Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>]

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