It’s fun to watch fundamentalist creationists descend into Humean skepticism. Hume, the most hardboiled skeptic of all time (since the eighteenth century anyway), pointed out that we can’t really say that anything caused anything else. You can doubt anything. Did that billiard ball cause that other one it just hit to move? No. You can’t prove it. It could be just a startling coincidence. There is no proof ever for any empirical causal effect, anywhere at anytime. Bummer. Of course, creationists love that fact, because they get to use that method against evolution! (They only use Humean skepticism when it’s quite convenient of course—unlike Hume they would never apply it to their own interests)! Continue reading Creationists: the greatest skeptics of our age
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{A note on thought experiments: OK, some of you good folk keeping trying to ‘kobayashi maru’ the conditions of the test and rearrange it, or say you would never believe the conditions would hold, or end run the solution. In a thought experement all of the conditions are stipulated and held ‘as if’ they are true to force you to think through the implications of a particular problem. That’s why Enstein’s famous thought experiment of riding bukaroo style on a light wave worked even though it was quite impossible.} This thought experiment comes from philosopher Stephen Law. It is worth reading in its original form, but I will summarize: Continue reading Thought-experiment August: (5) The God of Eth and the problem of good Continuing my Summer break I offer this: I keep hearing that fossils came from some other creations out there in the far reaches of space–that our Earth is a conglomerate of the remnants of these previous creations. My kids have actually heard this in seminary. Apparently the story goes something like this: God made lots of worlds though special acts of creation. Then to make this Earth he took all these other creations and put them together into this one. This story is nice because it explains why we have fossils millions of years old on a earth that is just a few thousand years old. It answers the age old question, “How do we get rid of Godless evolution.” So dinosaurs lived in these extra solar planets which furnished the material for this earth. The great thing about armchair speculation like this is that you don’t have to deal with any messy things like data and evidence. Continue reading Explaining Fossils (reprise): Many worlds smashed together to make this one In 1911, The Superintendent of Church Schools, charged three Brigham Young University Professors with Heresy. They were charged with (a) “including man in the process of evolution,” (b) “Joseph Smith’s vision were described in terms of their psychological, and therefore subjective, aspects,” and (c) “In regard to the Bible, teaching from the standpoint of the ‘Higher Criticism’” Continue reading The Student Response to the 1911 BYU Heresy Controversy
Fred Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe 1950 Now go watch this for a sense of what is going on in cosmology today: Could he have been more spectacularly wrong? Dark matter, dark energy, the Hubble Telescope—which would peer into regions unimaginably old and distant, the cosmological background radiation, on and on the discoveries have gone. The fact is it has only taken about 50 years rather than 500 for cosmology to be further from him than he was Newton. Continue reading In 1950 Cosmology Reached its Peak
Galileo’s Letter to the Church (1632) Conflict between science and religion runs deep. Continue reading Galileo says, “You go scientists!” My belief in God is not founded on evidence from the physical world. I believe because I am in a relationship with Him. I’ve gotten to know Him. I recognize his voice in others. I want to argue that some of the suspicion that exists between certain Mormon Saints and science is grounded in not recognizing this relationship is the fundamental relation in knowing God. Oddly enough I see the fundamentalist atheists and LDS saints who fear evolution as arguing from the same flawed assumptions. Continue reading The evangelical atheists and Mormon anti-evolutionists have joined forces So somewhere, somehow some chemicals started replicating. It’s no shame that science hasn’t cracked this yet. There are some great hints starting to become manifest, maybe RNA started it, but how is actually irrelevant to our metaphysical quest. Somehow it got started, is a perfectly acceptable beginning to our quest at this stage of the science. But we want to be careful about just saying “God did it” because when science figures this out we don’t want to have hung our hat on this lack of explanation as a coat hook for our belief. (See my “God of the Gaps” post for more on this.) Continue reading Life: Keeping you safe from a deterministic universe, Part III I have great difficulty influencing the past. Try as I might, it seems to be a fixed place that manipulating is hard because time’s arrow, as it is called, moves in only one direction. Breathtakingly bright physicists don’t really see a reason for this, but it does seem to be an empirical observation of how the universe unfolds. It might be that the universe is deterministic and if so, time is a bit of an illusion. Continue reading It was determined at the big bang you would read this post: Part II Science It should be abundantly clear that the Bible was never intended to be a rigorous scientific treatise in our modern sense. Talmage, for instance, wrote, “The opening chapters of Genesis, and scriptures related thereto, were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science.” Nonetheless, many today insist on a literal reading of the Genesis, holding that the earth (or even the entire universe) was created a few thousand years ago over a 6-day (or 6,000-year) period, that there was no life or death on earth prior to this, and that species are unchanged since creation. Needless to say, these notions are at odds with modern science, and lead to the blasphemous notion that God has planted evidence to mislead us. Continue reading Latter-day Biblical Literalism (Part II) Guest Post by David H. Bailey |
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