Yesterday, I attended a discussion led by a philosophy professor after a matinee showing of God’s Not Dead. It was a strangely skewed group: about half the attendees were local pastors or wives of pastors. Also, not to my surprise, most of them didn’t care for the movie. It was too over the top, it paid short shrift to serious theology, some of the scenes (especially the death scene) made them uncomfortable and wasn’t true to how Christians actually respond to death. So that was good. Of course, I had to point out that the caricatures of atheists were also unrepresentative.
One guy wandered in with a bunch of tracts and books and announced that he wanted to talk about creation and how the earth was young and recited a bunch of creationist cliches — he got booed out of the room, and looked dismayed that ministers weren’t accepting his conclusions.
Now I’m wondering how Christians respond to this collection of nonsense from Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.
Does science trump the Word of God? No way!
This fun, animated video demonstrates how science couldn’t even be possible without God and how we need to be careful how we “interpret” evidence.
Always be wary when they have to tell you their own video is “fun”. It wasn’t very. It’s another of those videos that is just words in varying fonts and locations flashing on the screen, while a narrator speaks a bunch of drivel.
Once again, it’s the Hamites reciting this magical distinction, that there are two kinds of science, historical and observational, and that the only one that really counts as true science is the observation of things in the here and now, and that the only historical science you can trust and that is important is stuff that has documents and eyewitness accounts to back it up (You can see where this is going.) As an example, they use the Eiffel Tower, pointing out that you can use observational science to measure its height and location, but in order to figure out when it was built and who constructed it, you’d need to look at old papers.
This is total bullshit, and a terrible example.
If every document describing the Eiffel Tower were destroyed, we’d still be able to make estimates of its age. We’d look at rates of oxidation of the iron in the structure; we’d compare construction techniques with other buildings around the world and identify its contemporaries; and I’m sure engineers and architects would have many other tools they could use to analyze it.
Furthermore, if the two hypothesis they were testing were that a) it was constructed of earthly materials by natural mechanical means vs. b) it was conjured instantaneously into existence last Thursday by a god, who cast a discarded toothpick down into Paris, we could evaluate those ideas and come very quickly to the conclusion that (b) was stark raving nonsense. And that’s analogous to what these bozos are trying to do with their bogus philosophy of science.
What they really try desperately to claim is that you can only examine the past through the first person accounts by people who were there, and presto, they have one for the creation of the world, the Bible, which is totally trustworthy in its every word, and therefore you are supposed to believe it in every detail, because you can’t do observational science of the past.
Bullshit, through and through. The Bible is not trustworthy; it’s a hodge podge of historical accidents assembled in a biased and political process 1500 years ago, it’s full of contradictions, and even if you accept the crappy distinction of science as AiG presents it, it is not a document that is at all contemporary with the creation of the world. (I wonder…maybe they are so delusional that they think the Bible is 6000 years old.)
You can’t simply accept an account of the past because it is a “document”. People lie all the time. More charitably, people make up stories for entertainment. With their kind of uncritical swallowing of myth because it is simply written down, we’d have to conclude that Ilúvatar was the creator, and Tolkien was his prophet. Hey, were you there? Then how do you know it was wrong? I have a book right here that explains how the Ainur sung the world into existence. A real book, with words even.
Then they go on to claim that Observational Science confirms that every word in the Bible is accurate. So why does nearly every scientist in the world disagree?
Finally, they trot out Plantinga-style baloney: we must have been created by an intelligent being, because if our brains are byproducts of chance…we couldn’t trust their conclusions to ever be accurate
. To which I have to say…EXACTLY. We can’t trust our brains — the whole elaborate edifice of science is a collection of protocols we follow to avoid trusting our brains. They have to know this; by their own ideas, they think that the majority of the world’s scientists, who all use their brains rather than the Bible, have come up with a set of explanations for the world that the creationists consider wrong.
Evolution does not claim that our brains are solely the product of chance, either. These guys don’t understand science, they don’t understand history, and they don’t understand brains. They do know how to put together a slick, superficial stream of lies into a very low information density video, though.
Slick and superficial describes Ken Ham to a T. But, he makes enough money from it that I’m sure he doesn’t care how he comes across to anyone but the rubes.
Was Hamikin’s there? I don’t think so….
In the absence of historical records, it is therefore anyone’s guess as to how the Eiffel Tower was built? Therefore God could have built it? No, the theocrats demand that you acknowledge that if all historical records are destroyed, then God did build the Eiffel Tower. This video IMO is shockingly Orwellian:
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
The guy who got booed out of the presentation sounds like my first year roommate from University. He got kicked out of every church/temple/… in the city for doing pretty much exactly that. One priest even told him he was a looney, and if he ever returned, they were calling the police.
Of course, none of that stopped him, he was sure the world was going to end in 5 years, and that meant telling the world about it was more important than minor things like doing homework, attending classes and exams, or paying the University his tuition.
We use “observational science” to do “historical science”.
If one is good, so is the other.
Ironically, for biology and evolution, this false dichotomy fails completely. <bEvolutionary biology is both observational and historical.
There are large numbers of experiments in evolution running every day, from the latest somatic cell into tumor, bacterial in shaker flasks and petri dishes, up to mesoscale experiments in multi-hectare enclosures.
And oh yeah, don’t forget the latest natural experiments with novel flu viruses and emerging diseases. A new emerging disease comes along about every 18 months, the newest being MERS.
Thank you for the video. Please send me a new desk and a concussion kit.
“Were you there?” is just dumb.
I/we weren’t there when the dinosaurs went extinct after the Chickxulub asteroid strike 65 million years ago.
But the evidence was!!! And it has survived and waited for us to find it and study it. The Cosmic Microwave background is left over from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
Shouldn’t that be a “no information video”? Or perhaps it was an “ultra-dense” video? I’m on the fence about this one.
*Sigh* Blockquote fail in my last post. Lets try that again…
——————————————————————————————–
Given the quality of their arguments and thinking, I get the strong impression that they do understand one thing about brains; how tasty they are.
You could certainly replace the entirety of that video, and all the other Hamite screeds, with an elongated moaning utterance of ‘braaaaiiiinnnns’ without any real loss of worthwhile information content.
It breaks my brain how they can act like the Bible is in any way a first person account. It is quite clear the Old Testament is not, and none of the books of the New Testament are first person accounts, unless claiming you saw a vision of Jesus suddenly counts as being there.
And there are even more possibilities. As Richard Carrier’s discussed, there was a somewhat different standard of truth among laypeople back then. Particularly of religious claims, the tree was judged by its fruit: if members of a religion did in fact behave pro-socially and reaped benefits from their worship, their religion was judged to have the favor of god.
(N.b. I’m probably expressing this wrong, since it’s been a while since I’ve read that particular piece, but the gist is correct.)
No attention to detail, no respect for reality. It’s all about slick rhetoric and superficial plausibility (which is deep enough for gullible believers). Tilt an Erlenmeyer flask and the fluid doesn’t move (0:30). Move the moon about its orbit and the “dark side” remains fixed (3:35). The shoddy work of deluded minds.
I wouldn’t even trust a creationist to get the bible right.
The biggest problem with the “were you there” argument is that it fails for even the bible.
Creationists say the world began 6000 years ago. According to whom? According to the bible. But was the bible written 6000 years ago? No. It was written beginning about 2500 years ago. So, who wrote the bible stories Genesis? Was he there? Certainly not. Then how does he know? Because he was “divinely inspired”? How do you know he was divinely inspired? Were you there? He only says he was divinely inspired. Maybe he was just making stuff up. Like L. Ron Hubbard, Mohammed, and Joseph Smith were making stuff up.
Unless you can confirm that the author of the bible was divinely inspired, then you’ve got nothing. And you can’t confirm the because you weren’t there.
Of course, we can check the bible against historical and archaeological data. And when you do, surprise surprise, it’s just a bunch of myths and revisionist Jewish history. Along with dietary guidelines for people without ice.
forget the science bullshit, what the fuck is happening with the moon at the end!
Learning the philosophy of science from a creationist is kinda like taking swimming lessons from a chicken.
More like “… you can only examine the past through by reading a jumbled word-salad that someone else claims is the verbatim writings of a person who was there.” The person making the claim wasn’t, so how does that person know his(usually) salad interpretation as an unedited accurate account is, well, an unedited accurate account written by whoever was claimed to have written it?
Anyways, by this standard, Jason and the voyage of the Argonauts is an accurate and correct account of a summer holiday in the Mediterranean. Amusingly enough, Issac Newton though it was and tried to use Jason’s holiday voyage to date various other events, some non-fictional. What makes this whole thing hilarious is Asserting invented Goofiness thinks Newton was right:
Yep, Ken “piglet rapist” Ham’s clown troupe think the nice Mr Jason blogged his summer holidays.
After a bit of thought, it seems the false dichotomy amounts to a rejection of causality. We observe causes and what effects they have, as well as develop an understanding of the mechanisms involved. We assume that these causes happened in the past and had the same effect, and that their effects would accumulate in the present. So by observing the present very carefully, we can use our knowledge of causality to infer the history of an object.
Of course, there are those who get around this by rejecting the assumption that the past works under the same rules as the present, claiming physical laws change arbitrarily at their deity’s whim. This raises the question of why he conveniently stopped changing them around the time we figured out a method of inquiry (science) that lets us counteract our preconceptions and biases in order to figure out how the universe works.
Next time I murder somebody, I’ll just leave the body sitting there. When the police come knocking I’ll tell them they can’t prove anything because there were no eye witnesses. Clearly the *observational* forensic science can’t make any claims to the past.
Sure, they can measure the number of stab wounds, the length of the body, and the spatter of the blood. They might even find bloody clothing in my clothes hamper. But there were no eye witnesses to the act and therefore there is no case against me.
Silly scientists, thinking the past can leave signs of its existence on the present without humans personally witnessing it.
I hate these people. They are the best proof there is that their God doesn’t exist, for if it did, it would surely have smitten them with thunderbolts for their lies by now.
We are past the point in our history where lies of this magnitude are harmless. They could lead to the death of nations over the course of a few decades, due to their effects on education, environmental stewardship (or lack thereof), and the economy.
And as that debate with Bill Nye showed us, Ham and Hovind are presuppositionalists, a particularly toxic and solipsistic branch of Calvinist (“Reformed”) apologia even
I hate these people. They are the best proof there is that their God doesn’t exist, for if it did, it would surely have smitten them with thunderbolts for their lies by now.
We are past the point in our history where lies of this magnitude are harmless. They could lead to the death of nations over the course of a few decades, due to their effects on education, environmental stewardship (or lack thereof), and the economy.
And as that debate with Bill Nye showed us, Ham and Hovind are presuppositionalists, a particularly toxic and solipsistic branch of Calvinist (“Reformed”) apologia even Billabong Craig thinks is question-begging lunacy.
The Bible knows almost nothing about the real history of the planet. Anybody would think that God – if he exists and if he wrote the Bible – wants people like Ken Ham to sound like bigoted fact-denying fools. (The fact-denying fools will be allowed into heaven and people who tell the truth won’t.)
And there goes the whole premise of the CSI shows….which are based on reality….
Actually, the best response I heard to that ‘were you there?’ nonsense is simply ‘yes’. If they disregard anything except what they term ‘observational science’, they can’t disregard the idea of you actually having been there as nonsense unless they were there to verify that you weren’t, or they have an eyewitness account that specifically states that you weren’t there. If they can prove you weren’t there by any other method, they’ve neatly defeated their own argument.
Ragarth @ 20
Precisely. I’ve always wondered how they square that particular circle.
even taking in the fact of the hollywood effect on the story telling the expense that such in depth investigation cost everytime and the unlikely clothing worn on CSI. The show introduces scientific analysis into prime time cops and robbers TV making it simply familiar and un-intimidating and trust worthy!
that is a good thing
uncle frogy
I’ve long thought that parts of the Old Testament were stories to shut up the kids.
“What’s a rainbow, dad, dad what is it dad?” – “Son, it’s God promising never to flood the world”
“Mom, why does it hurt to have a baby?” – “Because long ago a woman did a bad thing,”
“Holy one, why do we find great big bones in rocks?” – “Because once there were giants on the earth,”
“Dad, why are we hiding in the hills, why doesn’t God help us?” – “Because the enemy has iron chariots …”
PZ Myers – “(I wonder…maybe they are so delusional that they think the Bible is 6000 years old.)”
Yes, some of them really do believe this.
I’ve had a few discussions with creationists where they do point out that they believe the bible is the oldest book in the world, was the first book or thing ever written, was written in the 1st person by people who were actually there.
And so since the bible is the mostest oldestest book of all time, it must be true to have been continually published throughout history… and the creationists will them demand you show them a book, any book, older than the bible, and when/if you can’t meet their requirements or they shift the goalposts again (such as when pointing out ancient Egyptians documented quite a lot, and, for example, never recorded a global flood or that ancient Israelites were never enslaved en masse to build the pyramids) they can then claim victory.
Cognitive dissonance expertly avoided at the same time.
Ham’s absurd rationalizations for Bronze Age mythology remind me uncomfortably strongly of the character in the brilliant ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, the Ruler of the Universe. He lives in a shack in the middle of nowhere with his cat, which is called “The Lord”. The shack protects him from the outside elements, but he believes in nothing he cannot directly see at the time – thus, he refuses to believe that anything outside the shack, including the people whose lives he rules, exists. He is the ultimate empiricist; even the past, to him, cannot be shown to exist: “How can I tell,” he answers every question not immediately concerning the present, “”that the past isn’t a fiction designed to account for the discrepancy between my immediate physical sensations and my state of mind?” His philosophy is like Ham’s in being both superficially supremely rational and empirical, but actually, for all practical purposes, ridiculous.
http://www.ebooktrove.com/top_ten/DouglasAdams_TheHitchhikerTrilogy_5Books1ShortStory.pdf
Go to page 159. For those who haven’t read it, HHGTTG is a superb series, stuffed with dollops of healthy, hilarious cynicism.
This is also (IMO) why eyewitness testimony continues to trump physical evidence in jury trials, even when it is outlandishly wrong and/or flatly contradicted by that evidence. Because if a bible believer begins to comprehend that eyewitnesses can be mistaken, or even lie, then that throws the bible into question, as well. And that is not to be borne. If the bible is true based on that (supposed) perfect eyewitness testimony, then by golly, the same kind of testimony must also be perfect today!
wilsim:
Yeah, but how do they know the bible is that old?
Were they there?
(why yes, I’m helping run this stupide meme into the ground)
According to the Pullet Patrol™, the meme is at least a mile deep. The cluckheads may be lying, but is sounds about right….Lets work for the molten core depth.
An anonymous theist liar is lying about the Ham-Nye debate:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Atheism-on-the-Slide/194801873982784
“Winning and losing is subjective in these matters. (Some angry atheists will call someone a “liar” if they say that Ken Ham won the debate!) There are mixed reviews. Some say that Nye won on style, but not on substance, especially since Nye used falsehoods and already-debunked “evidence”. Many agree that it was a lousy debate format, and Ham could not adequately reply to Nye’s elephant hurling (one of several logical fallacies he committed) in those tiny rebuttal time slots. Do over, and do it right!”
The only falsehoods that I recall came from the mouth of Ken Ham.
http://biologos.org/blog/ham-on-nye-our-take
“But several times we here at the office groaned in frustration, like when Ken Ham made false scientific arguments or Bill Nye turned to science to answer questions of meaning and purpose.”
(there are honest Christians who are not anti-science)
A: Were you there?
B: Yes.
A: What!? No you weren’t!
B: How do you know I wasn’t there?
@15 Kevin Kehres
Ken Ham’s response to that is that Jesus, who is God and so was present, confirms that the Bible is true. Therefore, if you believe that Jesus is God, you must also believe that the Bible is divinely inspired and accurate. If you think Jesus didn’t really know, then you don’t believe that he really is God and the whole house of cards collapses.
If they discard everything that happened in the past, they can’t trust an experiment they did yesterday. They’d be depending on historical evidence. They can’t prove that they didn’t do some different experiment yesterday and record the events wrong, or that Satan didn’t come into their cameras and recording instruments and jack them up so they recorded incorrect data.
Observational science and the Bible? Next time they try this ask if they were there when the events happened or when the Bible was written.
I guess that’s why so many creationists reject Einstein, Quantum Theory, and just about every other breakthrough in physics since the days of Isaac Newton…
“we’d compare construction techniques with other buildings around the world and identify its contemporaries”
I was watching a program last night called ‘Restoration Home’. In this episode it was about a massive brick barn being restored and turned into a home. Part of the series is that they have a couple of historians try to dig up the history of the particular building. With this one, they started thinking it was built sometime in the 1600’s but couldn’t find any documentary evidence to back it up. So they turned to an historic buildings specialist, who took one look at the way the purlins in the roof structure were joined together and immediately said it was built in the 2nd half of the 1700s. Just that one detail was enough because that particular technique was found pretty much only in buildings of that period.
That music that starts at 0:52… is anyone else reminded of the Neverhood?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuXMQXO3VpY
Or is it just me?
@33 ashley
The “Biologos” website/foundation has been mentioned and linked as a source for reasonable Christian thinking regarding evolution.
So, I went to the site, discovered that it had been founded by Francis Collins, and found the following:
From “Common Questions” >
“Is there room in evolutionary creation to believe in miracles?”
From “What We Believe”
From “What We Do”
Regarding this… interesting but not surprising material, I am tempted to make any number of comments that would be better made by others with deeper insight.
But I do wonder what the proposed “science” looks like when the possibility of an intervening miracle is present at every point (including the point of research and discovery), when due to an equivalent necessity for divine intervention the “natural laws” are merely a subset of “miracles,” when “evolution by common descent” occurs as a preordained process, when all the processes thereof – in all details – are purposeful (ie, what might “mutation” mean…), and when the “truth” is “hidden in Christ.”
And given the various rejections, interventions, human specialness and such, exactly which of these and similar tenets are actually “not essential for salvation?” My training in philosophy is nonexistent, but still I hear a potential trainwreck here alone.
And last, what comfort is an evolutionary theory “equipped” with an “understanding” of “God’s sovereignty in both culture and the natural world?”
It sounds, to me, like a straightforward attempt to build a more reslilient bulwark of imdoctrination, or perhaps a somewhat stumbly alleviation of simple cognitive dissonance.
And I am left wondering if Francis Collins is a kinder, gentler, more palatable Ken Ham (and feel uncomfortably out of my station saying so, since he’s apparently done real work).
kn
knowknot, you’ve hit a deep vein there: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
I’m personally convinced Al-Ghazali was right and miracles/an active god/supernaturalism in general are fundamentally incompatible with the pursuit of science. (I just get out of the dilemma differently than he did; “your modus ponens is my modus tollens” & all that.)
Theistic evolution is certainly more sophisticated (despite the cognitive dissonance) than the bigoted nonsense of the YEC (who says forget science just BELIEVE scripture and then hypocritically pretends to be doing ‘real science unlike those ‘intolerant’ old Earthers and ‘evolutionists’):
http://creation.com/neandertal-paintings-bombshell
http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/2014/05/more-cave-paintings-further-thwart.html
(Sorensen complains about ‘Fascist techniques’ by opponents – but he refuses ANY comments under his hardline blogs)
https://www.facebook.com/Piltdown.Superman
An atheist former pastor blogs about Mr Ham:
http://brucegerencser.net/2014/05/ken-ham-sincere/
@44 octopod
Thank you (and by that I mean thank you) for the “OCCASIONALISM” link.
And thank you again.
From the link I gained the following bit, which is a beatiful and concise targeting of a storm of related concerns I’ve been weathering for a very long time:
I’m not sure how champions of creation avoid coming to this, though it seems to me that very few state their view so openly, relying on some barrage of verbiage to avoid the obvious implications. But I can’t help wondering if their only available option is to fall into the “ground of being” pudding.
I’m thankful for it as an elegant statement of the issue I was choking on:
Even given every outward indication of rigor and discipline in methodology, creation-oriented practitioners of science hold a strange, almost hallucinogenic (in the sense of chemical weaponry) card under the table, which dictates that the single and all-powerful source and determinant of all perceivable reality can, at any point, follow the ostensible pattern it has put in place OR break that pattern completely, and do either based on a whim… albeit a holy whim.
This is the reasoned and enlightened alternative approach?
It seems to me that the potential effects of this approach are fertile subjects for thought experiment. Followed by the massive application of any available analgesic.
_____________
BTW. This is one of the reasons I flit about here. Jewels like this, that clarify things (or muddy them up as necessary) pop out with some regularity. My sources for such results are very limited; therefore this place is precious (by which I mean precious), even given its attendant frustrations.
a lot of us were concerned about that when he got nominated to head the NIH.
there HAVE been some … hiccups… on his watch, but by and large he seems to have remained moderately sane.
that said, the difference between Collins and Ham is that Collins is far less reliant on being a conman than Ham is.
they are both, however, just as wrong in their ideology.
Collins book “language of god” had quite a decent first half explaining how what we learned from the human genome project supports evolution.
the second half… was him being utterly ignorant and in denial about the fact that what we know about evolution applies to behavior as well as biology.
…here’s a good review of what is right and wrong with Collins:
http://wasdarwinwrong.com/korthof83.htm
oh, and biologos has been an unmitigated failure in its mission.
from long experience… if you ever see anything funded by the Templeton Foundation?
you can pretty much bet it WILL be a failure.
@49 Ichthyic
Thanks much for that. But, at least in a quick read, and though the author was thorough, I wonder if he was still way too easy on Collins… which may have been the result of focusing purely on the text by Collins, without examining extended effects of Collins’ approach.
By this I mean that the reviewer looks only at Collins’ “The Language of God” in terms of the break between the solid nature of the evolutionary half of the book and the shakiness of “moral law” half. Left at that, Collins would seem to rigorously obey some form of a non-overlapping magisteria dictum, and leave it there… which may play into the fact that Collins appears to get a big chunk of his mojo by ostensibly sticking to the idea that poofology stops after God’s big sneeze, leaving a universe with stable, reliable processes that make scientific inquiry capable of reliable results.
But he can’t really do that. The problem is that in this regard Collins is either sloppy/lazy, disingenuous, or just MASSIVELY resistant to cognitive dissonance, some or all of seem evident from his own statements, whether made directly by him or simply endorsed by his presence.
A few examples (all italics mine):
From “What We Believe” @ the BioLogos site:
From “Evolution and the Imago Dei” @ the BioLogos site:
So, God didn’t really set up a functional system which is open to investigation (but must “sustain” it), the means of sustenance and process itself isn’t really all that reliable, since it’s completely changable due to prayer or divine whim (the difference being?), findings that look like valid scientific results could be completely unrelated to all observations and could mask miraculous occurences we haven’t yet understood (the sort of truth that is “hidden in Christ”?), and the whole thing was preordained anyway (with God hiding the processes from himself, allowing himself to remember only the intended outcome, as a protection against accusations of occasionalism?).
It’s all such a mess. Any science done from there surely requires hip-waders.
____________
Oh, and… while looking into occasionalism I ran head-on into the link and quote below. I think the potential problem of the “masked miracle” is tacitly addressed here, among other things.
Apparently both PZ and Behe were preordained to pop up here, in pleasantly separate contexts!
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Religion/occasionalism.html
OMIF.
Just ran into another example of the fruit of Collins’ pursuit @ BioLogos, as stated here in his own words:
A taste of the results of his vision can be seen here:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/were-adam-and-eve-real/
Funny how it all blurs (allusion to the primacy of vision intentional)… there be echoes of our recent adventures in astronomical Last Thursdayism, or whatever the hell that was.
yes, he was.
yeah, Collins rather tips his hand at how ignorant, or in denial he is, with statements like that.
it’s been a never ending voice for hundreds of years. hell, even pointing out how wrong it is has been in the literature for hundreds of years.
you might like tracing some of the links on that from rationalwiki:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism
@54 Ichthyic
yeah, Collins rather tips his hand at how ignorant, or in denial he is, with statements like that.
it’s been a never ending voice for hundreds of years. hell, even pointing out how wrong it is has been in the literature for hundreds of years.
QFT