The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #134693   Message #3066971
Posted By: Stu
04-Jan-11 - 09:52 AM
Thread Name: BS: Young Earth Creationism
Subject: RE: BS: Young Earth Creationism
Every discovery opens a new field for investigation of facts, shows us the imperfection of our theories. It has justly been said, that the greater the circle of light, the greater the boundary of darkness by which it is surrounded.

— Sir Humphry Davy

Pinched from here.

"they interprete the evidence according to their worldview as creationists also do"

How they assemble the evidence to support their world views is vastly different, and not comparable. Creationists like to paint themselves as scientists but their version of science flies in the face of the most fundamental principles of science - evidence and reproducibility. If the evidence means a theory is wrong then a new theory has to be formulated. This happens all the time and although (as pointed out by LH), some scientists will shoehorn facts into theories they are espousing many do not, the assimilate the data, reassess and move on. It's what makes science so exciting and full of wonder.

Creationism, however, starts with the 'fact' as stated in The Bible and then work from there. They can never accept the facts don't fit what it says in The Bible because to do so would undermine their entire faith. Ah - faith. There's the word that brings the Creationist house of cards tumbling down, this is the bedrock of their so-called 'science'. You cannot practice empirical science if you are unable to accept changes in your fundamental beliefs, if you cannot accommodate new data that renders old ideas defunct.

Kent has posted some interesting material here, but is posting it with disclaimers like "I am not trying to persuade you that what they claim is true. I do want you to understand what it is that they claim." Fair enough, but something about that last sentence seems a little . . . odd. You can't just post this stuff and expect no-one to try to refute it. And you can't post statements telling us God is an artist and the universe is his creation and expect no reaction to the total lack of evidence presented so far to back that up, apart from some wishy-washy analogy about paintings, acorns and a rather tenuous view of art creation peppered with the odd neologism.

I love dinosaurs. I mean I'm obsessed with them. When I was growing up all my picture books had naked, scaley green dinosaurs. Now, they all have feathered, colourful dinosaurs and knowing the work being done on dinosaur integument we have some exciting times ahead. Our view of these incredible animals has changed beyond all recognition in the 170-odd years since they were first described; how few back then suspected that the birds we share the planet with are actually living theropod dinosaurs - wonderful. All this has been discovered by the careful gathering of data, rigorous scientific method and careful and considered analysis. And if new facts came to light that proved to successfully challenge the current established viewpoint and meant we would have to re-write the evolution of these incredible creatures then so be it (it's happening right now with the Triceratops-Torosaurus debate).

Until Creationist science is willing to have it's most fundamental views and beliefs challenged (as opposed to the preaching of sermons like Kent's) or to present solid evidence to the contrary, for peer review and debate then for all the blather it's nothing more than pseudo-scientific superstitious bullshit.