Jan Michael

Cheers! This is my first post here so be gentle.

Does anybody know the best, most logical, way to refute the idea that God created the history that we now find through Scientific discovery? You've heard it before, god placed the dinosaur bones and gives us the evidence for a 14 Billion year old Universe, but it never "really" happened. It's just a big practical joke apparently.
I've been trying to explain to a real nutter, on another site, that this theory through it's unfalsifiability is as valid as Russell's "5 minute Universe".
How does one best explain that this sort of conjecture is intellectually dishonest?
The argument is that this "Theory" is absolutely logical to Genesis. I guess it is but it doesn't make it a fact.

Help?


Thanks,


Michael

Coragyps

Hi, and welcome aboard!

I'm no philosopher, but my take is that you can't refute such a statement. You can tell him that it's obviously wrong, as it was really the Invisible Pink Unicorn that did all that creating (and on Thursday last week, too), but it is so bizarre in any context of a "benevolent creator" that I can't see wasting time on discussing it.

Rest assured, though, you've come to the right place to get the philosophical arguments against!

Oolon Colluphid

Welcome aboard Michael!

You've got the answer there already. It's unverifiable, unfalsifiable, untestable, and so useless. If it cannot be proved wrong, maybe it's right, maybe not, but you can never tell. So it's pointless.

This is basic Popperian logic. We don't know all there is. Therefore we can't say what is, we can only say what [i]isn't[i]; we can't necessarily prove something true, because we don't have all the possible information, but a suitable test can rule out what is false.

IOW, if you can't test it, you can't judge it's veracity.

I've never figured out why anyone would claim god might be a liar. What's the best way to refute it? Because it goes against how he's described in the bible, and mostly, because it's plain stupid.

That doesn't stop the average cretinist though .

Cheers, Oolon

Jan Michael

Thanks for the input and nice welcome!

The real problem is the connection that this whacked out theory has with the Bible. It's, I think, fairly consistant with Genesis.

However your point that it isn't logically consistant with God like qualities, such as being deceptive instead of straight foward, may be an avenue to enlighten the easily confused.

That and the fact that is just plain "stupid".


Thanks,

Michael


PS: I usually spend a great deal of time at the Wasteland of Wonders forums. You're all welcome to check it out, of course, but I'm going to try this board out for a while just to get some new ideas (Or new ways of describing old ones).

See you around.