ex-robot

What would large areas of biology be to you?

Disease research? Rice Genome research? Biochemistry? Microbiology? Neurology?

xr

ex-robot

That is amazing. You can invent the MRI, work with microbes to detect land mines, research cancer, aids, malaria, etc. while denying 99% of biology. Truly impressive.....

xr

ex-robot

Oh no, we could never send another rocket ship in to outerspace without believing in the big bang.
Thats right. Throw out radioactive decay and you have no physics.
True as well. All geology is gone when you are a yec. Those idiot companies that actually hire and work with yec geologists must be on crack. Although most yec don't believe the flood is the cause of everything, lets ignore that.
Right again. All that research and accomplishments that yec scientists do in biology is entirely faked.
Humphrey's day job is working for ICR. An evolutionist admitting that a yec can do legitimate science!!! Will miracles never cease?
I suppose the rest of the work that other yec scientists have done according to the ICR's list are all faked.
Yes, I can only imagine how comforting it is to be considered a near-complete idiot rather than a total idiot.

xr

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: ex-robot ]</p>

S2Focus

If you look at the quality of "creation science" research, you'll see that there's definite reason for concern.

What would you say about a creationist geologist who dates a ten-year-old piece of lava produced by an explosive eruption (read "incomplete melting") with the K-Ar method, comes up with radiometric age of 200,000 years and then proclaims the method useless?

What would you say about a "creation-scientist" who cites a scientific paper to claim that radiomeric dating of 200-year-old lava produced an "age" of 2 billion years without realizing that the author of said paper was applying the method to *xenoliths* in the lava?

What would you say about a "creation-scientist" who uses carbon-dating on the shell of a living clam, obtains a radiometric "age" of a thousand years, and then proclaims carbon-dating to be unreliable?

What would you say about an "intelligent design" theorist who proclaims that CSI ("complex specified information" is "holistic" because the Shannon information content of an English sentence is greater than the sum of the Shannon information of all the individual words (without realizing that the "space" characters in the sentence account for the "missing" information)?

Do you believe that rubbish like this should be taught to science students? If creationists "ruled", it most certainly would.


And here are two more interesting scenarios with some really disturbing implications:

What would you say if a nuclear power-plant designed by creationist engineers who claim (without supporting evidence) that the decay rate of U-235 varies over time were to be built a few miles upwind of your home?

If a creationist geologist (who rejects mainstream geology) were to tell you that there's no chance of a massive subduction earthquake in the Pacific Northwest because "nobody saw one happen there", would you feel comfortable moving into an unreinforced-masonry high-rise building there?


As long as "creation-science" gets no farther than Sunday School and the occasional PTA meeting, perhaps you could argue that no real harm would be done. But if creationists manage to push their "creation-science" nonsense into places that really matter, the implications would be unsettling, to say the least.

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: S2Focus ]</p>

Mageth

What would large areas of biology be to you?

Disease research? Rice Genome research? Biochemistry? Microbiology? Neurology?


Looking at it now that would have been better said as "much of biology."

But yes, the fields you name all qualify as areas where evolution has definite major impact.

DireStraits

Depends on the area of science you are talking about.

If it is biology, then you can expect what happened in Russia under Lysenko to happen to American biology. In Russia, ideology - Marxism - dictated that Darwinism was wrong. The effects on Russian agriculture were devastating. The effect on Russian biology were pretty much the same, even though Russian science is world class in many other areas.

But professional creationists don't really want to take over science as such. Even if they could, it would generate such a backlash that they would be discredited even among many creationists. No, all they want is for their theory to be taught in American public school classrooms.

The effect of THAT would be to confuse kids about what a scientific theory is, since even Gish of the ICR agrees that creationism does not have a scientific theory. Getting kids to think in a scientific manner is hard enough already.

ex-robot

Well, there you go. Scientists who believe in a literal creation do plenty of research in all those fields and more.

xr

tronvillain

The kind of intellectual dishonesty required to be a YEC would probably have a negative impact on scientific inquiry, though I don't think that the impact would be direct in many fields.

HRG

You are absolutely right. Throw out radioactive decay and you have no physics.

Apparently, you do not realize that physics is not a disconnected jumble of observed facts, but - at least in principle - a coherent whole. Take out an essential part and the whole edifice crumbles.

Varying rates of radioactive decay would mean that physics is not invariant under time-translation - which in turn would be equivalent to a general violation of the conservation of energy. No mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, hydrodynamics .....

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses!
HRG.

ex-robot

Apparently, you don't realize that Humphreys managed to work for GE and Sandi National Labs, win several awards, etc. It seems as though there is plenty of physics apart from radioactive decay. It's not like yec would throw radioactive decay out anyways.

xr

[ July 12, 2002: Message edited by: ex-robot ]</p>