Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Gabe:

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Gabe Eisenstein
<gabe AT cascadeaccess.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

If you want written evidence for my claim, someone posted at
wikinfo.org (part of the ibiblio empire that also hosts b-hebrew) two
articles that say the same things as I claim here, including  links to
the same textbook I had with page references so that you can look it
up yourself if you don’t believe me. Remember, these were some of the
top experts in the field when this textbook was written.

http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Scientific_Method_from_science_textbooks

http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Criticism_of_evolution

The professor I had basically taught the same things as were found in
the textbooks.
>
> 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 
> 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.

LOL! This speculation is humorous! I enjoy a good laugh now and then, thanks.
>
> 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.
>
LOL!

> 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.

You don’t believe me? Then go read the textbooks. I’ve had people
burst out laughing when shown the absolute absurdity of the claim that
evolution, as defined in the textbooks, could be claimed to be
scientific.

But on the other hand, I have also met people so brainwashed into the
belief that evolution is science, and so unable to do critical
thought, that when demonstrated this argument, either break down into
logical gibberish, or are silenced with puzzled looks on their faces.
>
>
> Gabe Eisenstein

Karl W. Randolph.