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Veteran Member
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: southeast
Posts: 2,526
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Evidence vs Faith
malookiemaloo:
Over on this thread in E/C, RBH posted a very nice piece of writing:
Quote:
Creationist Criticisms of Geological Dating
Imagine that you are standing at some distance east of a tall building. A fence prevents you from getting closer to the building but does not impede your view. Suppose that you want to know the height of the building. What can you do?
Well, first suppose that you see three people standing close to the building in the distance. You can't see them absolutely clearly, but it looks like one is an adult man, one an adult woman, and one a child. You hold up a pencil, marking with your thumbnail the apparent height of the man. Then you carefully move your pencil up the building, one "man-height" at a time, counting the number of "man-heights" tall the building is. You find that it is 53 "man-heights" tall. You assume that the man is 5'10" tall, and multiplying, you estimate that the building is 309 feet high. You repeat the process with the woman, assuming her height to be 5'4". You find the building to be 54 "woman-heights" high, or 288 feet. Repeating the process once again with the child, you find the building to be 77 "child-heights" high. Estimating the child's height at 4'0", you estimate the building's height to be 308 feet. Based on the data gathered so far, you are justified in estimating the building to be between 288 and 309 feet high, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 feet.
Now suppose that you notice a man at the top of the building who is periodically dropping what look like bowling balls off the building. Deferring speculation on why he might be dropping the bowling balls, you time how long they take to fall and find that on average they take 4.4 seconds to fall from the top of the building to the ground. Knowing that the distance traveled by objects falling in the earth's gravitational field in a vacuum conforms to the simple equation,
Distance = 16t^2
you calculate that the building is about 310 feet high, your calculation disregarding the effects of air resistance. This makes your estimate slightly inflated, though for bowling balls the effect is very minor. In any case, this is consistent with your earlier estimates and provides independent corroboration for them.
Furthermore, by measuring the time interval between when each bowling ball hits the ground and when you hear the noise of its impact to be a bit less than 1 sec., and knowing that sound travels at about 1,100 feet per second at sea level, you estimate that you are standing about 1000 feet away from the building.
Now the sun is setting behind the building, and just as the building's shadow approaches you, you whip out a foot ruler, hold it upright on the ground, and mark the ruler's shadow length. Measuring from the base of the ruler to your mark, you find the ruler's shadow to be 37" long. Based on the estimate of your distance from the building obtained earlier, simple algebra shows that a 1000' foot long shadow would be cast by a building that is 324 feet tall at that angle of the sun.
At this point you have three quite different and independent methods of estimating the building's height, and they agree that it is in the neighborhood of 300 feet tall, perhaps a bit more but certainly not substantially less. Now a man walks up to you and says, "Your estimates are all wrong! My book says that the building is really only about 1/200 of an inch (0.005 inch) high. All of your measuring methods are terribly flawed and your estimates cannot be believed. The building is actually less than a hundredth of an inch tall! You must ignore your measurements and discard the physics which underlies them." What would you say to him?
This is exactly what the creationists argue. They deny that the several independent methods of estimating the age of geological features are reliable, and argue that they are in fact as much in (coordinated) error as the man denying your estimate of the height of the building. The creationist "young earth" hypothesis says that the estimates of the age of the earth that show it to be on the order of 4.5 billion years old are wildly mistaken, and that the earth is really only about 6,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 years old. In other words, they argue that the best scientific estimates of the age of the earth are off by as much as a factor of 750,000! This is equivalent to arguing that the building you estimated to be 300 feet tall is really only about five-thousandths of an inch tall. Yet they offer absolutely no valid evidence to substantiate this extraordinary claim but only criticize your measurements by saying things like, 'Well, those people may be midgets, and they aren't really standing near the building, and your stopwatch is wildly unreliable, and sound doesn't necessarily travel at 1100 feet per second in the air near the building, and gravity is different near the building, so your measurements are wrong by a factor of 750,000.' This is the precise character of the argument offered by "scientific" creationists. Is it any wonder that most scientists don't waste time and energy refuting creationist claims?
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So, malookiemaloo, suppose you are standing at that same fence looking at the building, and hear that conversation between the scientist and the creationist. Who do you believe about the height of the building? Why?
One of them has faith in his holy book. One of them has science and evidence. Do you really think that faith trumps evidence when they conflict?
If you believe the scientist in this case, why the difference? Could it be because you have no emotional bias on the issue of the building height? Would your answer change if the issue was the age of the earth according to the Bible, rather than the height of a building?
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06-16-2003, 09:21 AM
Re: Bump
