relda,
first of all thank you for continuing with this debate that is very rewarding for me, giving me an opportunity and incentive to more carefully formulate my own thoughts. I hope we two are not the only ones still following this debate.

When speaking of “EVERYTHING assumed to exist ...” I was trying to explain KANT, not make a claim myself. I might have misunderstood him: only a better knower of Kant - theist or atheist - could tell. I personally believe that the Divine/Spiritual has both objective and subjective (individual as well as of humanity as such) features. It cannot be reduced to either, only one of its features can be suppressed by this or that individual or school of thought. This probably comes from my experience with “doing mathematics“ where it is also hard to tell whether one creates (the subjective feature) or discover (the objective feature).

Since quantum physics, this clear distinction (between the observer and observed) became problematic even in the philosophy of science. A lot of misunderstandings - including those manifested in derogatory remarks about religion and faith on this OLO - arise when one strictly separates what is subjective and what is objective when dealing with what “really exists“. “Epistemology models ontology” is the favourite saying of John Polkinghorne, the physicist-theologian I often refer to.

I agree that Christian and other religious models (symbolisms) of the Divine contain “echos” of earlier models, some rather primitive. This is just what evolution is all about: we share 95% of our DNA with the chimpanzee, and Einstein’s theory certainly contains “echos” of Newton’s theory. However, I agree that the relation between various religious models of the Divine is much more complicated than that between various scientific models of the physical reality.

Your last paragraph expresses simply the reasons why I value your opinions so much: it is a nice formulation of what tolerance is all about. The “equally valid” part in your confession is for me acceptable exactly because in these matters I do not subscribe to a strict distinction between subjective and objective.

George,
"first of all thank you for continuing with this debate that is very rewarding for me, giving me an opportunity and incentive to more carefully formulate my own thoughts..." You have allowed me to do the same. Thankyou.

Quantum physics has for some time interested me in the idea of the observer affecting the observed - quite metaphysical really. Not even our scientists can quite grasp QM - nor do they pretend to.

"The first act of reason is consciousness [but] I must have objects of my thought and apprehend them: for otherwise I am not conscious of myself... [And to possess freedom is to possess spirit]. There is thus a being above the world, namely the spirit of man.” – Kant :)

AJ,
I wish you well in your science courses. On the nature of facts versus opinions, not everything associated under the rubric ‘science’ is hard fact. The issues raised on this website, www.onlineopinion, are those inviting considered discussion. The standard required before a proposition is considered a fact is so high as to usually bring only short, dull discussions. Most things worth talking about are not black and white. Possibly you’ve come to the wrong address. www.onlinefacts is down the street.

Waterboy, Relda.
I’m all for scepticism. What I was attempting to show was that Joe Schmoe Modell in the diner had a more healthy scepticism than some today who profess to be scientifically minded yet swallow fanciful ideas pretty rapidly.

If I understood Waterboy, then for a hypothesis to be scientific, it must be able to be disproven. So if all evolutionary theories were disproven, where would we be? Surely we would have to then propose some type of non-evolutionary view, even if just hypothetically? Yet nearly everyone here is telling me that creation could not even theoretically be considered as scientific.

Waterboy suggests we use scepticism in attempting to disprove some of our own theories. The problem is how to find a test to disprove a theory of history. What test will disprove that God took six days to make the world? Which test proves or disproves that reptiles changed into birds hundreds of millions of years ago? What test disproves that Hannibal crossed the Alps on elephants? What test can finally resolve an explanation for the death or disappearance of the Chamberlain’s daughter?

If I claim I sipped from that glass of water on the table last Thursday, what analysis would disprove my claim? That singular event is unrepeatable. Yet science normally requires repeatability. Historians may use witnesses or records in verifying historical claims, such as a camera that viewed me drinking the water. Then we argue the reliability of the recording. Such uncertainty arises over an event happening only last week. How far must my scepticism stretch for the alleged millions of intervening years?

(continued…)

Earlier AJPhilips posed some suggestions on experiments that could disprove evolution. He said if we could find a true chimera then that would settle the matter. However, if we found one tomorrow I’m guessing the evolutionary model is malleable enough to adapt to this new finding.

Others in Darwin’s day proposed the test of finding the predicted great number of transitional fossils. A hundred years later, the fossil record wasn’t much different. Palaeontologists were admitting as much. People like AJ were getting upset when creationists dared quote their summaries. So technically the test had failed, but the theory itself was able to adapt. Theories of history always can.

Relda views science falling into two types, the popular (the sham) and the academically sanctioned. Creationists have suggested it useful to view science in two categories: historical science, that invoking investigations into the past (palaeontology, archaeology, origins, etc.), and operational science, that which can be examined in repeatable tests (physics, chemistry, medicine, communications, transport, etc.).

Waterboy, you and several others on this thread have suggested that we look for what’s useful, alleging creationism doesn’t produce useful results.

Neither evolution nor creation are branches of science. They are both explanations of history, or philosophical frameworks for interpreting the evidence. No one on this thread has given any example of how seeing certain evidence through an evolutionary perspective is more profitable (in medicine, for example) than viewing it through a creationist model. I’m guessing I’ll wait in vain for such an example.

Medical science predates Darwin. Western science in general established its foundations (its most usefulness) at a time when most scientists accepted six-day creation.

Let’s not start to detail the pioneering breakthroughs in medicine accomplished by creationists such as Joseph Lister, Raymond Damadian or Louis Pasteur (though AJ protests the inclusion of Pasteur’s name).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Vahan_Damadian

Bennie,
The idea that science is viewed through a paradigm or a framework for assessing the evidence is not necessarily a creationist idea. If you want to find out more about scientific paradigms, read the writings of philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn.

relda,
I do not know about other scientists but physicists certainly have no problems with QM, because of its applicability. It is the philosophers of science who have problems with a model of reality they cannot visualise. I know, the Copenhagen school is just one attempt to interpret QM in a way acceptable to philosophers. I hinted at it not because I necessarily accept its explanations; I only wanted to show that the strict, “mechanical” distinction between what is subjective and what is objective can be challenged even from within science, albeit only on the most fundamental level of asking what is the “stuff” matter is made of. Is it tiny balls of elementary particles, waves, strings? Or is it Hilbert spaces, curvature of space-time? Of course, it is neither, these are just models: the first three are visual, the other mathematical, but still just models of the directly unaccessible Ding-an-sich.

All I wanted to say was that even if one restricts oneself to the reality described by science (and accepted by everybody except for the solipsists), the situation is not as simple as some of our atheist friends try to pretend. And that the blurring of the borderline between subjective and objective just MIGHT shed a new light at the relation between the material and the spiritual.

Thank you for the quote from Kant. His “spirit of man being above the world” is apparently supposed to parallel Genesis 1:1 “And The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters“? Nevertheless, I think that Kant’s metaphysics is compatible with Christian faith, even if he does not say so, although Fichte and Schelling apparently do.

While pursuing this line of thought I came across http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/ksp2/, which seems to be very promising. I am certainly going to try to read and understand it. This is again something to thank you for.

Dan

You appear to have missed the point.
Creation is not a repeatable event as you have agreed. Evolution is not only repeatable but is going on all around us.

As for your glass of water the only 'unrepeatable' aspect of that is that we can't go back in time to last thursday. To claim that drinking a glass of water is unrepeatable just because we cant go back in time shows a profound misunderstanding of the scientific process.

Furthermore refutability does not depend upon the reliability of witnesses. It is sufficient that the possibility of the event being observed makes it knowable or refutable. Creation is not observable or repeatable. Creation cannot be used to make model-based predictions which is why it is a useless theory.

Evolution is observable and therefor refutable.
As for the usefulness of evolution... what is animal husbandry if not an application of evolution, microbiologists use evolution all the time, we use our understanding of evolution to manage infectious diseases, Genetic engineering is nothing more than carefully managed evolution. The bottom line is that evolutionary models have proved to be very useful and there is every reason to believe that we will continue to make interesting and useful new discoveries well into the future following the evolutionary model. For that reason teaching evolution in the school curriculum makes good sense.

What justification is there for teaching creation or any of the other oddball, unproductive theories that are floating around.