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  • From: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] theories and standards
  • Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 12:02:47 -0700

I haven't posted for awhile, but as the originator of this thread I thought I'd get in a closing thought.

Stoney Breyer wrote:
Karl writes:
Science, according to the definition I was taught at a secular university by
a professor who was anti-Christian and a missionary for evolution (he could
not let a single lecture go by without at least one attack against
Christianity), cannot deal with the past. The closest it can get to dealing
with the past is to deal with is the present status of artifacts that have
survived from the past.

And I ask:
Karl, doesn't the obvious contradiction between your professor's characterization of science and his zeal for a particular scientific theory of past events suggest the hypothesis that he didn't know what he was talking about? (?which, I must hurry to point out, does not in the least imply that he was not a perfectly competent scientist)
[end Stoney]

Given the evidence of Karl's memory of the lecturer with the toledoth theory, it seems likely that this "science-cannot-deal-with-the-past" professor wasn't as illogical as Karl represents him. If he was, then I can't see how he could be a competent scientist. All causal accounts ultimately include an explanation of how present observables got that way, and how observations are changing over time.

Yes, it's a contradiction to affirm evolution and at the same time say science can't investigate the past (I almost wrote, ...say that you can't KNOW the past. But then I remembered that Karl thinks there is another, nonscientific knowing, that follows "different rules".) It's possible that the secular professor was just playing a semantic game where everything in biology, geology, etc. gets re-admitted through an appropriate parsing of "artifacts that have survived from the past": you could talk about "this object has the present appearance of something that was affected thusly in the past..." Kind of like, "these dinosaur bones presently look like something that lived millions of years ago" (even though God put them there to look that way, 5000 years ago). Perhaps the professor suffered from a philosophical confusion of the type popular in the 17th-18th centuries, a naive pre-Kantian empricism, which made some of his statements sound similar to the statements of fundamentalists, even though he wasn't one.

It's a tautology to say that what we observe is in the present. But as soon as we say that an observable has "survived from the past", we are making normal assumptions about the relation between past and present, and everything in geology and astrophysics is okay again. If we did not make that assumption, then we would (like the naive empricists) logically be reduced to questioning whether the entire universe, along with our "apparent" memories of a past, only came into existence five seconds ago.

It's sad that a person of Karl's intellect tricks himself this way. But it's annoying to most of us to hear this "secular professor" trotted out over and over again, as some kind of authoritative backing for an utterly illogical position.


Gabe Eisenstein




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