nakedemperor
Senior Member
mom4 said:It appears that empirical science (mechanical science, operational science) include both observing (aka "seeing it"), and repeatable testing. When dealing with the issue of origins, no one can observe what happened in the past or do repeated testing on what happened in the past.
You can repeatedly prove by radiocarbon dating and other atomic decay methods that rocks were created millions of years ago. You can observe through weathering, sedimentation, and erosional forces over the course of single human lifetime, and then observe strata and canyon walls and see that geological processes take in the order of millions-billions of years. Also, I'm not going to argue origins (again) on a predominantly evangelical messageboard. But to assert that the world is younger than 10,000 years old is to disregard fundamental tenents of science on the order of stubborn closed-mindedness. Or blind faith. Semantics.
mom4 said:We can only take the phenomena we observe around us and make assumptions. Some people choose to believe that there was no supernatural influence in the beginning of the universe, others choose to believe that there was. And so we have theories stemming from these a priori assumptions.
This is very reductionist. To assert that all assumptions (read: all hypotheses) suffer from the same lack of provability is overly-simplified; the law of gravitiy can be viewed as an "assumption" that all objects will fall at a rate of 9.8 feet per second, even if it has happened as such every single time it has been tested. This is a hyperbolic example, obviously, but shows that different hypotheses (say, the "assuming" that an apple will fall at9.8fps, and "assuming" that God created the universe <10,000 years ago) are assumptions with different levels of credibility and testibility. You argument that radioactive isotopes havent always decayed at the incredibly consistant rate that they do today, is , for example, an "assumption" with very low probability and zero testibility.
mom4 said:Also, most of science is not at all affected by the assumption that the earth/universe is billions of years old. Most of the branches of modern science were founded by men who believed that the earth was thousands of years old and created by God over a period of six days.
And their scientific worldviews were flawed; scientific branches like astronomy were hindered by the religious beliefs of scientists, and furtherd by the concessions of the religious community. Re: Galileo, e.g.
mom4 said:Theories of origins do not affect the scientific method,
Yes. Scientific method affects theories of origin.