Posted by Al; [Aldurant] on April 10, 1999 at 00:47:01 {83dcrF/7KEbNVk78PDhst74NX2uzuA}:
In Reply to: *Collected posts for WW posted by WW on April 09, 1999 at 16:28:48:
Thanks for the response WW- it'll do.
Book-I can never remember the name of that thing. I read it in the bookstore. The Jewish Physicist-Zionist. He accepted evolution and that man was older than 6000 years.
You refered to "Mediocrity, established thought, reputation, may be in doubt"? Every one of these terms reflects misunderstandings about science. Doubt, we could say, is science's "middle name", is not even news, much less a shock, that "science" is in "doubt". Science IS doubt. This sort of takes care of "established thought" also. Science simply has to make sense, and it has to be reproducible, generally. If a scientist shows up at a convention, and gets up on the platform claiming extraordinary findings which 300 others tried to reproduce in their laboratories but couldn't, it's not received well.
Sometimes the dissenter is right, other times he is not. Ludwig Boltzman was up against Ernst Mach, and Wilhelm Ostwald, in his advocation of heat as a statistical property of the assemblage of atoms. Boltzman, depressed over rejection and other things, committed suicide. Work by Niels Bohr, J.J. Thompson, and Ernest Rutherford, vindicated Boltzman's work not too many years later.
Phillip Kammerer was a very talented PhD Biologist and a socialist who pushed Lamarkism with his "Midwife Toad" experiment for several years. When it was debunked he killed himself also. He was wrong.
Each case is different, like crime. And like in criminal investigation, it depends on the evidence. Different theories, which at one time included gradualism in Geology, and evolution and germ theory in Biology were rejected by many when they were initially introduced. Many ideas have been rejected and then accepted later. But it is usually within a few decades. Jesus gave a rather good description of evidence in his comparing the sign of the end with spring,with all it's many aspects. One bud, or a couple of birds don't prove spring. But thousands all over the countryside does. It seems to be spring now, but I recall when there was freezing rain in late May. I was not anticipating winter to follow that unusual weather in May.
Mediocrity- I haven't a clue what you are talking about. You think science is mediocre, in comparision to what, God? Science is not running for God. That's only the Fundie strawman. God does his job, and science does the job God designed it to do.
What you said was that they couldn't support the population or breathe properly at 12,500 feet. With all due respect, that's utter nonsense. I have sprinted at 14,000. People become conditioned. It is reality WW. Whoever put that forth as evidence of the flood is not even trying to be right, just to persuade. They are trying to force themselves to believe.
:Why build a city on a plain that has bitter water, plus the
huge problems with growing food to feed the populace?
- Why? Does the Bible tell us?
:How did the residents get washed into gullies and ravines then covered with silt?
How? Do you actually think there is silt all over the earth?
I was looking at about sixty arrowheads and stone tools today. Not in a book, in a museum. Certain styles of tools were found with different species of animals, which had been butchered with them. There were about fourty bands of different
colored silt reaching up about fourty feet in a area next to a riverbed. ( A Photograph of the area in New Mexico) The silt was not homogenous, but had different minerals, etc., therefore the different colors. At the lowest levels, under
forty feet of silt were one set of tools, of arrowheads, of animals. Thirty feet under, another type, at twenty, another. The rate of sedimentation, not possible to be all at once because it was not homogenous, would indicate the thousands
of years involved. Carbon dating, verified by tree ring to 7000 years in the U.S. and 10,000 in northern Europe concurred what the sediment said. 12,000 years for the oldest, 7000 years for the youngest.
:Where did the salt domes come
from?
-Where? Did God put them there? Are salt domes in The Bible?
:This city was a graveyard BEFORE any Inca or Mayan culture existed. Who built it? Science can not answer.
- Neither can The Bible. But science might answer. The
Bible will not.
WW- You do not just give someone "something else to consider". Everyone accepted what you are giving us for 1500 years or more. You say you are not trustful of science. But you trust one scientist, and gainsay any one without a PhD who disputes a handful of scientists. But you are "distrustful" of ten thousand scientists, and hundreds of Noble Prize winning PhDs. You wouldn't be picking and choosing would you?
:I also don't believe the Bible or any
other work is inerrant. I take this much less literally than I used to.
- You say I read something into it? When you pick something like the flood, with so much evidence against it, I wouldn't have guessed you didn't think the Bible is
inerrant. Oh well, I stand corrected. I seem to recall someone mentioning that. Maybe it was you. What in the world in your point about the flood? The chinks that have been found in science have not been posted by anyone on H20, and they
have not been found by you. And they do not relate to the flood, one way or the other. There are just too many things that are too old, too fragile, too utterly without sign of any flood ever, all over the world for a world wide flood.
Whether there are things we do not have the answer for is not news. We knew we didn't know things. Imagine if we knew everything. What would be the purpose of science? The purpose is to find out things. We are not shocked that we cannot
learn everything instantly.
:You have ones here who promote their views as absolute and irrefutable.
-The "You" is not me, I presume. No one except a few fundies and some WTSer's promote their views as "absolute" and "irrefutable". But you do have yet to refute any scientific references made. Did you read my Archaeology posts?
:I consider it laughable for someone who has done some homemade research to critique a physicist who promotes a view that they don't agree
with(for example).
- This is sort of a strange thing for you to say. "A" physicist? You are defending the word of One(1) scientist? Is that what you said? It is "laughable" to dispute one scientist? Is this you talking? And who do you
dispute? I think it would be appropriate for you to consider yourself as the one they are disputing and "their scientists" (plural) dispute your scientist. Don't try to pit them against the PhD. They have there own PhDs they quote. Where
do you fit in to this picture? Somehow their credentials matter and we don't talk about yours? (You didn't respond to my comments on M.I.T.)
The "homemade" remark deserves a separate comment. Who has done "homemade" research? AF, JH, me? They quote some people, make some points and this is "homemade" research but you are somehow different? I think several here could get PhDs. It's probably just a matter of money. But I don't think any of us consider this relevant, including you.
:Scientists in ancient times thought they had all things figured out then.
-Who figured what? There were more mythologists, Biblical interpreters, and religious theorists who "thought they had it figured out." The
errant scientific theories hung on when a religion backed them, theatening death to any who disputed. Which scientist did that?
:No one really provided me with answers to most of my points.
- No one ever heard of them. Does this mean
that there are no 30,000 year old coral reefs? Does this mean there are no varves, really? Did the stones at stonehenge just stand there, unaffected by an entire planet of water? Does this mean someone carried off all the silt over most of
the world? The thousands of sites with clearly separate layers of silt, with distinctly different artifacts in each layer aren't really there? The piles of ashes from hearths and kilns weren't disrupted, dissolved, the pottery not smashed,
fabric not rotted. Because of the book you read and quoted to us, in part, we just "blow off" all this, and a thousand times more? There are plenty of diasters which have been witnessed, even filmed. We know what they do. The earth-wide
flood would have to do at least that much. You know there is a considerable layer of silt in the middle east. But it ends there. It's quite thick and uniform. I wonder what that was?
Give me the reference to the journals and I'll read them, and see if I can find data from the scientific community in response. The journals, the peer review periodicals, not a book, sold to the public.
Al