I don’t know about elephants in pockets, but the esteemed Captain Spaulding discovered elephants in pajamas - though how they got there, he didn’t know.
I know this is a long time to wait for a punchline, especially since I posted this twice, the first time right when the hand of God closed the thread only to have that action miraculously vanish.
Example of the OEC viewpoint: http://www.answersincreation.org/
<kicks Old Earth Creationist in head>
I refute it thus!
</kicks Old Earth Creationist in head>
Well, I know it was created yesterday. The intarwebs are lying if they say otherwise. Scientists are dickering with the dates and time stamps just to get more money for research. (I got that, paraphrased, from Rick Perry himself. 
)
Milages vary. There are YE Creationists who will argue that the entire Universe is around 6000 years + 7 days old, or who will narrow it to this galaxy, this solar system, this planet, or this biosphere. The Answers in Genesis/Institute for Creation Science/Creation Museum bunch are Full Monty YECers.
I myself vascillate between OEC & TE- and I lean to Adam & Eve being literal people, the first ‘homo spiritus’ but not the first homo sapiens.
I believe OEC make the error of trying to put God in a box that they define and is the weak part of their argument. They accept the scientific view of the world and try to fit God in that ‘box’ that they created. Since they accept the scientific view, and have the God in the gaps argument, there is IMHO little progress to be made on that front. The debate must go to the Word, which I believe either does not fully support OEC or if made to fit seems to cause problems or just very interesting things with other parts of scriptures that is very hard to explain in a scientific view of the world, which calls into question why they are constraining God by the observed science in creation but not later.
I dispute the premise that YEC and OEC need to be considered separately.
In both cases you have an assertion that is not used to make any testable claims whatsoever. And meanwhile all data is interpreted in an ad hoc way to try to fit the assertion.
So I think it’s just necessary to fully explain how scientific and critical reasoning actually work. And why we should be wary of believing things which have not gone through this process.
Of course, you may need to first unravel some of the nonsense they had been taught up to now e.g. Many believe that scientists begin with axioms of their own about things like abiogenesis; which simply isn’t the case.
“I have no need for that hypothesis”. There, refuted but good.
OEC makes plenty of testable claims. That isn’t the problem - the problem is that the claims have all been falsified, but when you present the data to OEC folks they put their hands over their eyes. You are assuming that the only reason OECers believe is that they don’t get science, but the real problem is that the facts conflict with deeply held beliefs, and so must be rejected.
YEC is so fuzzy that I don’t know if any real claims are made at all.
Such as…?
First of all, I’m not assuming it – I’m basing it on my experience talking to OEC and YECers, and reading their websites (I don’t know why I do this).
Secondly, rejecting facts because they conflict with beliefs is certainly against the principles of critical reasoning, which is something I mentioned in my post (alongside the scientific method).
This isn’t actually true.
To have an ark’s worth of animals become the millions of species we see today, you need speciation to happen several orders of magnitude faster than the true evolutionary history, or the speed we see it happening today.
Most YECs are happy to say one wolf-like “baramin” became all the dog and wolf species we see today. But “they’re still wolves” :smack:
I should clarify this: most YECs I’ve met are happy to call something a baramin when it suits some analogy or intuition that they, or someone around them, has.
But they’d never concretely say: these species comprise one baramin because that’s a testable claim (of sorts) about the world.
Are you sure you haven’t got YEC and OEC back to front here? It is YEC that makes lots of testable claims (about the global flood, dinosaurs surviving until quite recently etc.), although, as you say, they are all easily falsified. (And, as you say, they don’t want to hear it.)
OEC is, relatively, fuzzy, and not so obviously easy to falsify, because it tries, so far as possible, consistent with the basic religious commitments behind it (which do not include Biblical literalism), to accommodate itself to the facts of geology and paleontology.
However, as I pointed out in my post (#40) above, it inevitably fails to accommodate itself to all the facts, because the facts of biogeography, and the mere fact that many species have clearly gone extinct at some time, are inconsistent with the basic, non-negotiable religious commitments that God be sane, and neither incompetent nor sadistic.
OEC, which, before Darwin, was a hypothesis that could be, and was, held by intellectually honest, open minded and scientifically informed people, was falsified back in the 19th century, most crucially by what Darwin (and Wallace) observed about the biodiversity of oceanic island environments. YEC, on the other hand, which only emerged as an influential belief system in the 20th century, was born thoroughly falsified in all sorts of obvious ways, and has only ever been embraced by closed-minded cranks and the determinedly ignorant.
That’s where I’m at too. I more or less think that God was the spark behind the creation of life here on this planet, even if that spark was merely setting things up so that abiogenesis could occur and life could evolve.
I don’t really think that mankind is particularly special; maybe we were simply the first of the creatures on the planet ready for a little nudge into sapience. Or maybe we were just the first to evolve that way that can (imperfectly) perceive his existence. I’m not sure.
At any rate, I don’t think that you can really be a rational believer in science and have any kind of faith and think much more creationist than that. Any more God-centered discussion seems to go off the rails into silliness and ignorance and ignores logical, rational arguments and actual scientific proof.
There’s no scientific evidence for your belief, but it doesn’t contradict or deny any scientific evidence either. So you are nothing like an OEC or YEC.
Anyway, if you read this tomorrow, you should know that the universe didn’t even exist yesterday. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s Thursday, and I have to go to church.
That is not what I mean by OEC. As I understand it, OEC is the view that more or less accepts the standard geological time scale, and is not committed to the literal truth of Genesis, but nevertheless insists that evolution (or “macroevolutoin”) never happened, and that each species (or taxonomic family, or whatever), extant and extinct, was individually created and placed on Earth by God.
As I have explained above, any version of this that would actually satisfy a Christian (or a follower of any other religion, except perhaps Satanism) has in fact been falsified by the facts of biogeography and paleontology.
I am fairly sure that the theory that you two seem to be embracing has not been falsified, and in practice it is probably unfalsifiable. It seems to accept everything that science does know about evolution. We do not fully understand abiogenesis (although we know enough that it does not seem implausible that it could happen without divine intervention), and even if we did figure out in detail how it could have happened, it would be effectively impossible to prove that it actually did happen that way, millions of years ago.
So yes, at the point of the original emergence of life it is conceivable, and consistent with what we know, that God might have dunnit. From a scientific perspective, however, that does not look like a very useful or necessary hypothesis.
And as Bill Hicks famously remarked upon this concept "Is anyone else disturbed by the idea that God is fucking with us?
…and found the bit
Like no dating method should show results > 10 K years. Like we shouldn’t observe speciation. Like there should be no red shift. I know their answers all too well, but if your are proposing a diet and say that all taking it should lose an average of 50 pounds, and the results show they gain 5 pounds, saying that all the scales must have been broken in no way means the hypothesis has not been falsified.
I am in no way denying that most of them don’t know diddly about science and critical thinking. I’m just saying that teaching them how science works won’t change their minds. You think Phillip Johnson is too stupid to understand how science works?
Dembski? Not sure about that one.
A person with a problem. What caused that spark? You need a spark generator if you believe in a first cause.
:smack: Quite right.
However, as I pointed out in my post (#40) above, it inevitably fails to accommodate itself to all the facts, because the facts of biogeography, and the mere fact that many species have clearly gone extinct at some time, are inconsistent with the basic, non-negotiable religious commitments that God be sane, and neither incompetent nor sadistic.
OEC, which, before Darwin, was a hypothesis that could be, and was, held by intellectually honest, open minded and scientifically informed people, was falsified back in the 19th century, most crucially by what Darwin (and Wallace) observed about the biodiversity of oceanic island environments. YEC, on the other hand, which only emerged as an influential belief system in the 20th century, was born thoroughly falsified in all sorts of obvious ways, and has only ever been embraced by closed-minded cranks and the determinedly ignorant.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not aware of a single OEC hypothesis, the way there is more or less a single YEC hypothesis. Theistic evolution is kind of OEC, and is unfalsifiable - as well as not leading to any kind of research program. The brand of OEC that says a day is a million years or whatever is pretty easily falsifiable. As far as God being sane, a look at the world falsifies that hypothesis far more than extinction events. The standard response is that we can’t understand God’s plan.