Showing posts with label bad science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad science. Show all posts
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Ken Miller on Intelligent Design
This is a very long video (almost 2 hours) but quite worthwhile for anyone interested in understanding why intelligent design creationism is bad science. Especially interesting to me were the bits where Miller discusses evidence against irreducible complexity.
Miller is a Roman Catholic biology professor at Brown University, and he believes that faith and science are compatible. I disagree with him on this one point, but not in a strict sense. Miller's beliefs certainly don't make him any less a scientist.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Creation/Evolution controversy explained
It's SO simple, really. Ken Ham, the protuberant creationist apologist, has a neatly packaged Answer-In-Genesis to the question of why Evolutionists "refuse" to believe.
Be you creationist or evolutionist, you may be surprised to find out that the controversy is not about the actual evidence for or against your position. No, we can never look to the evidence to decide the matter. The key, you see, is in the interpretation of the evidence, which is naturally based on our presuppositions (or axioms, which, Mr. Ham explains, are the same thing.)
One interpretation might seem to fit the evidence better, warns Ken, if we have not grasped the notion that what are at issue are the presuppositions which underlie.
You see, it's like this: no one really "knows" if we were created or evolved. Because no one was there to witness how we came to be. Because "We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present."
If there was a witness, then someone was already living. So, being alive, they can't have witnessed the creation of life. Therefore, no one witnessed the creation of life.
No one, that is, except God (good thing HE's not alive, right?)!
Until we have a time machine, we'll never know how it really happened.
Luckily, our Christian brethren actually do have a time machine, in the form of the Bible. Hooray!
If we will only presuppose (and what right-thinker wouldn't?) that the Bible is the revealed Word of our Lord, then all the evidence will fall naturally into place. What a relief!
Ken Ham says he's glad he learned this distinction between facts and presuppositions, because then he was able to inoculate his students against the factual interpretations of other (evolutionist) teachers. Then the shoe was on the other foot for a change!
Despite God's every effort to be fair and give us all an even shake, however, some folks just won't believe, for their own indiscoverable, spiritually corrupt and immoral reasons. As long as they remain obstinate, nothing can prevent them from forming their own radicallly dangerous scientific interpretations of the evidence.
Be you creationist or evolutionist, you may be surprised to find out that the controversy is not about the actual evidence for or against your position. No, we can never look to the evidence to decide the matter. The key, you see, is in the interpretation of the evidence, which is naturally based on our presuppositions (or axioms, which, Mr. Ham explains, are the same thing.)
One interpretation might seem to fit the evidence better, warns Ken, if we have not grasped the notion that what are at issue are the presuppositions which underlie.
You see, it's like this: no one really "knows" if we were created or evolved. Because no one was there to witness how we came to be. Because "We all exist in the present—and the facts all exist in the present."
If there was a witness, then someone was already living. So, being alive, they can't have witnessed the creation of life. Therefore, no one witnessed the creation of life.
No one, that is, except God (good thing HE's not alive, right?)!
Until we have a time machine, we'll never know how it really happened.
Luckily, our Christian brethren actually do have a time machine, in the form of the Bible. Hooray!
If we will only presuppose (and what right-thinker wouldn't?) that the Bible is the revealed Word of our Lord, then all the evidence will fall naturally into place. What a relief!
Ken Ham says he's glad he learned this distinction between facts and presuppositions, because then he was able to inoculate his students against the factual interpretations of other (evolutionist) teachers. Then the shoe was on the other foot for a change!
Despite God's every effort to be fair and give us all an even shake, however, some folks just won't believe, for their own indiscoverable, spiritually corrupt and immoral reasons. As long as they remain obstinate, nothing can prevent them from forming their own radicallly dangerous scientific interpretations of the evidence.
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