Questions for Xavier and other YECs

[Quaremerepulisti]

1.  How do you explain the correlation between mother-daughter isotope ratios and the depth in the geologic column?

2.  How do you explain the distribution of fossils in the geologic column?

3.  How do you explain Lake Suigetsu (correlation of C14 with varves going back over 50,000 years)?

4.  How do you explain endogenous retroviruses (ERV)/pseudogenes (GULO, etc.) at the same spot and with (many of the) same mutations in the genomes of various primates and humans?

5.  How do you explain the vast genetic diversity seen in all species?  Random mutation?  Programmed mutation?  Other?

6.  What exactly do you want the Church to do?  (Remembering they condemned geocentrism several hundred years ago because that was (allegedly) taught in Scripture, and then had to backtrack.)

7.  If your answer to 1-5 is "we don't care, scientists who think this shows an old earth and common descent in primates are devotees of scientism and we don't share their metaphysical assumptions", exactly how does this imply materialism and what specific metaphysical assumptions aren't shared?

[John Lamb]

5. God created the diverse animals by special creation, so there was great genetic diversity to begin with. The diversity within species can be explained by mutation and loss of genetic information. The original genomes of the various species were more robust and healthy, whereas in their modern state we are looking at decayed forms. It's like cutting out various statues from the original, simple block of marble. A good example is the various dog species being essentially degenerate,  domesticated wolves.

6. It would be unwise to condemn old earth creationism, but the Church could be more emphatic about teaching what it has already declared to be true, e.g. that Adam and Eve are historical persons, and the first parents of all humanity; and the flood of Noah is an historical fact. In other words, defend the rights of scripture (inerrancy) and not cower before the "science" establishment. Still, she shouldn't declare young earth creationism because that might scandalise the weak of faith who would then think they would have to choose between "faith and science." Similarly,  on an individual level I don't insist on it, and I think old earth creationism is a an acceptable opinion as long as it safeguards certain defined truths.

Rest later maybe.

[John Lamb]

I won't answer 1-5 because they are scientific questions that are best left to people with expertise. There are plenty of creationist science websites and pages online though where I imagine you can find a creationist explanation for each of them.


7.  If your answer to 1-5 is "we don't care, scientists who think this shows an old earth and common descent in primates are devotees of scientism and we don't share their metaphysical assumptions" . . .

They are not necessarily devotees of scientism.

Scientism philosophically rejects any form of knowledge outside of what can be acquired by the material sciences (including the sources of divine revelation, e.g. scripture,) and ideologically it is an excessive submission to the authority of the "scientific community" and their consensus (which is often hypocritical when proponents of scientism speak of science as something that rests wholly on evidence and not at all on faith in any authority, and is ever ready to abandon one paradigm or theory for a new one - which clearly isn't the case,) which expresses itself as contempt and even political action against those who contradict that consensus (e.g. banning creationism is science classrooms.)

One can hold to old earth creationism without having this kind of attitude. It's just that often old earth creationists will dismissive young earth creationism out of hand because it is "not scientific" and it rests on "biblical literalism" (the Bible disregarded as "not a science textbook",) which manifests an attitude of scientism. Other old earth creationists try to seriously reconcile it with the scriptures, and do not necessarily dismiss out of hand the objections that young-earth scientists bring against accepted models.


". . . exactly how does this imply materialism and what specific metaphysical assumptions aren't shared?"

We can beat around the bush with this, but the gist of it is to what extent old-earthers give the divine power of creation to creatures, and practically divinise matter.

The greatest example of this is Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit and favourite theologian among the liberal periti at Vatican II, who went so far with this that imo he was practically a pantheist and more of a Hindu than a Catholic in his theology. His whole theology was centered around the theory of evolution and modern science, and reconciling it with the faith. The results were utterly disastrous, I think, and show why Pius IX condemned the idea that the faith must be continually updated to match the progress of modern science, and also St. Thomas' principle that the way we think about the cosmos will determine the way we think about God. Still, he was at least intellectually consistent in trying to reconcile his cosmology with his theology, whereas many today want to have a naturalist cosmology (determined by the discoveries of material science) and a Thomistic or otherwise traditional theology, which often results in a kind of dissonance.

The basic metaphysical premise is that the greater cannot come from the less, or, "you can't give what you don't have." The extent to which old-earthers imply that molecules can make themselves into living things, and living things can make themselves into rational beings (i.e. men) - they depart from the traditional metaphysics favoured by the Church, and in my opinion depart practically from theism altogether. The idea that there is a cosmic dust, which forms into hot balls of liquid, which cools down into planets, which life grows upon like a fungus - all happening by an unconscious, unintelligent process of material accidents: this is to remove God from the universe and make Him a mere "God of the gaps" at best. On the contrary, traditional metaphysics affirms that all lower things must proceed from a higher cause, so that if there is any order, power, beauty, goodness, intelligence, etc., in the world, it must be caused by a higher Order, Power, Beauty, Goodness, Intelligence, etc.

According to traditional metaphysics all substances in the world are composed of matter and form. In order for matter to be "in-formed" an intelligence must form it that way, i.e. God provides the forms of all substances. Materialism does not even recognise what Aristotle calls the "formal cause" of things, i.e. that which makes them what they are. Things, according to materialism, are just blobs of matter, and the distinction which we make between things is just some kind of mental fantasy which we impose upon them - forms are mere concepts in the mind, not principle components of beings. I might call the distinction "primary intelligibility" and "secondary intelligibility". Traditional metaphysics subscribes to "primary intelligibility", i.e. things are intrinsically intelligible - comprehensible to the mind - because they are in-formed by Mind (by the divine mind in natural substances, and the human mind in artificial forms); materialism subscribes to "secondary intelligibility", which says that things have no intelligibility in themselves, but the human mind somehow imposes an intelligible order onto them extrinsically. When a true metaphysician looks out into the world he sees forms, principles of intelligibility which give clear and living evidence to the presence of Mind in the world; when a materialist looks out into the world, he sees a formless ocean of matter and energy, and imagines that the forms are merely in his own imagination.

Ruskin, a painter:

"The [materialist] philosopher tells us that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy, in a tea-kettle as in a Gier-eagle. Very good; that is so; and it is very interesting. It requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the Gier-eagle up to its nest. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects, attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts in the two things are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction of volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode of force. The kettle chooses to sit still on the hob; the eagle to recline on the air. It is the fact of the choice, not the equal degree of temperature in the fulfilment of it, which appears to us the more interesting circumstance."

For the metaphysician, every blade of grass is a proof of God's existence, because it has being and form which can only be caused by a supreme self-subsisting Being and Mind. For the materialist, the entire cosmic order of the universe, with its marvelous diversity of co-dependent beings and intricate systems, is not even evidence of a divine intelligence: it just happened by accident, mere trial-and-error over billions of years. Materialists are intellectually blind, literally, because they cannot see the forms of things. And when they say that our common grasp on reality which we perceive through our senses is an illusion, and that "real reality" can only be described by mathematical formulas which reduce everything to "mass", "energy", etc. - they are elitist Gnostics who deprive the common man of his hold on reality in order to hold intellectual dominance over him. These modern Gnostics of scientism are so intellectually blind that they really think that the substantial world which we perceive with our eyes and senses, and that we understand with our minds as being composed of a variety of forms, is: an illusion existing only in our imaginations, and that reality is what's in their mathematical models. In truth, it's the substantial world, which is made of what Aristotle calls "individual substances", that is real, and these mathematical models are mere contrivances, mere "maps" which more or less describe how the mechanics of material substances work. They've lost the distinction between the material mechanics of a substance and the material substance itself. They think that physics is the queen of the sciences when it's just a branch of applied mathematics, and mathematics itself is just the study of quantity and has no grasp of substantial things - so really, they are peasants pretending to be princes. But they contribute to technological progress . . . so we can't criticise them and have to play along with their charade.

[Xavier]

Quare, have you read Prof. Denton's Evolution: A theory in crisis. I recommend it to you if you have not. Denton is not a young earth creation scientist. He could probably be broadly classified as an ID theorist. He shows there are many serious problems for evolution including the fossil record: "The  overall  picture  of  life  on  Earth  today  is  so  discontinuous,  the  gaps between the different types so obvious, that, as Steven Stanley reminds us in his recent book Macroevolution, if our knowledge of biology was restricted to those species presently existing on Earth, "we might wonder whether the doctrine  of  evolution  would  qualify  as  anything  more  than  an  outrageous hypothesis."1  Without  intermediates  or  transitional  forms  to  bridge  the enormous gaps which separate existing species and groups of organisms, the concept of evolution could never be taken seriously as a scientific hypothesis ...

Curiously,   the   problem   is   compounded   by   the   fact   that   the   earliest representatives of most of the major invertebrate phyla appear in the fossil record  over  a  relatively  short  space  of  geological  time,  about  six  hundred million years ago in the Cambrian era. The strata lain down over the hundreds of  millions  of  years  before  the  Cambrian  era,  which  might  have  contained the connecting links between the major phyla, are almost completely empty of animal fossils. If transitional types between the major phyla ever existed then  it  is  in  these  pre-Cambrian  strata  that  their  fossils  should  be  found."

1. Simple. Most of the fossils were buried simultaneously during the flood. Pre cambrian is pre flood. ICR: "It may sound surprising, but the standard geologic column was devised before 1860 by catastrophists who were creationists.1 Adam Sedgewick, Roderick Murchison, William Coneybeare, and others affirmed that the earth was formed largely by catastrophic processes, and that the earth and life were created. These men stood for careful empirical science and were not compelled to believe evolutionary speculation or side with uniformitarian theory ... A single sedimentary lamina, or bed, was supposed by uniformitarian geologists to represent typically a year or many years duration. It was concluded, therefore, that multiplied thousands of laminae and beds superimposed required millions of years. Recently, however, geologists have discovered that laminae and beds form quickly on floodplains of rivers during floods, in shallow marine areas during storms, and in deep water by turbidity currents. The evidence of rapid sedimentation is now so easily recognized that geologists observing a strata system these days often ask where to insert the "missing time" of which the strata do not show sedimentary evidence. Catastrophism, quite naturally, is making a come-back. There is good reason to believe that entire strata systems, and even groups of systems, were accumulated in a hydraulic cataclysm matching the description of Noah's Flood in the Bible."

Evolutionists sometimes use a circular methodology: they date fossils using rocks and then date rocks in the column using their estimated ages from fossils.

We had a thread on Potassium Argon dating. Isn't it true Potassium Argon dating will return rubbish results for rocks and ash that are known to be very young? You had rocks barely 200 years old being "dated" at 2-3 million. The explanation comes from what you will find footnoted even in evolutionary textbooks, that K-Ar dating cannot be used for rocks known to be less than 100,000 years old. The assumption is a half life has passed and the Argon present was formed through decay. This same assumption yield demonstrably wrong results for more recent rocks - too little time has passed for exponential fractions of 1.26 billion years to be meaningful. Even slight variations in the measurement of the quantities of Argon remaining would give dramatic differences of "millions of years". Such differences are meaningless.

https://www.suscipedomine.com/forum/index.php?topic=20156.0

I will defend here the modest hypothesis that, it is scientifically demonstrable (1) that human history is less than 10,000 years old and (2) the earth itself is less than 100,000 years at the most (and therefore Potassium Argon dating etc return wrong results because of the wrong assumptions). This much would be enough for evolution to be false. I admire Prof. Denton's arguments but I want evolution to fall quickly, not for this debate to be carried on for another 100 years.

Question for you, Quare, isn't it true that Helium diffuses out of radioactive rocks rather quickly? Under evolutionary timescales, there should be no helium present, it is the second lightest gas. But there is. This does not require assumptions about original quantity present and thus constitutes an empirical falsification of the claim of millions of years. All Helium would difuse out in 100 K years.

[Quaremerepulisti]

5. God created the diverse animals by special creation, so there was great genetic diversity to begin with. The diversity within species can be explained by mutation and loss of genetic information. The original genomes of the various species were more robust and healthy, whereas in their modern state we are looking at decayed forms. It's like cutting out various statues from the original, simple block of marble. A good example is the various dog species being essentially degenerate,  domesticated wolves.

The whole issue, of course, is that the diversity within species cannot be explained by mutation, and wasn't there at the start.  In a founder population of 2, there can be only 4 alleles of any given gene at the start.  In order to have the genetic diversity we see today from a founder population of 2 several thousand years ago, mutation rates would need to have been much, much higher than what we see today.  (And let me point out that these are not the original creation, but the founder populations of 2 that came off of Noah's Ark.)  So what exactly is the YEC explanation for 1) why mutation rates were vastly higher, and 2) why, if they were, it wasn't lethal.

And this creates a falsified prediction.  If this is true, DNA that we are able to retrieve from fossils (presumably buried from the Flood, and therefore similar to the founder populations that came off the Ark) should be vastly different from what we see today.  But it isn't.

6. It would be unwise to condemn old earth creationism, but the Church could be more emphatic about teaching what it has already declared to be true, e.g. that Adam and Eve are historical persons, and the first parents of all humanity; and the flood of Noah is an historical fact. In other words, defend the rights of scripture (inerrancy) and not cower before the "science" establishment.

She can do that, but it's doubtful it will be a successful strategy without any regard for the actual science.

I'll point out again that the last time the Church dug in her heels defending the "rights of Scripture" (geocentrism) against science it didn't turn out too well.  The Church was forced to redefine "inerrancy" as the inspired writers relating what sensibly appeared, instead of what actually was, an interpretation which was not shared by anyone prior to Copernicus.  But, looking at what people at the time (such at St. Robert Bellarmine) wrote, they were as threatened by geocentrism then as you are by evolution today.

What makes you think this time would be any different?  I mean, you can say Genesis I is "inerrant" because, even though a literal Adam and Even didn't exist, as did neither a literal tree of life, tree of knowledge, or walking serpent, and Google Earth shows there's no Garden of Eden existing on the earth today, this was a "literary form" used by the inspired author to relate an important truth about humanity; namely, that it is in a deficient state, but destined for better things.  You can say the flood story is "inerrant" because a great flood did really happen (as many have occurred on the earth), but it was neither geographically or anthropologically universal in reality; it just appeared to be, and the author was going by what sensibly appeared.  Or, you could take St. Bellarmine's approach and simply say that you don't understand these chapters.

Still, she shouldn't declare young earth creationism because that might scandalise the weak of faith who would then think they would have to choose between "faith and science."

Which they would, in fact, have to do, if they had a modicum of scientific literacy.

Similarly,  on an individual level I don't insist on it, and I think old earth creationism is a an acceptable opinion as long as it safeguards certain defined truths.

OK, because this was a very commonly-held opinion by both Catholics and Protestants for much of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

[Quaremerepulisti]

Quare, have you read Prof. Denton's Evolution: A theory in crisis. I recommend it to you if you have not. Denton is not a young earth creation scientist. He could probably be broadly classified as an ID theorist. He shows there are many serious problems for evolution including the fossil record:

Of course there are serious problems for molecules-to-man evolution.  The issue is that there are also many serious problems for YEC, which you just attempt to hand-wave away.  None of these problems exist for OEC, and I am therefore justified in concluding that it is the truth (although there are certainly several details to be still worked out), as also does Prof. Denton.  Certainly, we don't know as of yet whether separate origin-of-life (creation) events occurred at various periods in earth's history, or whether the better explanation is directed (not random) evolution and common descent.

 

1. Simple. Most of the fossils were buried simultaneously during the flood. Pre cambrian is pre flood.

That is not an answer, but merely a statement.  Why are they arranged in the way they are?  You don't have an answer for this.  All you can do is attempt to change the subject.  The laws of physics, fluid mechanics, etc., dictate an entirely different arrangement than what we see, sorting from less complex organisms on the bottom to more complex organisms on the top.  Why is this arrangement true, everywhere in the world?  Why aren't there any human skeletons on the bottom or trilobites on the top?

(Snipping irrelevant comments...)

We had a thread on Potassium Argon dating.

Yeah.  About those mother-daughter isotope ratios.  Why is it, that there is always more daughter isotopes and less mother isotopes the further down you go in the geologic column, if it was all (or at least Cambrian and post-Cambrian) laid down at the same time?  Again, you don't have an answer for this, so again you attempt to change the subject.

Isn't it true Potassium Argon dating will return rubbish results for rocks and ash that are known to be very young? You had rocks barely 200 years old being "dated" at 2-3 million. The explanation comes from what you will find footnoted even in evolutionary textbooks, that K-Ar dating cannot be used for rocks known to be less than 100,000 years old. The assumption is a half life has passed and the Argon present was formed through decay. This same assumption yield demonstrably wrong results for more recent rocks - too little time has passed for exponential fractions of 1.26 billion years to be meaningful. Even slight variations in the measurement of the quantities of Argon remaining would give dramatic differences of "millions of years". Such differences are meaningless.

You don't really do yourself a whole lot of credit with silly arguments like this.  Try this in an anti-evolution sermon when you become a priest.  The scientifically literate parishioners will know that, at best, you do not have any idea of what you are talking about, and you will have no credibility whatsoever from there on out. They will simply tune you out whenever you talk about the topic.  You're actually going to have to try and learn the science well enough to make a scientifically literate argument, and not simply rely on the latest from AIG or ICR.

Of course too little time has passed in young rocks for differences in measured Ar values to be meaningful - the K-Ar halflife is so long that Ar quantities will be extremely small and the precision of measurement is simply not there.  This has nothing to do with the validity of measurements for older rocks, where there has been enough decay to get a reliable (enough) measurement.

I will defend here the modest hypothesis that, it is scientifically demonstrable (1) that human history is less than 10,000 years old and (2) the earth itself is less than 100,000 years at the most (and therefore Potassium Argon dating etc return wrong results because of the wrong assumptions). This much would be enough for evolution to be false. I admire Prof. Denton's arguments but I want evolution to fall quickly, not for this debate to be carried on for another 100 years.

Reality is not going to conform itself to your desires.  Your posts are full of wishful thinking on this topic (like that about Y-chromosome Adam and mitochondrial Eve, which you claimed proved descent from a single pair).  What assumptions, exactly, about K-Ar dating are wrong and why should we believe they are wrong?  (We can measure the half-life in a lab.)

Question for you, Quare, isn't it true that Helium diffuses out of radioactive rocks rather quickly? Under evolutionary timescales, there should be no helium present, it is the second lightest gas. But there is. This does not require assumptions about original quantity present and thus constitutes an empirical falsification of the claim of millions of years. All Helium would difuse out in 100 K years.

Assuming that there is no in situ production of helium, which is known to be not the case, as it forms from alpha decay of other nuclei such as uranium. 

Meanwhile, if you telescope billions of years of radioactive decay into a mere few thousand years, the earth is vaporized.

And you still don't have an explanation for fossil distribution or mother-daughter isotopes.

[Quaremerepulisti]

I won't answer 1-5 because they are scientific questions that are best left to people with expertise. There are plenty of creationist science websites and pages online though where I imagine you can find a creationist explanation for each of them.

Unfortunately, detailed and satisfactory creationist explanations for these don't exist.  They all have to do what Xavier did, change the subject or just wave hands.

Scientism philosophically rejects any form of knowledge outside of what can be acquired by the material sciences (including the sources of divine revelation, e.g. scripture,) and ideologically it is an excessive submission to the authority of the "scientific community" and their consensus...

So IOW "scientism" is merely a rhetorical weapon to use to avoid having to deal with the actual data, just as I thought.

You can't accuse someone of scientism unless he rejects all forms of knowledge outside of science, including any and all philosophy, any and all study of history, music, etc., by your definition.  Just because he rejects Scripture as a source of knowledge doesn't mean he is guilty of "scientism".  You in fact, don't actually know what scientists do or don't accept as sources of knowledge outside of science.

Moreover, you define accepting conclusions of science as "submission to the authority of the scientific community" as though scientific knowledge were merely socially constructed.  Therefore, you can accuse anyone of "scientism" when he accepts a scientific conclusion you don't like.

... (which is often hypocritical when proponents of scientism speak of science as something that rests wholly on evidence and not at all on faith in any authority, and is ever ready to abandon one paradigm or theory for a new one - which clearly isn't the case,) which expresses itself as contempt and even political action against those who contradict that consensus (e.g. banning creationism is science classrooms.)

So, I guess we should teach phlogiston and alchemy instead of chemistry, "bad humors" instead of the germ theory of disease, phrenology instead of neuroscience, Ptolemaic geocentrism instead of astronomy, and so on, and it's horrible and hypocritical that they are not taught, and that there is serious opposition to them being taught.

One can hold to old earth creationism without having this kind of attitude. It's just that often old earth creationists will dismissive young earth creationism out of hand because it is "not scientific" and it rests on "biblical literalism" (the Bible disregarded as "not a science textbook",) which manifests an attitude of scientism. Other old earth creationists try to seriously reconcile it with the scriptures, and do not necessarily dismiss out of hand the objections that young-earth scientists bring against accepted models.

But it doesn't manifest an attitude of scientism - these OECs clearly accept another form of knowledge besides science.  They just give science more emphasis or importance than you would like.

The greatest example of this is Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit and favourite theologian among the liberal periti at Vatican II, who went so far with this that imo he was practically a pantheist and more of a Hindu than a Catholic in his theology. His whole theology was centered around the theory of evolution and modern science, and reconciling it with the faith. The results were utterly disastrous, I think, and show why Pius IX condemned the idea that the faith must be continually updated to match the progress of modern science, and also St. Thomas' principle that the way we think about the cosmos will determine the way we think about God. Still, he was at least intellectually consistent in trying to reconcile his cosmology with his theology, whereas many today want to have a naturalist cosmology (determined by the discoveries of material science) and a Thomistic or otherwise traditional theology, which often results in a kind of dissonance.

This is of course a fallacy regarding Teilhard - because one person did something badly does not entail it should not or cannot be done.
 Unfortunately, the cosmology thought to be the case by the medievals is clearly not correct.  The earth isn't the unmoving center, and the stars are not incorruptible.  Far from being mere sideshows, these are fundamental to the medieval worldview.

The basic metaphysical premise is that the greater cannot come from the less, or, "you can't give what you don't have." The extent to which old-earthers imply that molecules can make themselves into living things, and living things can make themselves into rational beings (i.e. men) - they depart from the traditional metaphysics favoured by the Church, and in my opinion depart practically from theism altogether. The idea that there is a cosmic dust, which forms into hot balls of liquid, which cools down into planets, which life grows upon like a fungus - all happening by an unconscious, unintelligent process of material accidents: this is to remove God from the universe and make Him a mere "God of the gaps" at best. On the contrary, traditional metaphysics affirms that all lower things must proceed from a higher cause, so that if there is any order, power, beauty, goodness, intelligence, etc., in the world, it must be caused by a higher Order, Power, Beauty, Goodness, Intelligence, etc.

Old-earthers imply none of these things.

According to traditional metaphysics all substances in the world are composed of matter and form. In order for matter to be "in-formed" an intelligence must form it that way, i.e. God provides the forms of all substances. Materialism does not even recognise what Aristotle calls the "formal cause" of things, i.e. that which makes them what they are. Things, according to materialism, are just blobs of matter, and the distinction which we make between things is just some kind of mental fantasy which we impose upon them - forms are mere concepts in the mind, not principle components of beings. I might call the distinction "primary intelligibility" and "secondary intelligibility". Traditional metaphysics subscribes to "primary intelligibility", i.e. things are intrinsically intelligible - comprehensible to the mind - because they are in-formed by Mind (by the divine mind in natural substances, and the human mind in artificial forms); materialism subscribes to "secondary intelligibility", which says that things have no intelligibility in themselves, but the human mind somehow imposes an intelligible order onto them extrinsically. When a true metaphysician looks out into the world he sees forms, principles of intelligibility which give clear and living evidence to the presence of Mind in the world; when a materialist looks out into the world, he sees a formless ocean of matter and energy, and imagines that the forms are merely in his own imagination.

And again, nothing about saying the earth is old implies materialism.

In truth, it's the substantial world, which is made of what Aristotle calls "individual substances", that is real, and these mathematical models are mere contrivances, mere "maps" which more or less describe how the mechanics of material substances work. They've lost the distinction between the material mechanics of a substance and the material substance itself. They think that physics is the queen of the sciences when it's just a branch of applied mathematics, and mathematics itself is just the study of quantity and has no grasp of substantial things - so really, they are peasants pretending to be princes. But they contribute to technological progress . . . so we can't criticise them and have to play along with their charade.

Physics does actually have something to say about the accidents of substantial things (not just "material mechanics") - how they change, and how such change can be predicted.

[james03]

I won't answer the old earth questions since I'm an old earther.  On the loss of Vitamin C, this is what you would expect for life systems based on DNA.  A slow loss of functionality.  GULO is a big problem for evolution.

[Kreuzritter]

7.  If your answer to 1-5 is "we don't care, scientists who think this shows an old earth and common descent in primates are devotees of scientism and we don't share their metaphysical assumptions", exactly how does this imply materialism and what specific metaphysical assumptions aren't shared?

Firstly, age aside, it doesn't show common descent. Nothing you've cited and nothing to be found in the annals of science logically implies it. It's only a "preferred" explanation, because after a lot of stop-gaps and leaps for steps which have no empirical verification and no provided explanation, cue the God-of-the-gaps of theistic-evolutionary pseudoscience, it's most appealing to some people's subjective sense of what is "reasonable" and "likely". Dependency graphs can model known relationships between species and genetic information flow, and they do, by statistical measures, such a good job of it in comparison with common descent models that the probability of latter providing the correct "explanation" is practically zero.

Assumptions? Oh, those. Where does one even begin? This is hardly a comprehensive and deductively structured list, and maybe not every one applies, but off the top of my head, before I tire of this:

The ontological subject-object distinction is meaningful and an independent objective world exists.
An objective material world exists.
This world is distinct from the experience of it.
It is experienced only mediately and only by a particular state of consciousness, the rest being imaginary.
These others, like the dream space, therefore, do not provide a picture of fundamental, objective reality.
"Empirical science" provides knowledge of this fundamental, objective reality.
The experience of normal waking consciousness is an the indirect experience of this objective material world mediated via sensory organs and the brain.
This objective material world is a cause of the existence, if not of the subject, then certainly the phenomenal content of his experience of it.
This objective material world is bound to follow mechanical physical laws.
These physical laws do not change.
These laws are discoverable.
Inductive inferences from past events are valid.
This objective physical world is really geometrically structured.
This space is a metric space
Realism with respect to the objects of atomistic physics.
An objective space and objective time exist.
Space is measurable.
Different perceivable spaces are part of one and the same space.
This space is one and the same throughout time.
Time is measurable.
Time is uniformly directed
The flow of time is uniform within an inertial frame of reference.
Time is an extension in analogy to space, whose parts can be summed.
The unit of time is derived from space, that is, time is measurable by the speed of a spatial process that is again assumed to be uniform in relation to the flow of time.
The imagined past actually existed and led to the present
Mechanical causation is real
Reductionism applied to the sensory images, the holistic phenomenon,  appearing to consciousness

etc. the theoretical world of scientific physicalism is objectively real, a clockwork world for clockwork thinkers that forms the basis at least of corporeal existence.

More diverse:

All creatures originated within this physical world and as a product of mechanical process.
All existing physical structures, in fact, as they are, originated in a natural mechanical process, for example, geological structures through time, radioactive isotopes from parent sources, etc.
Naturalistic "explanations" are epistemologically preferable and take precedence over invocations of intelligence, much less of  preternatural or supernatural acts ... because because.

Oh, and finally, a favourite implicit invocation:

God wouldn't do x,y and z, because that is not "rational". Quod erat demonstrandum.

And ones for the theistic evolutionists:

Genesis is an atttempt at explaning the origins of this world, hence if evolutionism is correct, it is not historical.
Man was first created in this world.
The Fall is a morality tale, not a cosmic event with physical and metaphysical implications, and it did not bring man into a fundamentally different world to that of Genesis 1 and 2, whose nature is not the work of God.

With respect to these last ones, as I've said before, I am not a dogmatist but a skeptic of naturalistic evolution as historical fact, namely, I think it is in principle impossible to demonstrate the truth of such an "historical science", regardless of merits or demerits, and there are many; I am prepared, however, to accept the possibility of the old age of this world and the Darwinian thesis that a process of bloody evolution brought about the various species in their law-bound physicality.

But I will never accept the proposition of theistic evolutionists that these are the work of God Most High and his Son, the eternal Logos. If an intelligence formed it and by such means, it is a counterfeit, formed from God's original perfect and by fiat ex nihilo material creation, by a power-mad, blood-lusting and ultimately bungling counterfeit deity, no doubt identified in 2 Corinthians 4:4, the Serpent of Eden.

That is not the God I know, not the God I have met in Jesus Christ, not the God of the angels I have seen with my own eyes and conversed with, and if he is the supreme being, if the supreme being is truly responsible for a world in which the Darwinian version of history is the case, then he is not to be worshipped but spat on in the face.

The truth of evolution would not make me an atheist, but  that of theistic evolution without doubt an antitheist who would seriously reconsider Lucifer's position as villain in the cosmogony. But theistic evolution is not true.

[Kreuzritter]

While we're speaking of "reason", here's a question:

How does a theistic evolutionist actually convince himself that the God he worships is good, nay, love?

I'm not interested in hearing scholastic angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin intellectualised rationalisations and moral sophistry to justify the mere assertion of it, where it's just a conclusion reached and signed off on in the face of the quite apparent moral dilemma that punches one in the gut when trying to reconcile goodness and love with the fundamental nature of this world and all the death, violence and suffering of innocents supposedly in it beforethe Fall. This is were the atheists again show more integrity and honesty than the theistic evolutionists.

[Quaremerepulisti]

7.  If your answer to 1-5 is "we don't care, scientists who think this shows an old earth and common descent in primates are devotees of scientism and we don't share their metaphysical assumptions", exactly how does this imply materialism and what specific metaphysical assumptions aren't shared?

Assumptions? Oh, those. Where does one even begin? This is hardly a comprehensive and deductively structured list, and maybe not every one applies, but off the top of my head, before I tire of this:

You didn't really answer the question I posed.  I'm sure you share some of these assumptions (like the existence of an external world and that its existence is independent from experience of it), and not all of the assumptions you list are metaphysical.  And none of these appear to be related to old earth and common descent among primates.

Let me ask again: what metaphysical assumptions are necessarily involved in coming to the conclusion of an old earth and common descent in primates, which ones do you reject, and how do they imply materialism?  If you can't come up with an answer, then you don't get to simply hand-wave away the science under the pretext that materialist assumptions were used.

Firstly, age aside, it doesn't show common descent. Nothing you've cited and nothing to be found in the annals of science logically implies it.

It is an inference, not a logical deduction, as you well know.  The inference is made from things like endogenous retroviruses and pseudogenes and so on.

It's only a "preferred" explanation, because after a lot of stop-gaps and leaps for steps which have no empirical verification and no provided explanation, cue the God-of-the-gaps of theistic-evolutionary pseudoscience, it's most appealing to some people's subjective sense of what is "reasonable" and "likely".

Creation of all animal species at once 6,000 years ago miraculously out of dirt has no empirical verification and no provided explanation either.  God did it that way because that's what He did.  It's most appealing to your subjective sense of what is reasonable and likely, as you admit later.

Dependency graphs can model known relationships between species and genetic information flow, and they do, by statistical measures, such a good job of it in comparison with common descent models that the probability of latter providing the correct "explanation" is practically zero.

Note what you just did there.  You used Bayesian inference.  That's not a logical deduction.  If you get to do it, then I get to as well.

The paper shows that dependency graphs are a better model for the particular larger groups of animals studied in the paper.  The conclusion doesn't generalize to the smaller group of primates which is what I am talking about here.

Moreover, the hypothesis space of dependency graphs is illegitimately constrained when we are talking about an omnipotent God, since God could create everything de novo, and unlike a software programmer, there is no reason why He should be reusing old code or why we should be expecting Him to.

Oh, and finally, a favourite implicit invocation:

God wouldn't do x,y and z, because that is not "rational". Quod erat demonstrandum.

So how do you know last Thursdayism isn't true?  God certainly has the power to create the universe last Thursday and instill us with false memories.

You can't have it both ways, you know.  If you're not going to adopt Divine voluntarism (and the associated nominalism and occasionalism) then it is in certain cases true God would not do x, y, z if that is not rational; at least, the argument cannot be dismissed right out of hand.

See, here's the thing.  Aristotelian philosophy must admit the basic principles that get science off the ground.  The Church enthusiastically adopted it, and later ended up kind of hoist on its own petard.  We've already discussed the philosophical progression to materialism.  But now I'll show how science got the prestige it did.

Things have certain natures, and that dictates how they will act.  Therefore, there will be observable regularities in nature.  These observable regularities can be observed and catalogued in such manner that accurate predictions can be made.  They can also be catalogued in such manner that accurate retrodictions can be made.  (If you deny this, are you willing to deny that I was once an infant?)  There isn't necessarily an easy epistemological correspondence between regularities in nature and essences, but the correspondence must be there all the same.  Thus, when philosophers irritated with the progress of science say "but science just deals with appearances" they are lying.

And thus it's not so easy to hand-wave away the evidence for an old earth under the argument that maybe nuclear decay rates were different in the past.  The physical laws are what they are due to the nature of things; if the nature of things were different, so would the physical laws be.  It is the nature of a charged object to repel a like-charged object and attract and oppositiely charged one and so on.

But I will never accept the proposition of theistic evolutionists that these are the work of God Most High and his Son, the eternal Logos. If an intelligence formed it and by such means, it is a counterfeit, formed from God's original perfect and by fiat ex nihilo material creation, by a power-mad, blood-lusting and ultimately bungling counterfeit deity, no doubt identified in 2 Corinthians 4:4, the Serpent of Eden.

Is that a real possibility in your mind?

[Pon de Replay]

But I will never accept the proposition of theistic evolutionists that these are the work of God Most High and his Son, the eternal Logos. If an intelligence formed it and by such means, it is a counterfeit, formed from God's original perfect and by fiat ex nihilo material creation, by a power-mad, blood-lusting and ultimately bungling counterfeit deity, no doubt identified in 2 Corinthians 4:4, the Serpent of Eden.

Is that a real possibility in your mind?

It would have to be a possibility.  In the book of Job, God gives the devil permission to cause suffering.  All you have to do is push God back a single step and have him give the devil permission to create and govern an entire world of suffering.  Evolution would surely be on the menu in that case , as evolution is nothing if not many millions of years of innocent sentient creatures dying by predation, famine, and disease.  If "theistic evolution" is true, then the creator is something like a cosmic third-grader giggling as he burns an endless succession of ants on a sidewalk with a microscope.  Who else would "glory" in something as gruesome as evolution?

[Kreuzritter]

Unfortunately, detailed and satisfactory creationist explanations for these don't exist.  They all have to do what Xavier did, change the subject or just wave hands.

Subjective weasel word.

You can't accuse someone of scientism unless he rejects all forms of knowledge outside of science, ...

That is not the typical definition of scientism. Not that I care, it's an overused polemical term anyway.

Moreover, you define accepting conclusions of science as "submission to the authority of the scientific community" as though scientific knowledge were merely socially constructed.

And that's a straw man.

So, I guess we should teach phlogiston and alchemy instead of chemistry, "bad humors" instead of the germ theory of disease, phrenology instead of neuroscience, Ptolemaic geocentrism instead of astronomy, and so on, and it's horrible and hypocritical that they are not taught, and that there is serious opposition to them being taught.

Notice how none of these "failed" sciences purports to be able to derive knowledge about the distant past and the historical origins of things in physical processes.

This is of course a fallacy regarding Teilhard - because one person did something badly does not entail it should not or cannot be done.
 Unfortunately, the cosmology thought to be the case by the medievals is clearly not correct.  The earth isn't the unmoving center, and the stars are not incorruptible.

Please rigorously define "unmoving" and "cosmic center", show how the Earth's status has been determined as the contrary in such a sense, and then prove that this sense is the same as that supposedly claimed and understood by "the medievals". Physics, which is relativistic in regard to motion, including non-intertial frames of reference, does not agree with you but dismisses the question altogether from being meaningful to itself.

Far from being mere sideshows, these are fundamental to the medieval worldview.

Not in your physicalist interpretation of their meaning and intention except to the same uninitiated idiots who regarded Alchemy as a physical undertaking and "primitive chemistry".

God is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. - Hermes Trismegistus

This is not a diagram intended as primitive astronomy set in a physicalist cosmos, as you and your fellow modern ignoramuses can only see it. And it does not place Earth at absolute the center of the cosmos, but in fact farthest from it as farthest from God, its source, and material realities remain only a symbol of the cosmology and cosmogony being expressed here. That's precisely why Hell, the "outer darkness" is located "within the Earth".

Physics does actually have something to say about the accidents of substantial things (not just "material mechanics") - how they change, and how such change can be predicted.

Not beyond the "accidents" of mechanical "properties". In very limited instances it can correlate such quantities,  ultimately classical variables, i.e. perceived effects upon measuring instruments,, with properties of qualitative phenomena eventually perceived, like type of colour or sound, but says absolutely nothing about the how and why. Obviously it cannot; there is nothing in the mathematics that makes up the content of its theories applied to its abstract world of theoretically existing objects, which have no other properties than being bearers and obeyers of quantitative mechanical laws, which can account for such things.

[Kreuzritter]

You didn't really answer the question I posed.  I'm sure you share some of these assumptions (like the existence of an external world and that its existence is independent from experience of it), and not all of the assumptions you list are metaphysical.  And none of these appear to be related to old earth and common descent among primates.

I may or may not. It's not relevant to the discusson.

Let me ask again: what metaphysical assumptions are necessarily involved in coming to the conclusion of an old earth and common descent in primates, which ones do you reject, and how do they imply materialism?  If you can't come up with an answer, then you don't get to simply hand-wave away the science under the pretext that materialist assumptions were used.

Most of the list. For certain, those near the beginning, also, those regarding the possibility of conducting the physics which underlies ALL of your phenomena taken as "measuring" the "age" of the Earth. Also and especially, the assumption of naturalism; it's implicit to your arguments from dating methods.

It is an inference, not a logical deduction, as you well know.  The inference is made from things like endogenous retroviruses and pseudogenes and so on.

Yes. And? Stop pretending that the results of such "inferences" constitute knowledge about the past.

Creation of all animal species at once 6,000 years ago miraculously out of dirt has no empirical verification and no provided explanation either.  God did it that way because that's what He did.  It's most appealing to your subjective sense of what is reasonable and likely, as you admit later.

You're obviously not getting this: stop pretending that your propositions are more "well-founded" than those of YECs by virtue of magic.

Note what you just did there.  You used Bayesian inference.  That's not a logical deduction. 

No, it didn't. The quantities assigned to the probability follow logically and I never related a statistical concept of probability to any fact about the real world.

If you get to do it, then I get to as well.

I'm talking to you on your terms.

The paper shows that dependency graphs are a better model for the particular larger groups of animals studied in the paper.  The conclusion doesn't generalize to the smaller group of primates which is what I am talking about here.

Now that's being obtuse.

Moreover, the hypothesis space of dependency graphs is illegitimately constrained when we are talking about an omnipotent God, since God could create everything de novo, and unlike a software programmer, there is no reason why He should be reusing old code or why we should be expecting Him to.

Nonsense. The hypothesis is what it is and remains a "good" model. You have no idea what God's reasons would or would not be, and our expectations are absolutely irrelevant to the truth status of this model in relation to natural history.

So how do you know last Thursdayism isn't true?  God certainly has the power to create the universe last Thursday and instill us with false memories.

Infused faith. More, I don't think that actual knowledge recognised as actual knowledge can be "faked" any more than my immediate experence can be considered non-existent; I don't think that any evil demon could have falsely convinced Descartes that 1+1=2, and I don't think it's possible, false memories or not, for me to experience the knowing that I was around before last Thursday, as that seems to me to contradict the nature of what this knowing is. But I won't use that as an argument to contradict the possibility. Maybe I don't know. I hope.

You can't have it both ways, you know. 

I'm not trying to have it both ways. I'm not the one making public claims as to possession of natural knowlegde of the origin of this world.

If you're not going to adopt Divine voluntarism (and the associated nominalism and occasionalism) then it is in certain cases true God would not do x, y, z if that is not rational; at least, the argument cannot be dismissed right out of hand.

Even so, problem is objectively determining what is "rational". As applied against creationists, I do dismiss it out of hand.

See, here's the thing.  Aristotelian philosophy must admit the basic principles that get science off the ground.  The Church enthusiastically adopted it, and later ended up kind of hoist on its own petard.  We've already discussed the philosophical progression to materialism.  But now I'll show how science got the prestige it did.

I'm quite aware of that. I obviously don't adhere to or have the least fondness for Aristotelian philosophy.

Things have certain natures, and that dictates how they will act.  Therefore, there will be observable regularities in nature.  These observable regularities can be observed and catalogued in such manner that accurate predictions can be made.  They can also be catalogued in such manner that accurate retrodictions can be made.  (If you deny this, are you willing to deny that I was once an infant?)  There isn't necessarily an easy epistemological correspondence between regularities in nature and essences, but the correspondence must be there all the same. 

You asked for metaphysical assumptions and I provided them. You've just provided an implicit list of many more. Things. Things having natures. Natures dictating action. Natures being fixed. Results of identical or similar actions yielding identical or similar results.

Accurate predictions can be made under very constrained circumstances regarding a rather limited set of phenomena and usually only very close into the future, and these can always be thwarted by unknown variables and intrusions from outside the system. Moreover, meaaningful predictions are usually testable. Retrodictions are often not, and in the case of theories of origins, they are absolutely not by any means currently available to us or ever likely to be available.

Deny you were an infant? No. But I don't try to surmise what your parents had for breakfast the day you were conceived by looking through your kitchen cupboard.

Thus, when philosophers irritated with the progress of science say "but science just deals with appearances" they are lying.

"Appearances" are one of the things science deals with the least.

The physical laws are what they are due to the nature of things; if the nature of things were different, so would the physical laws be.  It is the nature of a charged object to repel a like-charged object and attract and oppositiely charged one and so on.

This is meaningless tautology straight from the Scholastic playbook. It explains nothing about physical laws, what they are ontologically, why they are as they are, and how causation works through them and upon their objects. It's a "hand-waving excercise".

Moreover, physicists have in the past speculated, tried and failed to derive the fundamental empirical laws from some intrinsic nature of their objects.

Is that a real possibility in your mind?

Yes, as Pon de Replay put it so eloquently.

[Quaremerepulisti]

Kreutzritter is the evil twin of atheists who think that "If God caused everything, who caused God?" is an absolute rebuttal to the cosmological argument, that eternal/inflationary, "imaginary time", or quantum mechanical "from nothing" cosmologies obviate the need for a Creator, and that Hume and Kant showed that miracles can't happen and metaphysics only exists in our imagination.  Intelligent people (most of them, anyway, you can't get a Ph.D. in physics and be a complete cretin) but who make really stupid arguments, blinded as they are by an a priori commitment to a certain worldview.  Of course they think their arguments are really clever, and that it is everyone else who is stupid.  The atheists rant against "superstitions of bronze-Age goatherders" while Kreuzritter rants against "physicalism".  Just like atheists, he rants on and on, hardly ever even responding to a single point made.

Kreutzritter even denies the ability for reason to see that last Thursdayism isn't true - that God wouldn't have done this because it wouldn't be rational.  Yet he trusts that very same reason to tell him that theistic evolution isn't true - God wouldn't have done this because that wouldn't be rational.  He relies on "infused faith", but how does he even know that the content of his "infused faith" is correct - if God can imbue with false memories He can likewise imbue with a false faith - for reasons known to Him alone, inaccessible to us.  Could God will that 2 + 2 = 5, I would like to know.  In short, if absolute Divine voluntarism is true, all bets are off and the discussion ends right there.  It is impossible to have a rational discussion about Him or anything He does.

Then, Kreutzritter is utterly ignorant of natural science or the scientific method yet feels himself qualified to pontificate on how utterly stupid science is, in exactly the same manner as Richard Dawkins pontificating on how stupid it would be for anyone to think the cosmological argument is sound.  He simply doesn't want to hear what science has to say anymore than Dawkins wants to hear what philosophy has to say.  Science is a threat to Kreutzritter's worldview just as philosophy is to Dawkins's.  So he simply wants to a priori deny it any claim to being a means of knowledge and rants on about how stupid scientists are just like the New Atheists do with regard to philosophers and theologians.

One way to go about this is to try to show that philosophy and science rely on a contradictory set of assumptions.  (That is, of course, just what the New Atheists do when they say science "disproves" religion and even natural theology.)  But, as I showed, the assumptions of Aristotelian philosophy (at least) provide the grounds for natural science - objects act according to their nature and thus, there are regularities in nature, which can be observed.  This regularities provide the grounds for making both predictions and retrodictions.  (It doesn't mean every claimed prediction or retrodiction will be correct, of course, only that are sound philosophical grounds for making them if proper inferential techniques are used.)  Kreutzritter doesn't really have an answer to this except to either deride scholasticism (but even under absolute realism, which he adheres to, things still act according to their natures) or rant on about the ontological status of physical laws (which is in reality a silly question).  Why a silly question?  It is as silly as asking the "ontological status" of "man is a rational animal".  It is his nature.  So it is the nature of a charged particle to repel like charged particles and attract oppositely charged ones.  That is the philosophical explanation of Coulomb's law.  Now, I am still waiting for the metaphysical assumptions involved in concluding an old earth or common descent denied by his philosophy.  (My apologies in advance if that was buried somewhere in his rant, but all I saw was an agreement with these principles.)

The other way is to attempt to discredit science when it gives results he doesn't like, such as a moving earth.  Thus we have the airy dismissal of "Physics, which is relativistic in regard to motion, including non-inertial frames of reference, does not agree with you but dismisses the question altogether from being meaningful to itself."  This, of course, is woefully ignorant of the actual physics.  If Mach's principle is true, you can indeed transform to a non-inertial frame with the earth at the origin of the coordinate system with zero instananeous translational and rotational velocity at time t=0 (say).  But the laws of physics then dictate the earth will move in that frame and it will not be at the origin at a later time.  For instance, conservation of angular momentum dictates that earth's rotational speed will change (in a rotating-earth frame) based on the tides.  In a "stationary-earth" frame the earth will oscillate back and forth.  In fact, changes in earth's rotational speed can be directly seen through very long baseline interferometry.  (Although I'm sure Kreutzritter will dismiss this as something seen through instruments. ) Then, of course, when I say that science deals with accidents and not merely appearances, he puts "accidents" in scare quotes under the pretext science doesn't deal with how or why.  Yes, it's true science doesn't deal with formal or final causes; that's not its proper subject matter.  It does deal with efficient causes, which affect accidents, and the fact that it doesn't deal with formal or final causes doesn't mean that it's wrong in what it says about accidents and efficient causes.

Except, of course, when science gives a result that he does like, such as the dependency graph vs. common descent paper.  Then all of a sudden that is the gospel truth, and none of the previous limitations of science matter.  Science is very "narrow" and only applicable under a very tight set of circumstances, except here, where a refusal to generalize the results to smaller and closer groupings of animals, without data showing that model is also better there, is merely "obtuse".  (The author of that paper himself, BTW, admits that more work needs to be done and he should eventually look at a combined common design/descent model, which he didn't do in this paper.)  He is utterly ignorant of the fact that, when inferences are made, it is not the likelihood but the posterior probability that is relevant, and that when comparing models, it is therefore important to get the right prior distribution over the hypothesis (or variable) space.  (Otherwise, you always prefer a quadratic fit to a linear one, since it always fits the data better.)  He admits that "You have no idea what God's reasons would or would not be, and our expectations are absolutely irrelevant to the truth status of this model in relation to natural history" and does not see that that is exactly my point and that that completely destroys his argument.  Unlike a computer programmer, who is constrained (at least broadly) to reuse old code modules (there is a strong expectation he will do so and not create de novo), God has no such constraints whatsoever, and thus the prior model should take de novo creation of modules into account and not illegitimately constrain the prior of those to be zero.  Kreutzritter, if you don't understand this, your objections to science are as ignorant and ill-founded as "If God created the world, who created God?"  The data, unfortunately, is actually most consistent with a non-omnipotent designer.  Take that for what you will.

Finally, he asks how theistic evolution would be consistent with a loving God.  Funny, that's the same question Richard Dawkins asked of the God of the Old Testament, who, to him, is nothing but a sadistic, cruel, tyrannical bully.  That's the same question unbelievers ask about a God who drowns (almost) everyone and every animal in a global flood or a God who commands genocide, even commanding the killing of innocent children.  But their questions aren't relevant.  Who are they to question God?  That will always be the response.  Yet it is OK for Kreuzritter to do so.  The simple answer is that God foresaw the Fall and therefore its effects were prior in time to it, and if Kreutzritter believes in the Immaculate Conception, he is constrained to accept that an effect can precede a cause in time.  If it's OK to have all this cruelty after the Fall, it's OK (temporally, though perhaps not ontologically) before.