis, cosmology, and even Biblical ethnology, we run the mathematical equations backwards. The equations seem to work equally well going backward as forward.
Lambo:On the basis of these events (Creation, Fall, Flood, Babel, etc.), we have a set of presuppositions to build a way of thinking which enables us to interpret the evidence of the present.
DDH: Hold that thought. We will return to it momentarily.
Lambo:Evolutionists have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose, e.g. no God (or at least none who performed acts of special creation), so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence of the present.
DDH: Well, actually, no. Evolutionary biologists have no need whatsoever of hypothesizing either that God exists or that God does not exist. Indeed, evolutionary biologists don’t even concern themselves with God at all. If they are involved in science, that hypothesis is precluded from their consideration. Evolutionary biologists begin where all science begins, i.e. in doubt. All of modern Western science began with Rene Descartes’ “Discourse on Method”. Most lay people are only familiar with this treatise through the famous dictum, “Cogito ergo sum”, most often translated as “I think, therefore I am” but more correctly translated as “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” In this treatise Descartes dared to do the unthinkable, which was to question how humankind could know anything. And, then granting the singular assumption that it was possible to actually know anything, Descartes went on to ask an even more insightful question, “with what certainty did we know that we knew anything?” Descartes dared to think like an atheist and managed to not get toasted in a time when doubters were commonly burned at the stake by the Church for such questioning. Other famous thinkers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Newton, and Einstein, to name only a few, went on to build principle on top of principle to Descartes’ fundamental scientific underpinnings.
With over 300 years of hindsight, modern philosophers of science inform us that there are three unifying strands that tie all of this scientific work together.
The first is that the success of all of this work derives from the willingness of those, who would use this method to think, only in naturalistic terms. That is to say that the observer is only permitted explanations that would have objective explanatory value. There can be no explanations that would not look objectively like an explanation to everyone who heard the explanation. The objective explanation cannot invoke magic, miracles, faith, or fairies, not that they might not actually be the cause of what was being observed, but simply because those attributes are not the same for everyone. The explanation must be in terms that everyone could agree to. If the other person could not see the explanation as the cause of the phenomenon, there was no explanatory value expressed in the “explanation”. Any acceptable stepwise scientific explanation had to stop at the step before the step that requires the explanation “and then a miracle happens”. This does not deny the existence of some deity, nor does it require that denial. It simply states that any explanation, to remain scientific, had to stop at the step before coming to that explanation.
The second unifying strand was that all useful scientific theories made some type of prediction. The prediction could be trivial or monumental. But, some type of prediction was absolutely essential for the theory to be called science. It is often thought that this means that scientific theories are testable against said predictions. This is not categorically true. There are some “scientific theories” such as string theory that actually make predictions but that cannot be formally tested, at least with any form of technology that we are likely to acquire in a reasonable period of time. But, if string theory remains untestable, it will almost certainly be replaced by a theory that actually is testable.
Finally, ALL scientific theories can be imagined in some way to be falsifiable. We can imagine a way in which the theory in question could be proved to be false. This is not to say that the theory is false. We are simply saying that we can imagine some set of circumstances that would cause us to come to doubt the explanatory nature of the theory. If one cannot state some fashion in which the explanation could be shown to be false, then once again the theory’s explanatory power is brought into question. For example, if hereditary theory ever came up with an individual offspring whose phenotype (i.e. its physical characteristics) had no relationship whatsoever to its genotype (i.e. the arrangement of the DNA in the organisms genetic chromosomal structure), then all of hereditary theory would be thrown into chaos and the entire understanding of heredity would have to be reformulated, assuming that a field of science called “heredity” even continued to exist at all. If fossils from much deeper layers turned out to be much more complex and much younger than fossils found in shallower sedimentary layers, then the entire field of paleontology (strictly speaking, stratigraphy) would be brought into question, and we would naturally be justified in continuing our search for a coherent and logical theory with more all-encompassing explanatory power.
With regard to the modern fusion of genetic theory with Darwinian evolution, often referred to as the Modern Synthesis, it is the fact that the genetic information that we have does not contradict either the morphological (Linnean) classification of the living world into Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Genus and Species or the cladistic analysis that convinces us that evolution is a true representation of the way that things actually happened. It is one of the great successes of Darwinian evolution that modern genetic techniques have confirmed the much earlier morphological (Linnean) classification scheme rather than contradicting it.
The day that ID people proffer up some way in which ID might be made falsifiable or some prediction that might be made from ID or Creationist theory, they will be that much closer to having their “theory”accepted as science. But, to date, we have had zip from them on either score.
