by hooberus 64 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Oddly enough, hooberus is good at starting conversations, but seems uninterested
in actually responding when pressed with perfectly reasonable critical questions.
Why even bring up a subject if you are not planning on having a meaningful conversation?
[inkling]
Here is how atheists like Dawkins construct their "reasoning" against legitimate probability arguments (fine tuning; origin of life, etc.).
Therre are several variations of this type of argument (which are not always as explicit). The arguments are full of fallacies:
They never do present a real probability argument against an eternal God, (let alone against an eternal God not composed of "part" componets). Instead, they (Dawkins and his parrots) use the above reasoning and claim to have shown the improbability of the existence existence of any creator God.
If they do discuss the issue of possiblity of an eternal creator (or ones not composed of componet parts), they will generally dismiss such a creator God without any legitimate probability argumentation, and then shift to a discussion of "why can't they propose an eternal universe?". (which of course is not the subject directly under debate).
Anyway, the concept of an eternal fine tuned universe, or life without an origin, has been suggested and rejected by even most atheistic scientists for many reasons (such as thermodynamic evidence for a beginning to this universe). Instead (to try to escape the testable design inference), they invoke the multi-verse "explanation" -which is argued by many to be a retreat into untestability.
http://saintpaulscience.com/contents.htm
- Covers issues in the philosophy of science.
- Explains the difference between scientific and non-scientific theories, particularly the key role of testability.
- Documents that evolutionists themselves have thoroughly endorsed testability as the criterion of science in all the key creation/evolution court cases.
The book later argues that evolution is not science — using the evolutionist's own criterion of testability. Some evolutionary leaders are quoted essentially admitting that. The book argues that the new creation theory is testable science, and evolution is not. This role reversal is noteworthy since it engages the debate on the evolutionists' terms using their own criterion of science. It is also a departure from previous creationist positions.
- Debunks the evolutionists' attempts to define creation out of science:
- Identifies cases where evolutionists use a double standard — one standard for creation theory, and a lesser one for evolution.
- Shows that theories involving an intelligent designer are already accepted by evolutionists as testable science. Therefore, evolutionists cannot claim such theories are inherently unscientific.
- Debunks the evolutionist's assault on the argument from design. Shows that the argument from design can be thoroughly convincing. For example, we often show that someone's death was not accidental, that it was designed — and we show it so compellingly that we execute the 'designer'.
- Shows that some statements about the supernatural can be testable science. The key is that science must remain self-consistent, it cannot be allowed to contradict itself, and this sometimes forces us to accept some element of the supernatural. Gödel's Theorem (from the logic of mathematics) is discussed as a precedent setting example. This is a contribution to the wider philosophy of science as well as the origins debate.
- Shows the anthropic principle is not testable, and so not science by evolutionists' own criterion. It reveals an illusion involving a three-shell game ruse, much like is later revealed for natural selection.
First they claim that any designer of any complex thing must be more "complex" than their creation
To me, this has always seemed an odd argument for the Dawkins evolutionist to make. He wrote a book to explain how complex things can naturally evolve from simple things. I guess there is a "Mount Improbability" his own mind is incapable (or refusing) of climbing. His ultimate 747 never got off the ground.
BTS
In Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, 1999, 13(2), 77-82 (and reproduced in trueorigin.org), John Woodmorappe quotes Morris and Parker, in order to define the 'geologic column', thus: "This standard column is supposed to be at least 100 miles [160 km] thick (some writers say up to 200 [320 km]), representing the total sedimentary activity of all of the geologic ages." At the end of his paper he concludes that, "There is no escaping the fact that the Phanerozoic geologic column remains essentially non-existent. It should be obvious, to all but the most biased observers, that it is the anti-creationists who misrepresent the geologic facts. The geologic column does not exist to any substantive extent, and scientific creationists are correct to point this out." (Emphasis mine.)
Any such 'column' is claimed to consist of strata, so now consider the words of the renowned French sedimentologist, Guy Berthault (after translation from his native French into English):
"As we have shown in the laboratory, layers of incoming sediment have been wrongly identified as being strata. The scale of geological time and the chronological succession of fossils have been calculated on this mistaken belief, that strata are successive layers of sediment.
"A single layer of sediment can sort itself out into parts of many strata. So the position of fossils, rather than showing evolution, merely indicates the distribution of marine species which lived at different depths.
"If the creatures fossilized in the rocks show no evolutionary sequence, could they have all lived together at the same time? Since we now know that rocks don't need time to form, just enough sediment, there appears to be some reason to believe that they could have all been living together.
"The very fact that [the remains of hundreds of millions of fossilized creatures] were buried in vast quantities of sediment, which has since turned into rock, and that this kind of rock is only made by water, strongly indicates that the catastrophe was a cataclysmic flood, which covered the entire Earth."
There is no 'geologic column', except, of course, in the minds of young schoolchildren who stream out of the natural history museums after being taught that there is.
More than three quarters of all exposed rock on the World is sedimentary, i.e., it was laid down under water and then dried out (this is basically true whether the rock is further classified as being clastic or chemical).
Geology links certain rock strata with periods of time and assigns to each stratum a name, such as, 'Precambrian', 'Cambrian', 'Triassic', 'Jurassic', 'Cretaceous', and so on. Some strata are often rich in fossils (Cambrian is a good example of this). Using the fact that certain naturally-occurring elements (referred to as a 'parent') undergo radioactive decay into other elements (referred to as a 'daughter') in a time which can be determined by laboratory experiments, various absolute dating methods have been developed, including carbon-14 (for which Willard Libby won the 1960 Nobel Prize for Chemistry), potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, etc.
However, because of such things as uncertainties in the original composition of the rock when it was being laid down, and addition or subtraction of parent or daughter elements since, radiometric dating is notoriously unreliable when it comes to sedimentary material. Instead, sedimentary rocks are usually dated by recourse to the fossils they contain. If the age of the fossil is known, and the fossils were buried in the stratum, then we must know the age of the rock, right?
Wrong, because the fossils are dated by seeing what stratum they were discovered in. To illustrate, let us assume that a particular fossil is 40 milliard years old (it won't matter that this is older than the supposed age of the universe, since we are told that some stars are older than the universe!). Where was it found? Let's say in the Cambrian. We deduce, therefore, that the Cambrian is 40-milliard-year-old rock. Since it is 40 milliard years old, any fossils it contains will be around this age. So we conclude that our original estimate was correct! Such circular reasoning is the essence of sedimentary strata dating. Think of a number, any will do, quickly double it and add on ... oh, three and a half milliard.
Even in those cases where radiometric dating is claimed to be accurate, namely igneous rock, there have been some pretty spectacular faux pas, such as ages ranging from about 140 million to 2.96 milliard years for samples distributed to twelve different laboratories, taken from the Kaupelehu lava flow, Hualalai volcano, Hawaii. However, these supposedly 2.96-milliard-year-old rocks were formed when the volcano erupted in 1800/01.
Similar ludicrous figures of several milliard years were obtained from samples that solidified after the Mt. St. Helens eruption on 18th May, 1980.
Mt. Rangotito on North Island, New Zealand, buried trees when it erupted. The age of the trees, using C-14, was analysed at 225 years. The age of the overlying, solidified rock, using K-Ar, was given as 465,000 years.
These are just a few examples of 'accurate' radiometric dating methods giving totally absurd results. How do we know that any dates produced by such techniques are correct? Simple, those that support popular ideas, like organic evolution and uniformitarian geology, are accepted, and those that do not are rejected.
In order for the dating laboratories to be spared any future embarrassment from nutty Creationists, no sample is now accepted without an accompanying form, specifying exactly where the sample came from. This allows samples to be tied in nicely with the paradigm, and science to remain above reproach.
It is a very common misconception that the rocks we see all around us took millions of years in the making. The fact is that rocks can be formed in a few hours or days, requiring only sediment, water and a cementing agent, rather than great lengths of time. Furthermore, the 'strata' exposed in rock faces all over the World give no indication of age. For example, the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980 produced 600 feet of new 'stratified' rock in a matter of hours.
The events which followed the eruption of this particular volcano produced evidence before our very eyes of the processes that would have occurred on a massive scale after a cataclysmic flood. One of these events was the phenomenon of lake outflow with sediment loads.
There is evidence to suggest that a great lake was left in place over a sizeable part of North America as flood waters abated upon the World. When the retaining wall was breached, the rapid and enormous outflow from this lake resulted in what we now call the Grand Canyon. Again, just such a process was witnessed at Mt. St. Helens, when flowing water and mud gouged out a mini (by comparison) canyon, 200 feet wide and 100 feet deep.
