RE: Young Earth Creationism Vs. Science (Statler Waldorf Contd)
November 11, 2010 at 1:43 am
(This post was last modified: November 11, 2010 at 1:45 am by Statler Waldorf.)
Well I don’t believe that the beams of light were created in place, but it does not violate the law of conservation of energy because that is a natural law that would have been created simultaneously. You guys always make the error of assuming that the laws of nature predate nature itself, which cannot happen.
I disagree with your assessment of rescue mechanisms. Oort clouds have never been observed, yet many textbooks talk of them as if they are a proven fact; which of course is ridiculous. Old-Earthers just know that Comets can’t last longer than 10,000 years, rather than re-evaluating their old-universe ideas they create a magical cloud of ice that can magically spit out comets every now and then. Have we observed this ever to happen? Nope. It’s a super-natural explanation dressed up in a tuxedo.
So despite these things never being observed, you find them “plausible”? Sounds a bit like a Flying Spaghetti Monster belief system to me.
So you believe in things because you think they are “plausible”, but then you turn around and believe in things that you admit are “implausible” because they only have to happen once? So you essentially will believe in anything then? In an interview Richard Dawkins stated that he is “99.99” percent sure that God does not exist, so this would mean that he is 0.01 percent open to God existing. This means according to a poster child of Evolution it is a lot more plausible that God exists than than guessing a 5000 digit pin number on your first try, so then will you believe in God ? Somehow I think you will not, despite your previous reasoning on the subject.
As to your question about “who created God?” I will set up a simple logically valid syllogism for you since valid logic is important to me.
Premise 1: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe has a beginning.
Conclusion: The universe has a cause.
Premise 1: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Premise 2: God is eternal, he has no beginning.
Conclusion: God has no cause.
So just using logic we can easily concur that the “God needs a creator” argument is not logically valid.
The Bible is not historically accurate? Then why did I just see a program on National Geographic where they were using scripture to find the cities of Sodom and Gomorra? They found the two cities exactly where Scripture said they were and they also found evidence of catastrophe in both cities. The Bible is used in Archeology more than any other holy book.
Well yes certain dating methods are meant for different materials, like radio-carbon dating is meant for organic matter and radio-metric dating is used for igneous rocks. However, when we use just different radio-metric methods on the same igneous rock you get vastly different ages. Sometimes these ages vary by a billion years! What kind of accuracy is that? When we use these methods to date igneous rocks of known ages we get ages that are sometimes thousands of times in error. We never get the correct age. So why would we assume that a method that never gives the correct age on material that has known ages would give the correct age on material that has unknown ages? Sounds like blind-faith to me.
All structures that exist today post-date the global flood. The methods used to date these prior to the flood are shaky at best and use false assumptions.
The Earth is full of evidence for a global flood and I would encourage you to read some of the literature on the subject.
Quote: I don’t care because you have yet to prove the validity of them. They are just your stories, full stop. Even if they were true, they point to a limited number of exceptions to the general nature of secular science not a whole sale issue. If you wanted me to consider them you’d prove they are factual.
Quote: Again, one article. One Limited set of reviewers.Thats not enough for the sweeping generalisations your trying to force. You’re not proving anything except one possible case of overzealous reviewing which I read differently to you. You can’t just make claims like ‘an article that destroyed Darwinian Evolution would never get published’ I don’t know this and you don’t know this. Why? Because every experiment conducted into the subject thus far has confirmed it. Trying to argue against it in this way is foolish Statler.
First of all, how else do you prove a person event is true rather than saying the event is true? Not sure what else you’d like, kind of ridiculous standards.
Secondly, first it was “No there are no biased reviewers, they just look at the Science”, now it is “Well these are only a few cases of bias, that’s not the norm.”. Moving the goal posts to try and win a discussion is pretty lame.
No reason to get grumpy.
So you really believe that secular journals will allow any kind of article as long as it has “sound” science? Well let’s take a look at the secular journal track record. We will examine this track record in how it relates to two assertions you made.
Assertion 1: In order to conduct good science you must get published in secular journals.
Assertion 2: The secular peer review process is fair and only critiques the “Science” and nothing else.
Important note: Editors have the final say in what is published in their journals, not the reviewers themselves.
So let’s look at the first assertion, if good science can only be done by people who are peer reviewed and good science always gets published then there should not be any cases that disprove this right? Actually the cases are numerous! Here are some examples…
Case 1: Watson’s and Crick’s work on DNA and the double helix was never peer-reviewed. Bad science? I sure hope not.
Case 2: The First Law of Thermodynamics (law of conservation of energy) was first formulated by German physician J. R Mayer. Mayer’s work was rejected by the leading German physics journal Annalen der Physik. Does this mean that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not scientifically valid? I sure hope not..
Case 3: Enrico Fermi’s paper on weak interaction theory of beta decay was rejected by the journal “Nature”. Does this mean Fermi was not a real Scientist? Was his work not scientific? I sure hope not.
Even the journal “Nature” admitted (Oct, 2003) it has made huge mistakes by rejecting solid scientific research for publication.
“‘There are unarguable faux pas in our history. These include the rejection of Cerenkov radiation, Hideki Yukawa’s meson, work on photosynthesis by Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel, and the initial rejection (but eventual acceptance) of Stephen Hawking’s black-hole radiation.”
So since it is apparent that good science can be rejected by these beloved journals, now the question naturally arises, “well can bad science get published in secular journals?”. The answer is of course yes. Let’s look at a few examples.
Case 1: The Piltdown man hoax, was published in numerous secular journals and was not labeled a hoax for 40 years.
Case 2: Hwang Woo-suk, falsified data relating to his embryonic stem cell/cloning research was published in “Nature” numerous times.
Case 3: Fraudulent work on superconductivity by Jan Hendrik Schon was published in Nature from 2000 to 2001.
Case 4: German anthropologist Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten systematically falsified the dates on numerous ‘stone age’ relics for nearly 30 years and was published in numerous secular journals.
So since the first assertion appears to be false, let’s look at the second one, do reviewers actually only look at the “Science” and nothing else? Let’s look at what a few actual editors of Journals say on the subject.
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability—not the validity—of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
-Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet
“Any journal editor who desires, for whatever reason, to knock down a submission can easily do so by choosing referees he knows full well will knock it down; likewise, he can easily obtain favorable referee reports. As I have always counseled young people whose work was rejected, seemingly on improper or insufficient grounds, the system is a crap shoot. Personal vendettas, ideological conflicts, professional jealousies, methodological disagreements, sheer self-promotion and a great deal of plain incompetence and irresponsibility are no strangers to the scientific world; indeed, that world is rife with these all-too-human attributes.”
- Robert Higgs, editor of the Independent Review
“Scientists are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm—in this case neo-Darwinism—so it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict the paradigm to get a hearing. They’ll find it difficult to get research grants; they’ll find it hard to get their research published; they’ll, in fact, find it very hard.”
- Dr. Evelleen Richards, University of New South Wales
Now let’s look at the belief that Creationists are rejected only after their work is looked at and found to be non-scientific. According to Karl Giberson, editor of Research News & Opportunities in Science this is simply not the case. Looks like they are rejected before the work is even examined; it also looks like extra measures (dishonest ones) are taken to sway people’s opinions on the subject.
“If an editor chooses to publish a hostile review of a book, common politeness would suggest that the author ought to have some space to respond. But editors have a “higher calling” than common politeness, namely the editorial mission and guidelines that inform every decision as to what will be printed and what will be rejected. I have learned, since becoming the editor of Research News, common politeness is often in tension with editorial priorities … In my editorial judgment, the collection of ideas known as “scientific creationism” (which is not the same as intelligent design) lacks the credibility to justify publishing any submissions that we get from its adherents. I would go even further, in fact. The collection of creationist ideas (6,000 year old earth, no common ancestry, all the fossils laid down by Noah's flood, Genesis creation account read literally, etc.) has been so thoroughly discredited by both scientific and religious scholarship that I think it is entirely appropriate for Research News to print material designed to move our readers away from this viewpoint. For example, we might publish a negative review of a book promoting scientific creationism while refusing to allow the author a chance to respond. Is this an unfair bias? Or is it proper stewardship of limited editorial resources?”
- Karl Giberson
Douglas Peters and Stephen Ceci also did a study on bias in these journals. They changed the names on certain articles that had been published at one point and re-submitted them. What they found was that the majority of these articles were rejected the second time only because o the names on the article. The reviewers were unaware that the articles were duplicates of previously accepted articles. They also found that this was the case when the institutes were changed from more prestigious ones to less known universities. So t is obvious that a lot of reviewers base their suggestions on names and universities rather than the “Science” in the article.
So it’s pretty apparent that the peer-review system on your side of the aisle is pretty corrupt and not trustworthy. To think that you ot on my about the Answers Journal wanting actual Creation articles for their journal It is also important to note that no creation journal has ever had a case of fraud. I trust them, and for good reason. So the next time someone says, “Well Creationists don’t get published in our journals!” (a false statement), I think the best response a creationist can have is, “Thank God!”.
Quote: So, you’ll just look for minor logical fallacies so that you can dodge the actual issue at hand. That is a poor style of debating which merely shield you from having to address the points being presented against you.
Minor logical fallacies? There is no such ting, all the ones I have pointed out are quite major I assure you. It’s actually the best way to debate. There are two ways to refute an article, you can either point out the invalid logic used by the presenter, or you can demonstrate that one of the two premises is false. Why would I ignore a golden opportunity to refute an argument by ignoring a logical fallacy? It makes my job very easy. Maybe you guys should use proper logic and force me to demonstrate one of the premises is false? Thus far, nobody has even gotten to that point.
I appreciate the dialogue and I find it quite interesting. Keep it up, and I will keep an eye out for your response Sam. I am tired now, and going to go watch some NFL Total Access, haha.
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I bet you he won't reply. And if he does, he'll say "Go to the Balcony".
Oh no! Why would you commit yourself to something that can be so easily disproven? I obviously did respond and I did not say "go to the balcony". Tootles.
