Re: Do creationists believe in black holes?

On 31 Mar, 18:01, noshellswill <noshellsw...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:12:25 -0700, geoproc wrote:
It seems a fairly clear cut question. We all know about black holes.
They were suggested in the 18th century and eventually predicted by
Einstein's relativity, but of course it's impossible to directly
observe one.

And this matches nicely with the skepticism creationists have with the
theory of evolution. Are creationists happy with their kids being
taught about the existence of black holes?

Why is it that a creationist will always rattle off 'you can't show
that microevolution adds up to macroevolution' (ignoring, in any case,
the evidence for both), but has no problem with cosmologists
extrapolating from 'Einstein's math says this' to 'these bodies
exist'? After all, there is MUCH less evidence for the existence of
black holes than there is for evolution. Pretty much all the phenomena
associated with black holes - lensing, accretion discs, etc, can all
be generated by normal bodies of various densities and masses. In
other words, the only reason we have to believe in black holes, is
that mathematics predicts them.

What do the creationists here (if Ray isn't the only one left) feel
about this? Black holes - are they a fairytale, and are you going to
let scientists feed that to your kids?

GP:

Why do you beat this dead-horse? One can't evaluate a scientific theory
that doesn't exist.

GR is derived from ( as far as anyone knows ) the most fundamental
physical principles, and from those fundamentals makes quantitative
predictions for measurable phenomena. You may mathematically modify
in-detail those assumed principles and note the change-in-predictions. You
may even mathematically combine GR with an utterly inconsistent competitor
( QM ) and try to derive quantitative predictions either novel or more
accurate. May the best theory(ies) win. At least we are confident that the
verbal explication of those theories will have NO BEARING on the
truth-values assigned to them. Mathematic robustness, extensibility and
agreement with experiment alone measure its worth.

Here's the RUB! An analogous TOE would predict (current, at least )
behavior/structure frequencies ( of living X )from some landscape
function, and the (sets of ) amino acid sequence relevant to the
species-in-question. Given PTM a current TOE would be forgiven for putting
off reference to nucleic-acid sequence till next century or so. But, NO
such TOE currently exists.
What is interposed? Fictious "alleles" are
correlated with chimeric "traits", in a way that might well embarrass a
freshman physics student calculating projectile displacement from initial
angle-of-fire. A total lack of dynamic structure.

Now I'm no biologist, but I reckon I know this debate well enough to
predict that you've left something out here in your description of the
ToE. :)


Mind, lots of data exists bearing on the issue of biologic
development within/between species ... fair enough to say the data
overwhelmingly supports a developing biological unity. The biochem and
biophysics and genetics is real (unifying) science. But the theory of that
unity has yet to be written ... and 1000-books-of-blab do NOT constitute
the first sentence of a scientific theory.

I suspect you may be exaggerating when you say the theory has yet to
be written. Currently the theory based upon Darwin's work is the best
candidate, and in a sense that IS the theory, just one that needs
refining (in the same way that Newton's gravity IS the theory of
gravity, it was just refined by Einstein).

When a TOE displays the transition matrices implied above we can then
proceed to its evaluation. Until then, it's little more than " ... two
nekked naturalists strolling hand-in-hand through green meadows ...."

I'm going to have to admit ignorance of the mathematical details of
population genetics, because they are hard, but that doesn't mean I'm
going to accept that scientists have been writing evolution papers in
64pt font for the past 150 years.

However, I have written a few simulations of evolution, and I'd be
interested to know what kind of 'matrices' you're looking for. Can you
explain that in more detail?


%^] nss
*****

.

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