No PhD Needed

[MathGeek]

Being a scientist and exercising dominion over creation is not something people choose to be when they grow up, it is something people are by virtue of being created in the image of God and being thereby granted authority over creation. Adam had no formal education, much less a PhD, when God brought the animals to him to be named. Somehow through the fall and the giving over of creation to bondange to decay, we lost track of all the names Adam had given to creation, and Carl Linneaus is regarded as one of our greatest scientists for taking up the naming task once again through his organized system of binomial nomenclature...
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[Pat Babaz]

MathGeek

Have you found in your career that most scientists are atheists? Its seems like a lot of them are out to disprove the existence of God thru their work. I know you are a man of deep faith so that must be hard to work in such a secular vocation.

[MathGeek]

Originally Posted by Pat Babaz

MathGeek

Have you found in your career that most scientists are atheists? Its seems like a lot of them are out to disprove the existence of God thru their work. I know you are a man of deep faith so that must be hard to work in such a secular vocation.

I've really never done a careful assessment, but there are enough people of faith in science that it's not obvious from my 30 year career that "most" scientists are atheists. There do seem to be more atheists than the general population, but there are plenty of people of faith too: lots of Muslims, Catholics, and Jews - not so many evangelical Christians. A lot of scientists are reluctant to talk much about their faith, so it's hard to really know through most casual and professional conversations.

The vocal atheists like Dawkins and Krauss and Sagan and Nye are a distinct minority. But their influence is disproportionate to their numbers because they are so vocal, and because they are prepared to undermine the faith of students as well as persecute scientists and educators who are unwilling to peddle their naturalistic kool aid that contradicts the Biblical account of creation.

[Pat Babaz]

Math geek, as a Christian myself I have a hard time answering skeptics who question why Bible says the world is only about 10,000 years old and also why dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. You seem very well versed in the word, how would you answer those questions?

[Smalls]

Originally Posted by Pat Babaz

Math geek, as a Christian myself I have a hard time answering skeptics who question why Bible says the world is only about 10,000 years old and also why dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. You seem very well versed in the word, how would you answer those questions?

Does the bible actually say the world is only 10,000 years old?

I've always taken Genesis as metaphorical, not realistic. By that, I mean that the 7 days may not necessarily have been 7 days. I've had many, priests and scientists alike, more or less agree with that idea. Days to God may have been a millenia. The story was obviously passed down, because there was no one to write it down as it happened. Could anyone back then have fathomed what 1000 years was like, or a million? Heck, people now only live 100 years, if you're lucky. Back then, they lived to be what, 30 or 40? So perhaps when the story was given by God to be written down, it was told as if it took him 7 days to make the world. That is much easier to comprehend. In the context of a year, that is not a long time. It didn't take him a long time to make everything, within the context of how old the world actually is.

Maybe that makes sense, maybe it doesnt. But that is how I look at things, as a scientist.

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[MathGeek]

Even with a rather literal reading, a number of assumptions and additional steps of logic are needed to assign an age to the earth. To me, the more direct and supportable conclusions a literal reading gives are a six day creation, the absence of death before the fall of man, and the creation of man and woman at the beginning of creation.

Understanding the conflicts between these aspects of a literal reading of the Biblical texts with modern secular consensus is not a task for a few sentences in an internet forum. Send me an email request, and I'll send along the 10 page paper my wife and I co-authored on the topic some time back. Michael_Courtney@alum.mit.edu

The main points ideas center around two points:

1) The application of methodological naturalism assumes that the laws of nature are constant. Since miracles and supernatural events are assumed by the method not to occur, any claim that the method has invalidated a specific claim of a supernatural event (Biblical creation) has made a circular argument, which is a fallacy.

2) Operational science describes the laws of nature and is subject to the tests of repeatable experiment. Questions of what happened in the past are more properly questions of history rather than natural science. Redefining the subjects as science rather than history gives greater weight to a naturalistic interpretation of the physical evidence (with a method that assumes miracles do not occur) than to the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence commonly admitted when questions are recognized as historical.

The 10 page paper is titled, "Faith and Science: Debunking the Myth that Science Disproves the Bible" and while it neither proves nor demands a literal interpretation of the Biblical texts regarding creation, it does present a framework which allows them to be preserved without any contradiction by secular consensus or modern science.

[Cappy]

Jesus taught in parables why can't the old testament be the same?

[Pat Babaz]

I found this on a website and thought it was interesting:

The word "day" in ancient Hebrew has three different meanings: the daylight portion of a 24-hour day, a 24-hour day, and a long, unspecified period of time. So the 6 days to create the Earth(rest on the 7th) doesn't necessarily mean it was six 24hr days.

[Baychamp1]

Originally Posted by MathGeek

Even with a rather literal reading, a number of assumptions and additional steps of logic are needed to assign an age to the earth. To me, the more direct and supportable conclusions a literal reading gives are a six day creation, the absence of death before the fall of man, and the creation of man and woman at the beginning of creation.

Understanding the conflicts between these aspects of a literal reading of the Biblical texts with modern secular consensus is not a task for a few sentences in an internet forum. Send me an email request, and I'll send along the 10 page paper my wife and I co-authored on the topic some time back. Michael_Courtney@alum.mit.edu

The main points ideas center around two points:

1) The application of methodological naturalism assumes that the laws of nature are constant. Since miracles and supernatural events are assumed by the method not to occur, any claim that the method has invalidated a specific claim of a supernatural event (Biblical creation) has made a circular argument, which is a fallacy.

2) Operational science describes the laws of nature and is subject to the tests of repeatable experiment. Questions of what happened in the past are more properly questions of history rather than natural science. Redefining the subjects as science rather than history gives greater weight to a naturalistic interpretation of the physical evidence (with a method that assumes miracles do not occur) than to the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence commonly admitted when questions are recognized as historical.

The 10 page paper is titled, "Faith and Science: Debunking the Myth that Science Disproves the Bible" and while it neither proves nor demands a literal interpretation of the Biblical texts regarding creation, it does present a framework which allows them to be preserved without any contradiction by secular consensus or modern science.

In my simple mind the theory that masses of rock & gases collided randomly and created a perfect planet which sustains animal, plant and human life perfectly, debunks the scientific non believers. Challenge them to go to church, read the bible and actively seek the Holy Spirit, and we'll see who changes their mind.

[MathGeek]

Originally Posted by Baychamp1

In my simple mind the theory that masses of rock & gases collided randomly and created a perfect planet which sustains animal, plant and human life perfectly, debunks the scientific non believers. Challenge them to go to church, read the bible and actively seek the Holy Spirit, and we'll see who changes their mind.

Agreed.

[Smalls]

Originally Posted by Baychamp1

In my simple mind the theory that masses of rock & gases collided randomly and created a perfect planet which sustains animal, plant and human life perfectly, debunks the scientific non believers. Challenge them to go to church, read the bible and actively seek the Holy Spirit, and we'll see who changes their mind.

My question though is how does it debunk them? A theory is something can be proven or disproven. Can this be proven or disproven?

I'm catholic. I believe in the creation story, but not because it could be proven. I believe it because that is my faith. I also believe evolution is a real thing. Evolution, in my opinion, is a tool of God. For what purpose? Maybe so that his creation will adapt and survive.

But I'm not sure we will ever be able to prove, one way or another, how the world was made. Everything we have is "theory", which I think is using the term a bit loosely, because it implies that it can proven or disproven. Can any of them be proven? Or do we just believe in what we believe is the truth?

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[Pat Babaz]

I think a lot of times scientists present their theories like they are facts.. Man made global warming is a good example of that. I don't believe in evolution as far ameba to lizard to marsupial to ape then to humans, but I do believe in natural selection. It takes way more faith to be an atheist than to simply believe in an Almighty God that created it all.

[MathGeek]

Originally Posted by Smalls

My question though is how does it debunk them? A theory is something can be proven or disproven. Can this be proven or disproven?

There are different kinds of levels of proof and disproof. For example, most scientist and engineers are familiar with means, standard deviations, and p-values. If a theory makes a quantitative prediction of the value of an outcome, and an experiment measures that outcome a number of times with a mean value and a standard deviation, the mean value being 2 standard deviations away from the outcome has disproven the theory with a 97% confidence level. Suppose the theory predicts average global temperatures to rise by 3 degrees over a specified time. If the measured temperatures have risen 2 degrees +/- 0.5 degrees, then the prediction is off by twice the uncertainty in the measurement. This allows a confidence level to be ascribed to a claim of disproof, but it is not absolute certainty.

Other claims can also be debunked more qualitatively, akin to Mythbusters' use of their three outcomes: Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed.

Originally Posted by Baychamp1

In my simple mind the theory that masses of rock & gases collided randomly and created a perfect planet which sustains animal, plant and human life perfectly, debunks the scientific non believers. Challenge them to go to church, read the bible and actively seek the Holy Spirit, and we'll see who changes their mind.

I agree with Baychamp that the claims that a planet perfectly suitable for life assembled from rocks and gases has been debunked by qualitative considerations about its unlikeliness. "Busted." The original scientific claim is captured in the "nebular hypothesis" originally put forward in 1755 by Immanuel Kant. It has never found enough evidentiary support to be called a theory. It only persists, because all the other naturalistic theories for the formation of the earth and solar system have failed more spectacularly.