Dear Pericles,

Personally I am not a Christian and do not believe in the "young-earth" claim, yet I can see the merit of believing in the biblical story of creation while excluding science from one's thinking.

The secret is to, instead of "What is so?", ask "What is good?".

When you ask different questions, you are most likely to arrive at different answers!

When one is seeking material results and wants to be successful, one naturally asks "What is so?", so one way to practice under-cutting our worldly desires is to stop asking scientific questions and one method which helps us doing so, is to believe the Genesis creation story, or for that matter anything else which helps us to focus our mind on God instead. Hearing the stories of God purifies our heart and fills us with devotion to counter the corrupting influence of the world.

Do we want to be successful, or do we want to to be pure?
That is the pre-commitment that Dan was speaking about "at the first turn".

Thank you Yuyutsu for answering on behalf of Dan S de Merengue. I wonder how different his response might be.

Yours makes perfect sense to me.

>>...one way to practice under-cutting our worldly desires is to stop asking scientific questions and one method which helps us doing so, is to believe the Genesis creation story<<

If the objective is to reduce science to irrelevance, this is an appropriate path to take. It avoids all temptation to investigate the scientists' concept of the universe and its functioning, and in doing so replace curiosity over the world around us with a single, spiritual focus.

Not the way I prefer to live my life, but we are all individuals, capable of making up our own minds about these things.

Incidentally, I'm not entirely sure Dan would agree with your summary. Maybe we'll find out.

Pericles,
You ask me for an explanation for the thought processes that led me to accept the position that the world is thousands rather than millions of years old?

There's much in the history of philosophy of science to suggest as simplistic the view that science steadily progresses by adding new truths on old, or that later theories are necessarily closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories.

The influential philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, said that looking back at Aristotle's ancient writings concerning motion, it seemed full of egregious errors, both of logic and of observation. Judged by today's understanding of physics, Aristotle looked like an idiot. Yet we know he wasn't. To understand Aristotelian science, one must know about the intellectual tradition within which he worked.

For Kuhn, the development of science is driven by periods of stasis where researchers operate under what he called a ‘paradigm’, or a common intellectual framework, disrupted by periods of crisis where some scientists begin to question the dominant paradigm. Empirical evidence is always interpreted through an intellectual framework. The current paradigm which interprets evidence within deep geological time arose only about 200 years ago on the back of philosophical concerns,

Ultimately, if science is primarily concerned with observation, then we cannot measure anything older than ourselves. For elapsed time can only be measured while time is elapsing. Therefore, any long age conclusions are interpretations, not observations.

Thanks for getting back to me on this Dan S de Merengue.

>>There's much in the history of philosophy of science to suggest as simplistic the view that science steadily progresses by adding new truths on old, or that later theories are necessarily closer approximations to the truth than earlier theories.<<

In every case that I can think of, where old "truths" have been superseded, the new understandings have arisen through the use of tools and capabilities that did not exist in the preparation of the older theories.

Can you offer any counter-examples, where the revised explanations have contradicted earlier ones, while still using their "common intellectual framework"?

Aristotle actually illustrates this point, exactly.

>>Judged by today's understanding of physics, Aristotle looked like an idiot. Yet we know he wasn't.<<

He had neither the tools, nor a massive body of other people's work to work from, nor the ability to anticipate future discoveries. All that he achieved was within the "common intellectual framework" of his time.

And this observation interests me:

>>The current paradigm which interprets evidence within deep geological time arose only about 200 years ago on the back of philosophical concerns<<

What were the "philosophical concerns" that caused people to question the thinking on deep geological time? For me, it seemed to have been that the previous explanations - that the world was formed over a six day period - did not survive the arrival of newer, more accurate observations.

What is lacking in the modern approach to geology - and cosmology - that allows you to reject their findings? Do you see their interpretation of the facts to be error-prone? Or simply misguided?

>>Ultimately, if science is primarily concerned with observation, then we cannot measure anything older than ourselves.<<

Yet you accept the accuracy of Genesis.

You also seem to accept the results of the key discoveries in other manifestations - the computer on which you write your posts is a product of the same common intellectual framework, after all.

Where does your disconnect occur? At what point did you stop accepting what science has uncovered?

Pericles,
You ask me, at what point did I stop accepting what science has uncovered?

I'm thrilled and I marvel about what science has uncovered. As I've already said, I very much appreciate the benefits and insights gained from modern science. Perhaps the difference between me and you is in our understanding of exactly what modern science has uncovered in 'the last five hundred years' of which you speak.

It certainly hasn't uncovered any of the atheist ideals to which you hold dear. You speak of tools such as "telescopes", and the principles held by the men that use them, such as Newton. But this is what Isaac Newton actually said: "The most beautiful system of the sun, planet and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and domination of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

Much of the strength of the scientific method derived from biblical ideas present in the Christian West. As I alluded to above, certain ideas, such as a real universe, are essential before 'science' becomes possible. "The universe is real, because God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1). This sounds obvious, but many eastern philosophies believe that everything is an illusion. There is no point in trying to investigate an illusion by experimenting on it." Men then were encouraged to look for the normative laws prevailing in the universe after believing that they proceeded from a single law giving Creator.

So in my understanding, these acknowledged scientific benefits flow from a Christian worldview, and it's the atheists who are living off borrowed capital.

You ask about philosophical concerns. Looking back about 200 years, geologists were investigating the formation of valleys in Europe. Their lines of thinking could be split into two groups. Uniformitarians considered the slow and gradual erosion rates observed each year. Catastrophists considered the large scale effects of flooding or volcanism or other tectonic movement. They were both influenced by various positivist ideas of science, and came up with markedly different theories and time scales in their conclusions. A third group were the scriptural geologists, who looked at the evidence in terms of the Great Flood, and so would also be considered catastrophists.

The point is that despite having the same 'tools' available and looking at the same evidence at the same time, they each arrived at very different conclusions depending on their philosophical outlook. People tend to see what they're looking for. For the most part uniformitarian ideas dominated geology for more than the next 100 years, but in recent decades catastrophism has been making a comeback.

So different ideas are often vying for prominence, especially when it comes to questions of origins. Science doesn't think just one thing. Currently the Big Bang theory is popular in cosmology. But there exists many other theories. Popular theories can also become self fulfilling prophesies. For example, while the Big Bang theory is popular, it will attract most of the funding grants. While it attracts the funding, it will remain very popular, ipso facto.

The formation of the earth's moon does not have just one theory. The collision theory of which you speak has many detractors.

You ask what do I accept? Well, I'd like to think that I don't just gleefully follow the majority view, but wish to think of myself as a bit more rational than that.