For an inexplicable reason, I was listening to local talk radio last night.
The topic was global warming, and the host kept pulling out all these statistics and theories about ice ages and the millions of years of various climate changes. I wasn’t paying all that much attention.
And then a caller called yelling at the host for using terms like “millions of years” when it was obvious to everyone that the earth wasn’t that old.
This seemed to start an avalanche of people calling either to slam the YECs or to slam the global warming deniers. One YEC said that global warming is entirely possible because the earth had been corrupted by people, and people had introduced evil into the world.
Then some of the global warming deniers were essentially calling the YECs morons who ignore science.
I found the whole fight rather entertaining.
Anyway, is there an actual rift between these groups, or were these just outliers spoiling for a fight?
ETA: I forgot that the original topic for the night was actually how some Republican Senator claims that the Democrats are planning to find a way to stifle talk radio. That was hilarious for its own reasons.
In my experience, global warming deniers regard the consensus about man-made global warming as an artefact of scientific politics and plain bad science. Deniers consider their own viewpoint to be the result of proper rigorous science, more scientific than the consensus, who select and warp data to conform to environmental dogma. Do a search for Intention’s posts to see what I mean.
If the consensus on global warming is the result of environmental dogma, Young Earth Creationism is the result of religious dogma, and the scientific arguments of YEC are tranparently and blatantly flawed. To global warming deniers, YEC types exhibit the all the worst behaviours of the global warming consensus, purporting to base their claims in science but really twisting science to support their agenda. The two groups were just never going to get on…
Not that I know of, but it is rather typical of YECs to snort at almost any discussion of science, whatever it pertains to. My impression is that this is done to try to maintain that man’s understanding of anything is feeble and flawed and can therefore be summarily dismissed, which of course is very convenient when the discussion turns to evolution or cosmology.
It’s actually part of a fallacy of generalisation (well, amongst other things) and typically goes something like this: “They were wrong about the cause of Malaria, and they were wrong about the configuration of the Solar System, so why should we believe them when they say rocks can turn into humans?”
Well credability is an important thing in life when you’re deciding who to believe. We can’t all be experts in everything.
The big mistake they make is to lump ‘scientists’, ‘the public’ and ‘polatitions’ into groups like there’s one big meeting every year where they decide what lies are generally agreed upon. (Just like I just did to them irronically) The very foundation of discrimination and intolerance.
Well, that’s one of the big mistakes they make, yes - the ‘they’ that were wrong about the cause of Malaria aren’t the people who, say, discovered genetic evidence for the common ancestry of humans and apes.
Another big one is to focus on a comparatively small number of goofs and ignore a vast ocean of successes. Yet another is to completely fail to grasp that science is the process whereby incorrect assumptions are systematically destroyed. If it were not the case that we discovered we were wrong about some ideas, something would be desperately wrong.