I haven’t run into many OECs like this. They’d give up the inerrancy of the Bible, which seems very important to YECs, and still have an easily falsifiable belief. YECs with unfalsifiable beliefs have the benefits of being comforted by the thought that there is a reason for all this and of not having to believe in stupid things. That there is no evidence doesn’t bother them - look at all the deists who believe in a God who has not contact with us and who is unfalsifiable by definition.
It’s not a question of smart or stupid.
Scientific and critical reasoning don’t come naturally to humans. It’s worth pointing out to people when they are not thinking in this way.
My experience has been more with YECs than OECs but I think in both cases they attack the very foundations of rational thought. For example, they’ll say that everybody interprets data to fit a preexisting belief.
Those are terrible examples of testable claims. They’re all negative*, the first is meaningless, and the other two are predicting the non-existence of an already observed phenomenon.
Of the three, the only statement which I can see a creationist making is “no dating method should show results > 10 K years” because in itself it is not a testable claim.
No individual dating method is going to unequivocally prove deep time. In fact, the data doesn’t say anything in itself. If you ad hoc interpret data after the fact you can say millions of layers of ice cores prove the earth is a week old.
- There are examples of good, testable negative predictions. The red shift example you gave would be one of them, if we hadn’t already observed stellar spectra.
But generally positive claims are more useful and immediately testable.
Too true. They’ve created loads of terminology - apobaramin, holobaramin, metabaramin (actually I might have made that last one up, but this makes no practical difference), but try to pin anyone down on the question of whether any two species are baraminologically-related and you either hear crickets chirping, or get an obfuscatory answer.
Well, I don’t know who you may have met, and, indeed, I do not know how many OECs who fit my description are around these days (though I strongly suspect that most of those people who say they do not believe in evolution in surveys are nearer to this than to any form of YEC), but I think what I said is pretty much what is usually meant by OEC, and what was meant by the OP. Certainly it is what the mainstream view of the origin of species would have been before Darwin’s time. Even those who were still “catastrophist” geologists by then were well aware that the Earth had to be much older than 6,000 years.
On the other hand, as I understand it, most of the people who make a lot of noise about creationism these days are YECs of some variety. Maybe it is these that you have ‘run into’.
You can have all the comforts of Christianity, and believing there is a reason for everything without believing in the inerrancy of the Bible. In fact, that is the condition of most Christians today, and nearly all Christians (who gave the matter any thought) historically. A strong commitment to Biblical inerrancy is, mainly, a 20th/21st century American heresy.
Also, although, as I said, OEC has been falsified, it is not all that easy to falsify. In my experience, few people, on either side of the argument actually know how it is falsified, and I do not think anybody in this thread spelled it out until my first post. Mostly you just get bluster about how it is not scientific because it is not falsifiable. But that is only true of straw-man versions of OEC. The real theory, because of its crucial theological commitments (God not crazy or malicious), is falsifiable, and has been falsified.
You seem to be saying that YECs do not have to believe in stupid things. Surely you can’t mean that! YECs believe in a vast array of incredibly stupid things.
OECs, on the other hand, although they are wrong, do not have to believe in very much that is stupid at all. They just have to be ignorant of some fairly recondite facts of biogeography and paleontology, or else fail to draw the (less than blindingly obvious) correct implications from them. (Unless you mean to imply that simply believing in a God is stupid. - That is most of the human race written off then!)
Deism is a completely different issue. It is, more or less, the position that bump was espousing, and I agree (indeed, I was saying as much in the post you commented on) that it is unfalsifiable. As such, it does not in any way conflict with science, and is fully consistent with evolution. I am not sure what point you are trying to make about it.
Johnson was a law professor at Berkeley. No matter how much I despise the guy, I think it would be hard to claim that he didn’t understand critical thinking, and that he is too stupid to understand evolution. That is why I used him as an example.
That’s actually true. That is why reproducibility is required, and why papers get reviewed. The difference between scientists and these guys is that scientists are trained to look for this and to correct themselves when it does happen. That is part of graduate school - getting your wrist slapped over and over again by your adviser when you make this kind of mistake or make unwarranted claims in a paper.
YECs make the first claim all the time - that is why there is a big section on talk.origins about it. The second is a clear prediction from a created and reasonably static universe. At this late date of course many things falsifying YEC have been observed. The list is nearly endless. The reason YEC is bad (no, terrible) science to the point of not being science at all is that they have made their premise unchangeable, and spend their time creating ad hoc explanations for the observations which falsify it making no predictions at all - or none they will stick to. The problem with people like Johnson is not that they are stupid, but that they are dishonest in the way fanatics often are.
First, nothing is going to unequivocally prove anything. The people from Terry Pratchett’s Strata might pop in and tell us how they salted the earth with fossils and built it to look old. But I stand by my statement. It is a falsifiable claim, and that it has been falsified by several dating methods just strengthens the refutation. You can’t prove it to be true, of course, but if multiple dating methods confirmed that nothing seemed over 10,000 years old it would be a very strong claim. Ad hoc excuses are common from the proponents of a dying hypothesis. In real science younger scientists, without anything invested in the dying hypothesis flock to the new one. YECers don’t come from labs, they come from churches, and they have an investment in YEC from a different source. Clearly if religion were not involved YEC would be as dead as phlogiston.
If you read a biography of Hubble, you’ll know that a red shift was not predicted by the cosmology of the day - which was still debating if there was anything beyond our Galaxy. This was not because astronomers were creationists, they just assumed a static universe. (Look at Einstein and the cosmological constant.) While modern YEC is fairly recent, the concept itself is ancient and certainly does not predict a red shift. Coming up with a modern hypothesis that has already been falsified doesn’t mean that falsification is incorrect - it just means that the people with this hypothesis think in an ahem interesting way.
Missed this due to the misformatting:
I do not see how it can possibly be falsified, unless you have some objective means of telling whether and when the authors of Genesis were using metaphors. In any case, it is not proposed as even a quasi-scientific hypothesis, but as a hermeneutic one, so falsifiability is irrelevant.
Well, that might be an argument that would convince an atheist. Not many of them are creationists in the first place though. Producing arguments against creationism that would be convincing to an atheist is, frankly, just jerking off. Really, arguments against creationism that will only be convincing to someone already convinced of Popperian style falsificationist account of the nature of science are just jerking off too.
The same, I suppose, could be said about arguing with people with firmly closed minds, which probably means virtually all committed YECs. What is interesting, and probably worthwhile, is producing arguments that might be convincing to someone who finds creationism an attractive view, but still has a reasonably open mind. That frankly, is probably most of the population, many people who espouse OEC ideas (because they don’t know better), and, in particular, most children and young adults. Those are the people who are worth trying to convince.
Incidentally, I did not say, and do not think, that extinctions tend to show that God is insane (within a creationist theoretical framework). I said extinctions tend to show that He is either incompetent or malicious. It is the biogeographical evidence that would make Him insane, and that, in fact makes a much stronger anti-creationist case. The distribution of species in geographically isolated environments as compared to large regions such as continents shows a distinctive pattern (first recognized by Darwin in the Galapagos) that would makes absolutely no sense from the point of view of any imaginable intelligent designer (but that makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective).
Sure, but most rational religious believers (I do not include YECs in that set, but I do include many OECs, and casual creationists who just have not thought about the issues much) know in practice that that argument cannot be pushed too far. If that were not the case, Darwin (a young man expecting to take up a career in the church, and an enthusiastic adherent of the creationist “natural theology” that he had learned at Cambridge) would not have been convinced by the evidence he himself discovered. And even if he had been, he would not have been able to convince more than a tiny handful of contemporaries, and evolutionary theory would be nothing but a footnote in the histories of 19th century crackpottery.
Maybe it is possible to imagine convoluted explanations as to why God might have thought it a good idea to create and then destroy the dinosaurs, but when it comes to explaining why He would have put all those strange finches (and iguanas, and tortoises), but no other land birds (or reptiles, or mammals), on the Galapagos, and have repeated that sort of pattern in small isolated environments all around the world (but never in large, continental environments), then the mind just boggles. No sane creator would do that. It is hard to imagine even an insane reason for doing it!
This is actually one of the most glaring examples of ignoring what has just been said that I’ve seen in a while.
People might think that I’d put those two quotes in the wrong order.
No, it isn’t.
Pre-existing beliefs are a part of science as they’re a part of all reasoning. But trying to fit / reinterpret data after the fact is absolutely not part of science. The whole scientific method relies on not doing that.
As for all the other stuff you’ve written, it’s a tangent I don’t particularly want to follow you on. It’s clearly the case that Creationists don’t make testable predictions. They would never put their beliefs to the test.
I think it’s reaching to say one of their claims is sorta kinda a testable prediction because they deny red-shift or whatever.
A testable prediction is – “I have a hypothesis about the world. If it’s true, I can make a specific, surprising prediction (“surprising” meaning: we would not otherwise expect to happen).
If the prediction happens, I gain confidence in the hypothesis. Otherwise I will reject it”.
Before, and even after, Darwin, there was certainly work on the evolution of nonhuman species, but most still thought man to be specially created. I don’t know how you’d categorize someone believing this today. The position that man did not evolve in an old earth seems fairly common.
Throughout the 19th century they had the problem of explaining how the Sun could have lasted long enough for the clear age of the earth, both from geology and the pace of evolution. Things were rather muddled.
While pure inerrancy is fairly new, in the beginning of the 19th century a lot of religious people got into science assuming that discoveries would strengthen the Bible’s basic correctness. There was a segment which suspected science. Darwin knocked the legs out from under the former group since the special creation of man was fundamental, and the latter group who were the ancestors of the current crop of YECers were able to say “I told you so.”
Yes, I messed it up again - I meant YEC. As for OEC, is there a single OEC theory or many? YECers are for the most part tied to the Bible, with some loose interpretations when they can’t deny the facts. But if you allow the whole creation story to be metaphor and easy to reinterpret - from simply using the day is a million year interpretation to the total metaphor one - you get lots of variants. Some not falsifiable.
I’d say Catholics believe in OEC in this broad sense, and while God being the creator is not falsifiable, they more or less agree with science on every other aspect.
My point was actually along these lines. As I see theistic evolution, it involves a God who created the world just when science says it was created, using the same mechanisms, and who invisibly manipulated the development of life so that we came out. The arguments against this are that there is not a shred of evidence for it (and there is no reason to presuppose we were the goal of this directed evolution) and that any God doing it the way our God is supposed to is inefficient and cruel. But if you think that is a reason against theistic evolution, it is just as good a reason against a loving god in general. And I know the not very convincing counterarguments.
As far as evolution goes, the Catholic position, say, seems indistinguishable from the deist one. Some deists say that God set things into motion with initial conditions guaranteeing we’d result, which is not much different from invisibly directing things. Now Catholics believe God intervenes in human life, which does distinguish them from deists, but not as far as creation or evolution goes.
I agree with you about the unwashed masses. But the fact that most creationists get all their information from their church bulletin doesn’t tell us anything very interesting. The motives of a person like Johnson are far more illuminating. That kind of person is the leader, after all.
As for the other point, perhaps I was being too subtle. If you want something to be true, you very often see the existing data in a way that supports it. The first thing to do is to construct a test to try to falsify your thought, basically trying to tell yourself that you are full of shit. Then you present it to colleagues, so they can tell you that you are full of shit. Then you try to publish it, so the reviewers can tell you that you are full of shit. If you present it , your audience might tell you that. If it gets out there, people with other views will try. If your idea survives all that, then you’ve actually got something.
Yes and no. Blatant examples, like creationism and Fred Hoyle, are not part of good science. But lots of real data is not so cut and dried as you make it sound, and it is often the case that the data gets reinterpreted and the hypotheses tweaked while it is unclear which is really true. There is a fascinating book on the KT boundary controversy that shows this very well. A little bit of this might put you on the losing side - or it might refine your idea to actually be correct. Too much and you wind up a laughingstock.
I never claimed they explicitly made testable predictions. But YEC inherently makes testable predictions, which if they were scientifically trained or honest or both would lead them to the inevitable conclusion that YEC doesn’t work.
When I was in junior high, before the YEC revival, we learned creationism as being more or less the same as spontaneous generation or phlogiston or humors - hypotheses which lots of people accepted and which got disproven. The interesting question is not whether YRC is falsifiable, and not whether it has been falsified, but why so many people hang on to it - some of them not total idiots.
I’ve asked the metaphor question to theists many times over the years, and have never gotten a reasonable answer, so don’t look at me. The day = a million years (or something) argument is easy to falsify. First, the record shows that all days are not the same length. Second, the order is wrong. Now, if you somehow define Genesis as a metaphor for whatever happened, where the mapping is totally unfathomable …
I was just trying to come up with some argument against the hard to falsify brand of OEC. I have no problem with the malicious god one. Darwin (though not Wallace IIRC) was leaning towards agnosticism anyhow. Who knows what he would have written if he still believed. But, if I am reading you correctly, your point is that certain models of OEC can be falsified not from physical evidence but from models of God. There have been plenty of malicious gods believed in throughout history - the West just claims to not believe in one now.