What is Creation Science? Part One - Burning Down the Strawmen!
I will not support any online site that resorts to lies. As often explained, this is why I have declared all blog posts and articles by Kent Hovind to be unreliable and, on the other side, have warned all readers to ignore the falsehoods spread by talkorigins.org as well. For instance, this is a picture of a carcass that fooled the Japanese people, National Geographic and quite a few scientists and amateurs like myself at first:
Anyone can be mistaken. Plenty of people thought that a carcass brought up from the sea by a Japanese trawler was that of a Plesiosaur...until we came to find out that it was in fact the remains of a Basking Shark! But the Japanese had already put out a stamp with the image of the supposed ancient animal before further investigation ruled out a saurian creature.
Hovind's Dr. Dino website continued to advertise this carcass as a saurian after it was proved to be a shark. Therefore that and some other unfortunate events convinced me to avoid any information coming from Kent Hovind at all. So even though his site was devoted to supporting Creationism, the willingness to be willingly deceptive is not acceptable to me, nor should it be to you. I will never recommend going to his site or paying attention to any claims made there.
The refusal of Talkorigins to correct false information about the Acambaro figurines was the last straw for me with them. They have falsehoods posted concerning numerous subjects, apparently believing that any old story will fool the average person. Their narrative about the Acambaro figurines is nothing but lies told by a disreputable "investigator" named Charles De Peso from beginning to end. Mexican authorities, local authorities and other investigators such as famed attorney and author Erle Stanley Gardner revealed De Peso to be an unscrupulous liar whose entire narrative was complete nonsense. Talkorigins uses De Peso's false report as a so-called "debunking" of the figurines. This tells me that their entire site is unreliable. I should know because I had exchanged emails with them and made a point of revealing errors on their pages that they have to this day refused to correct.
When someone devises a way to be deceptive, this is frankly what we would call lying. Lies are part and parcel to the Darwinist mythology. In order to help explain Creation Science I am starting by dealing with some common lies and fallacious "fallacies" that Darwinists have made up to avoid certain things like evidence and logic.
Pretty obvious that the Knickerbockers were not actually singing and playing this song but were lip-syncing, which was typical of several of the 1960's teen-oriented rock and dance shows back then. Paul Revere and the Raiders made fun of the concept by playing obvious toy instruments in this hilarious recorded performance:
Back to the point. This performance by the Raiders was not deceptive because they used toys so the audience was in on the scam if for some reason they were not aware of the lip-syncing practice common at that time. Certainly lots of pre-teens were a big part of those television audiences. Anyone familiar with music was not fooled by lip-syncing and I will give Ed Sullivan a lot of credit for allowing musicians to actually PLAY the song on his stage. Eventually live performances were preferred and viewers actually got to hear what the bands really sounded like rather than experiencing another spin of the .45 along with a bunch of guys pretending to play and sing.
Darwinists try to deceive you purposefully, much like a lip-syncing band. They do not actually present conclusive evidence for their claims, they just make the claims and pretend they have stated facts. Fail!!!
In discussions/debates, there are numerous ploys used by people to try to win the day for their point of view by avoiding evidence and logic. One of the common ones is the Straw Man.
A definition from Merriam-Webster Online:
Would it surprise you to find that Darwinists have intentionally invented several Straw Men? In discussing cosmology there are numerous such inventions. Author Washington Irving popularized the ridiculous idea that Christopher Columbus (a Christian, as it happens) set out to "sail the ocean blue" to prove that the Earth was not flat. NOBODY other than some entirely unschooled people thought this way and in fact long before Christ was born it was well known that the Earth was round.
Another Straw Man is the idea that the Heliocentric Solar System was opposed by "religion" and proposed by "science." Since the great astronomers of the day were believers, this is a foolish rumor. In fact, it was a tenet of the accepted science of the day that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System and it took several proofs to convince the defenders of the ruling paradigm to accept the idea that the Sun was at the center of the Solar System. Copernicus was foremost in leading scientists, royals and the church leaders to accept this concept. Galileo gets some credit but actually he also got himself in some trouble with peripheral issues and was not as important to the modern acceptance of the idea as was Copernicus. In fact, the ancient Greeks had considered it a possibility and work by men like Kepler finally convinced the majority of scientists and others that Heliocentricity was a certainty. All three men (Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler) would be considered Theists if not Christians.
In fact, many of the early scientists were priests, in part because few non-royals or clerics were given the opportunity for higher learning or even taught to read. The efforts of a few priests like Grossteste, Bacon and Martin Luther led to common people being given the chance at higher learning and Gutenberg's printing press led to the revolution of literacy for all people. Thus, it was the Reformation and not the Renaissance that caused a rapid rise in general knowledge and truly this was a rising tide that raised all ships! For it was not science that was shrugging off the shackles of ignorance, it was the individual scientists fighting to tear down the old monuments to false-but-accepted dogmas...rather like the situation today, as ID proponents and Creation scientists struggle to open the eyes of the world to the failures and fallacies of Darwinism.
A critical problem with this method of "doing science" should be obvious to you, the 21st Century reader. The major premise must be correct or the entire chain of ideas will be wrong. Just as a misdiagnosis of a patient can lead to an "error cascade"which could result in great harm or even death, the wrong major premise or minor premise will lead to a faulty conclusion.
“I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” - David Hume as quoted on page 74 of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 45) by Lawrence Dewan.
Science before the new Theistic movement was based on Aristotle's Axiomatic principles, but men like Roger Bacon thought that scientific ideas should be tested from the ground up rather than considered from the 10,000 foot perspective of the logical mind. To observe a process and declare that the sensible idea is that it happens because of (insert concept here) was not, to men like Bacon, worthy of the glory of God nor likely to be accurate. He believed in observation and experimentation and as it happened that another Bacon, Sir Francis, would devise the formula for the Scientific Method based on Roger's ideas
"He(Francis Bacon) wanted to replace the Aristotelian method of syllogism with an entirely new scientific method...Bacon believed that the most general axioms should form the end rather than the beginning of scientific inference, and his own methodology was designed to avoid Aristotle's mistake. Bacon's method proceeds along a strict hierarchy of increasing generality...in order to yield reliable information, human senses needed methodological assistance." - The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pg. 16) as edited by Markku Peltone.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are quite a few ideas that have been considered as plausible means by which the Universe was brought into existence. But do not think that the Big Bang is in any way a fact in any way, shape or form. It is a very crude concept that does not withstand scrutiny...unless you like your equations 96% evidence-free? Secular cosmologists have actually been more axiomatic than scientific in this particular instance, preferring a basically evidence-free explanation to a more logical one that involves the Creator God.
Will we be able to comprehend the making of the Universe within my lifetime? Do we have the innate intellect to be able to understand the "how" aspect of the event? Perhaps not, but for me I see that evidence piles up in other scientific disciplines and it piles up on the Creation side, so I expect that to be more apparent as time goes on in the world of cosmology as well. As far as the Solar System goes, space missions have already proved that the Solar System is far younger than Darwinists thought possible. So perhaps the Big Bang will prove to be a dud as well before I leave this mortal coil?
Now we have come to another Straw Man. Darwinists claim that Naturalism must be inserted into the Scientific Method. Did Francis Bacon do this? No! In fact Bacon assumed that God created all things and therefore all things could be investigated logically and methodically in order to discover secrets of their operations and forces, etc. While it is true we can only experiment on things in one particular time or place, this does not limit supernatural explanations for the origin of natural things.
Bacon was simply doing good science. Ancient scientist-philosophers like Archimedes and Aristarchus absolutely performed experiments and observed phenomena to do bottom-up investigation per the Bacon methodology.
Let's tell it like it is...When you are debating or discussing an issue and the other side resorts to deliberately deceptive arguments, then you know they cannot win on the evidence. So they will lie to you. If you understand how they do it, you will not be fooled by it. So the first kind of deception to expect from Darwinists and be ready to refute is the Straw Man. I close with the rather humorous and typical 1960's lip-synced performance by the Castaways of "Liar, Liar."
Anyone can be mistaken. Plenty of people thought that a carcass brought up from the sea by a Japanese trawler was that of a Plesiosaur...until we came to find out that it was in fact the remains of a Basking Shark! But the Japanese had already put out a stamp with the image of the supposed ancient animal before further investigation ruled out a saurian creature.
The refusal of Talkorigins to correct false information about the Acambaro figurines was the last straw for me with them. They have falsehoods posted concerning numerous subjects, apparently believing that any old story will fool the average person. Their narrative about the Acambaro figurines is nothing but lies told by a disreputable "investigator" named Charles De Peso from beginning to end. Mexican authorities, local authorities and other investigators such as famed attorney and author Erle Stanley Gardner revealed De Peso to be an unscrupulous liar whose entire narrative was complete nonsense. Talkorigins uses De Peso's false report as a so-called "debunking" of the figurines. This tells me that their entire site is unreliable. I should know because I had exchanged emails with them and made a point of revealing errors on their pages that they have to this day refused to correct.
When someone devises a way to be deceptive, this is frankly what we would call lying. Lies are part and parcel to the Darwinist mythology. In order to help explain Creation Science I am starting by dealing with some common lies and fallacious "fallacies" that Darwinists have made up to avoid certain things like evidence and logic.
Pretty obvious that the Knickerbockers were not actually singing and playing this song but were lip-syncing, which was typical of several of the 1960's teen-oriented rock and dance shows back then. Paul Revere and the Raiders made fun of the concept by playing obvious toy instruments in this hilarious recorded performance:
Back to the point. This performance by the Raiders was not deceptive because they used toys so the audience was in on the scam if for some reason they were not aware of the lip-syncing practice common at that time. Certainly lots of pre-teens were a big part of those television audiences. Anyone familiar with music was not fooled by lip-syncing and I will give Ed Sullivan a lot of credit for allowing musicians to actually PLAY the song on his stage. Eventually live performances were preferred and viewers actually got to hear what the bands really sounded like rather than experiencing another spin of the .45 along with a bunch of guys pretending to play and sing.
Darwinists try to deceive you purposefully, much like a lip-syncing band. They do not actually present conclusive evidence for their claims, they just make the claims and pretend they have stated facts. Fail!!!
In discussions/debates, there are numerous ploys used by people to try to win the day for their point of view by avoiding evidence and logic. One of the common ones is the Straw Man.
A definition from Merriam-Webster Online:
Definition of STRAW MAN
1
: a weak or imaginary opposition (as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted
2
: a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction
Another Straw Man is the idea that the Heliocentric Solar System was opposed by "religion" and proposed by "science." Since the great astronomers of the day were believers, this is a foolish rumor. In fact, it was a tenet of the accepted science of the day that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System and it took several proofs to convince the defenders of the ruling paradigm to accept the idea that the Sun was at the center of the Solar System. Copernicus was foremost in leading scientists, royals and the church leaders to accept this concept. Galileo gets some credit but actually he also got himself in some trouble with peripheral issues and was not as important to the modern acceptance of the idea as was Copernicus. In fact, the ancient Greeks had considered it a possibility and work by men like Kepler finally convinced the majority of scientists and others that Heliocentricity was a certainty. All three men (Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler) would be considered Theists if not Christians.
In fact, many of the early scientists were priests, in part because few non-royals or clerics were given the opportunity for higher learning or even taught to read. The efforts of a few priests like Grossteste, Bacon and Martin Luther led to common people being given the chance at higher learning and Gutenberg's printing press led to the revolution of literacy for all people. Thus, it was the Reformation and not the Renaissance that caused a rapid rise in general knowledge and truly this was a rising tide that raised all ships! For it was not science that was shrugging off the shackles of ignorance, it was the individual scientists fighting to tear down the old monuments to false-but-accepted dogmas...rather like the situation today, as ID proponents and Creation scientists struggle to open the eyes of the world to the failures and fallacies of Darwinism.
One great obstacle to modern science was the old guard's familiarity and comfort with Aristotle's approach to scientific questions. The word would be Syllogism - From the Free Online Dictionary:
syl·lo·gism (s
l
-jz
m) n.
l-jzm) n.
1. Logic A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion; for example, All humans are mortal, the major premise, I am a human, the minor premise, therefore, I am mortal, the conclusion.
2. Reasoning from the general to the specific; deduction.
3. A subtle or specious piece of reasoning.
[Middle English silogisme, from Old French, from Latin syllogismus, from Greek sullogismos, from sullogizesthai, to infer : sun-, syn- + logizesthai, to count, reckon (from logos, reason; see leg- in Indo-European roots).]
A critical problem with this method of "doing science" should be obvious to you, the 21st Century reader. The major premise must be correct or the entire chain of ideas will be wrong. Just as a misdiagnosis of a patient can lead to an "error cascade"which could result in great harm or even death, the wrong major premise or minor premise will lead to a faulty conclusion.
“I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” - David Hume as quoted on page 74 of Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, Volume 45) by Lawrence Dewan.
Science before the new Theistic movement was based on Aristotle's Axiomatic principles, but men like Roger Bacon thought that scientific ideas should be tested from the ground up rather than considered from the 10,000 foot perspective of the logical mind. To observe a process and declare that the sensible idea is that it happens because of (insert concept here) was not, to men like Bacon, worthy of the glory of God nor likely to be accurate. He believed in observation and experimentation and as it happened that another Bacon, Sir Francis, would devise the formula for the Scientific Method based on Roger's ideas
"He(Francis Bacon) wanted to replace the Aristotelian method of syllogism with an entirely new scientific method...Bacon believed that the most general axioms should form the end rather than the beginning of scientific inference, and his own methodology was designed to avoid Aristotle's mistake. Bacon's method proceeds along a strict hierarchy of increasing generality...in order to yield reliable information, human senses needed methodological assistance." - The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pg. 16) as edited by Markku Peltone.
With that in mind...
Universe by Design, by Dr. Danny Faulkner
The first few chapters of the Bible describe what I, the author, believe to be the origin and early history of mankind, the earth, and the universe. Even a cursory reading of the Book of Genesis by anyone reasonably scientifically literate ought to result in awareness that the biblical and scientific stories of creation are markedly different. Not wanting to live in a fragmented world of the Bible on Sunday and science the rest of the week, most Christians develop some reconciliation of the two. Either this process results in a world view, or it is based upon an often tacit world view. For instance, one will usually attempt to reconcile the Bible to science or science to the Bible. It is important to understand what one believes in Genesis, because certain rules of biblical interpretation will be established here.
You can read the rest at the link in the title just above. Also, seven chapters of the book are available online. You can also purchase the book, including in ebook format.
So in fact the birth of modern science was midwifed by Theists and Christians and Deists who abandoned the Aristotlean axiomatic way of scientific explanations in favor of dependence on experiments and observations to investigate hypotheses methodically. We see that while Bacon actually formulated the Scientific Method, scientists from antiquity used the principles of the method to determine things like the diameter of the Earth and other such discoveries as listed by Dr. Faulkner. Both Geocentricism and the Flat Earth concept were falsified by use of the scientific method even before it was explicitly spelled out by Sir Francis himself.
But what of the Universe itself?
Will we be able to comprehend the making of the Universe within my lifetime? Do we have the innate intellect to be able to understand the "how" aspect of the event? Perhaps not, but for me I see that evidence piles up in other scientific disciplines and it piles up on the Creation side, so I expect that to be more apparent as time goes on in the world of cosmology as well. As far as the Solar System goes, space missions have already proved that the Solar System is far younger than Darwinists thought possible. So perhaps the Big Bang will prove to be a dud as well before I leave this mortal coil?
Now we have come to another Straw Man. Darwinists claim that Naturalism must be inserted into the Scientific Method. Did Francis Bacon do this? No! In fact Bacon assumed that God created all things and therefore all things could be investigated logically and methodically in order to discover secrets of their operations and forces, etc. While it is true we can only experiment on things in one particular time or place, this does not limit supernatural explanations for the origin of natural things.
Bacon was simply doing good science. Ancient scientist-philosophers like Archimedes and Aristarchus absolutely performed experiments and observed phenomena to do bottom-up investigation per the Bacon methodology.
Let's tell it like it is...When you are debating or discussing an issue and the other side resorts to deliberately deceptive arguments, then you know they cannot win on the evidence. So they will lie to you. If you understand how they do it, you will not be fooled by it. So the first kind of deception to expect from Darwinists and be ready to refute is the Straw Man. I close with the rather humorous and typical 1960's lip-synced performance by the Castaways of "Liar, Liar."