Re: Creationism is a falsified scientific theory

In article <1156038950.792008.152200@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Kent" <musquodster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mark Isaak wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 20:59:21 +0000, George Evans wrote:

in article pan.2006.08.17.16.43.39.47691@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mark
Isaak at eciton_NOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 8/17/06 9:45 AM:

On Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:20:35 -0500, *** C wrote:

RAM wrote in talk.origins

George Evans wrote:

You have misidentified the villain. It is fundamentalism.
Creationism is still viable. It is not "unsupported by
science". It is in second place.

Provide some evidence of this "scientific support." And what
exactly do you mean by second place.

I didn't know scientific theories were in a queue.

If they were, creationism wouldn't be second, it would be dead
last, and would have to back up everytime another scientific
theory was presented.

No, creationism would not be in the queue at all. It was once,
about 200 years ago, and it reached the head of the queue, and
it got rejected on account of being wrong. (Which brings us
back to the Subject of this thread.)

The closest thing I have seen to a falsification in this group is
the idea that creation would predict a very sharp boundary in the
geological record representing the moment of creation--the
reverse of an extinction. And, of course non is found, so that
seems conclusive.

No,,George Evans, it's conclusive of nothing at all. In fact, if God had
made the world, then He could have one so in such a way that there was
no such boundary. The problem with that statement is that it cannot be
disproven, even in principle. It's just a variant of Last Thursdayism:
God created the whole universe, including all evidence and memory of
previous existence, last Thursday. You can't disprove that, so, by your
logic, that's conclusive. But that logic is wrong.

The problem is that under "peer review" it was
shown that the possibility of a world wide flood brings the data
into question because such an event could have changed geology.

Except that there is no possibility of such a flood. There's not enough
water on the planet for it to rain steadily everywhere for forty days
and forty nights.

Therefore the "experiment" is not conclusive.

I'm not sure what experiment you're talking about.

Biblical creationism made at least two definite predictions -- that
the earth is less than 7000 years old, and that there was a global
flood after humans came on the scene. Both are now spectacularly
falsified. Creationism also predicts stasis of a sort, that that
animals we see today have existed as long as there were animals.
That too is spectacularly false.


I would not call those predictions. Predictions are saying what will
happen in the future not the past. Those would be postdictions or
retrodictions.

Kent, you're getting hung up on certain meanings of the word
"prediction." Forget prediction. Let's just say it this way: The Bible
says that that the earth is less than 7000 years old, and that there was
a global flood after humans came on the scene. But both statements have
been spectacularly falsified. (Mostly Mark Isaak's words.)

Back to prediction: When scientists say that a theory predicts
something, they don't mean that some event will happen in the future,
they mean they predict that certain phenomena will be discovered. For
instance, "When Dmitri Mendeleev proposed his periodic table, he noted
gaps in the table, and predicted that as of yet unknown elements existed
with properties appropriate to fill those gaps."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendeleev%27s_predicted_elements )

Those elements already existed, but nobody knew about them. Mendeleev is
said to have predicted them.

A 7000 year old earth is not falsified. Think
Omphalos hypothesis.

That doesn't advance the discussion at all. Omphalos is not even in
principle falsifiable, and thus does not fall within the realm of
scientific investigation.


Very little is ever falsified.

Hypotheses are falsified all the time. For instance, Aristotelian laws
of gravity and motion were completely falsified by observations and
hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Mach, and others. To wit
(restated in modern terms, but with the essentials preserved):

I. Objects at rest will stay at rest.
II. Objects in motion will eventually cease moving.
III. What comes up must come down.
IV. The Heavens are an unreachable sphere in which perfection reigns and
different laws operate.
V. The Earth is the reference from which motion is measured.

Well, that's all wrong. Newton et al. showed that the laws of motion are
very different from that set. And then Einstein said that under certain
circumstances they're even more different from that.

There are other hypotheses that have been falsified: the steady-state
theory of the cosmos and the expanding-earth theory of geology, to name
just t wo. The big-bang theory "predicted" that there would be a cosmic
background radiation in the microwave band ... and it was eventually
found. That radiation is not explained by the steady-state theory, which
is thus falsified. And expanding-earth was one attempt to explain why
continents fit together so well, but it has a lot of serious problems
such as violating various conservation laws.

Oh, yes, and don't forget phlogiston and a whole host of wrong
hypotheses about heat and energy, all falsified.

The problem
with creationism is that it does not make predictions (say what will
be observed on the future).

Well, not entirely. If you'll accept scientists' use of "prediction"
when talking about scientific hypotheses (which you have to because we
are, after all, talking about science), then you'll see that the Bible
makes certain predictions about evidence that must be discovered ...
which have not been found (and for which plenty of contrary evidence has
been found).

--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com> http://www.timberwoof.com
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

.