[QUOTE=Scholar Beardpig]
It is nothing more than a press release from the Land of Make-Believe. There is no meaningful way for an educated person, or even an intellectually honest one, to believe in creationism
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Sure there are ways that educated or intellectually honest people can believe in creationism. Several things are getting mixed up in this thread. One is young earth creationism being touted as the only creationism idea out there. Certainly the young earthers are going against mountains of evidence, and I’d agree that in this case you are right…there isn’t any way for either an educated or intelligent person to arrive at this as a viable conclusion without basically turning off their brains and just believing on blind faith.
However, when you start talking about the creation of the universe type creationism then things are a bit more ambiguous IMHO. I don’t believe that there is a god who created the universe, though as an agnostic I try and be objective and say there COULD have been (I just don’t believe there was), but I freely acknowledge that there is no way to know and folks who might feel that this is what happened have a valid point that can’t be disproved by our current science (unlike young earth creationism).
That’s not necessarily true. Much of science consists in devising experiments meant to validate or invalidate a given theory or conception of things. I’m not sure that counts as a “presupposed idea”, but you do start these experiments with a pretty good handle of what *should *happen.
It’s only Not Science if, given a contrary experimental result, you ignore or dismiss it and proclaim you were right anyway.
Bad science. But strictly speaking paleontologists don’t start off with the current paradigm as revealed truth, but learn of the development of paleontology from the very beginning, including the mistakes and dead ends. Plus you are allowed, no encouraged, to change the current view if you have data. I started reading about dinosaurs in the 1950s, and in my life they became warm-blooded (some of them) and we found out about the asteroid which may have wiped them out. (Except for the birds, of course.) In creationism the facts must be twisted to match the god-given “truth” (excuse me while I gag in calling it truth, even in scare quotes) and in science the hypotheses and theories change to match the data.
When creationists wander into the Dope, which is infrequent, I always start by asking them what they think evolution says. I seldom get an answer, but in my experience they really don’t know, and think it calls for impossible things, because that is what their church bulletin claims.
Not presupposed, but provisional - and a good experiment should be conducted with the goal of falsifying the idea. Creationism 300 years ago was more or less science; it became bad science or not science when creationists refused to change the hypothesis to meet the facts, so I agree with that part of your answer.
Pseudoscience. It’s not the only variety of pseudoscience, but starting out with a preconceived “truth” and adhering to it regardless of the data is a common version.
The point is that the only real difference between young earth creationism and regular creationism is that the young earth version doesn’t fit in as well with popular opinion. Regular creationism is wrong about things which are less well-known so it’s not as obviously wrong.
But pointing out the obvious errors made by young earth creationist makes it easy for people to see the errors. Then once they see the errors exist, you can point to regular creationists and say “Look carefully and now that you know what you’re looking for, you’ll see they’re making the same kind of errors.” You just need to awaken the sense of skepticism.
The main argument I tend to hear from Creationists is that “we assume things now are how they were back then” regarding things like radioactive decay and how we can’t assume that rates were constant and all that sort of thing.
A useless argument, I’d say, but that seems to be the crux of it. The point is that they look for a loophole to discard evidence that contradicts their claims.
The problem with creationism as a general term (there was a something like God or several gods that created the universe) isn’t necessarily the concept, it’s the specific instance most creationists argue for – the biblical creationism with the biblical God. While Occam’s Razor shaves away any creationism, I’d call it silly to believe in a more deist sense that an intelligent something set everything in motion, but not disingenuous. The problem with biblical creationism is that we already know all sorts of things like how Genesis 1 was added to the book of Genesis centuries after Genesis 2 (during the Babylonian exile), and how Genesis in general was ammended multiple times by various sects to make it fit their current times (Yahweh is better than Asherah/Baal/El Elyon/whatever, El Elyon is really just an alternate form of Yahweh, etc). It’s a book with a boringly human origin, and filled with tons of boring revisionism, so I don’t think that one can fairly argue for biblical creationism.
Like I said, I think some philosophical creationism (i.e. Deism) isn’t so bad, it’s at worst silly, but unfortunately creationism as a MOVEMENT is based around pushing a silly story such that we have basic, archaeological evidence that it was made up by humans. In this case the scientific evidence is irrelevant, it’s basic archaeological evidence about the Bible ITSELF that defeats the idea of biblical creationism.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
The point is that the only real difference between young earth creationism and regular creationism is that the young earth version doesn’t fit in as well with popular opinion. Regular creationism is wrong about things which are less well-known so it’s not as obviously wrong.
[/QUOTE]
Again, it depends on the definition we are using for ‘creationism’ and ‘creationist’. I’ve heard self described creationists who’ve basic view ends with ‘well, God created the universe and everything in it’. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that, from a scientific perspective, since no one really knows what set off the Big Bang. Like I said, I don’t personally think that there needs to be gods or a God or even a Dog or Og involved, but I concede that there COULD have been one. Now, if we are talking about creationism or creationists that posit a God/god/gods/Dogs or Ogs who created fish and wombats out of whole clothe by the magical wave of their wand, or other stuff that flies in the face of scientific reality, then I’m with you…that IS ‘obviously wrong’.
I’m all for an awakened sense of skepticism. I think Demon Haunted World should be required reading in grade school.
I still like Robert Ingersoll’s perspective on this in “Some Mistakes of Moses”, God created everything out of nothing, and then had to create Eve as Adam’s helper from his rib, the quote was more or less “And having used up all the nothing, God took Adam’s rib.”
I believe I’ve heard variations on this, a creationist grabbing some scientific factoid and claiming it disproves the Earth is really billions of years old, i.e. “Scientists claimed the Earth’s magnetic field decreased by three percent between 2000 and 2004. If the Earth is four billion years old, the magnetic field must have been three billion percent stronger! That’s impossible, all the metal would have been torn away! Scientists won’t admit how FOOLISH this is!”
One note about Ken Hamm and his “interpretations from different perspectives” garbage. Science is essentially a rigorous, organized exercise of guess and check. You make a guess about how things are, then check to see if any observation disproves it. Hamm includes in his lectures this slide (click the link for the actual image):
God, in this case, is the Bible, by the way. Since you cannot guess (because you believe you have the answers), you cannot check (because if the evidence contradicts your beliefs, you must be misinterpreting the evidence). If you begin with the assumption that any authority is infallible, you simply cannot do science.
This is obvious to reasonable and educated people, but Hamm is preaching to people who have never been faced with a serious factual challenge to their faith. Interestingly, I think they have repeatedly faced personal and emotional challenges, but faith is presented as the answer to those doubts. Since faith has essentially no place in science (or logic or reason), most evangelical and literalist Christians have no tools to deal with an undeniable fact:* the evidence contradicts their book*. More importantly, Hamm is preaching to children who don’t know any better and sabotaging their ability to acquire those tools. That’s what makes him dangerous.
Are they saying the God created the Big Bang and let the universe go from there, or that God created the universe as we see it today, and did it, say on last Thursday? And why would any rational person want to call himself a name that pretty much stands for idiocy?
Even if I thought that something - either god or grad student - created the Big Bang, I sure wouldn’t want to call myself a creationist.
[QUOTE=Voyager]
Are they saying the God created the Big Bang and let the universe go from there, or that God created the universe as we see it today, and did it, say on last Thursday?
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The former has been more my experience, though there seems to be plenty that are more oriented towards the latter too, if you stretch ‘last Thursday’ to be ‘sometime 6000’ or ‘4000’ or whatever years ago.
Because labels mean different things to different people. A lot of folks on this message board think the ‘conservative’ label ‘stands for idiocy’ as well, and whether it does or doesn’t has no bearing on the fact that a lot of people self apply that label…and that it means different things to each of them.
I wouldn’t either, even if I did believe that’s what happened.
