hyzer

MOJO-JOJO: is the question "How do we (lay persons) really know?" or “How can we trust that scientists really know what they tell us they know?”?

It seems to me that lay persons must, to a great degree, learn to trust experts. We learn as children that our parents (the “experts&#8221 are right when they tell us to keep our hands off the stove top. So by the time we are teens we tend to believe the driving instructor when he (or she) cautions about locking up the brakes in the rain.

Now, when we have reason not to trust an expert (court cases come to mind) we get other experts and listen to both sides. So when someone says "Come on....HOW do they know all this?? They can make up anything they want about natural history, but how do they really know??". I would suggest that either there is a world-wide conspiracy between the natural history experts (since they agree on the fundamentals in KeithHarwood’s example) or they aren’t making it up.

MOJO-JOJO

Good point hyzer. I think the above is the biggest road-block for them though. They get themselves so indoctrinated, that they ONLY trust "God and the bible". Anything else is simply the "empty wisdom of man" which is expressly warned against in the bible . The question to them is "trust the infallible creator God ....or trust fallible man?" Until this mental block or defense mechanism they have is conquered, they will simply never see things the way rationalists do.

KeithHarwood

Lots of hard work by thousands of people. Years of training in how to do observations, tens of years of field-work observing plants and animals in the wild, dismantling them in laboratories, excavating fossils, analysing lumps of rock one atom at a time, counting varves and tree rings and ice layers, building mathematical models of ecosystems and body structures and chemical pathways and analysing those models to compare them with real life.

And this has been going on for the last three hundred years.

That's how we know.

No they can't. They can't make anything up. They have to have hard evidence and they have to say how they got that evidence in sufficient detail that anyone else can go and get the evidence for themselves. And lots of people do go and get the evidence for themselves. That's how they really know.

Yes, it is. You can do that sitting in a nice warm room, or, if you like discomfort, sitting on a hard pew in church. You don't have to traipse through jungles for weeks on end with disgusting creatures inhabiting every little scratch on your body. You don't have to freeze your butt getting ice cores in Greenland, or up to your armpits in a bog in Ireland digging up 2,000-year-old trees, or soaked to the skin on the deck of a hydrology survey ship, or cough your lungs out with the dusk and the sand of a geologic or palaeontologic or archaeologic dig.

Every scientist, in every field, not just biology, will agree, even enthusiastically endorse, that it is much easier to accept the bible than to do science. So you can tell them they are right about that.

Edited to get the quoting right.

[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: KeithHarwood ]

And again.

[ June 19, 2002: Message edited by: KeithHarwood ]</p>

Starboy

When I read the posts from the pro-creationists specifically when they talk about the methods of science it makes me wonder if our schools have not failed an entire generation of students. They appear to have no concept of the methods of sciences and critical thinking in general. All of this makes me very tired.

Goodnight

Starboy

scigirl

sigh,

I know what you mean. Half the time, I don't think that religion is the "enemy" of science, but rather religion provides an excuse for ignorance.

scigirl

hyzer

“indoctrinated”

There it is. Religious “education” starts at birth (with baptism). By the time science education starts the fundamentalist mind is probably too far gone.

MOJO-JOJO

As I quoted elsewhere;

"Faith is often the boast of the man who is too lazy to investigate."
~~F.M. Knowles

also

"God is a fragile thing; it may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of commom sense."
~~Unknown

[ June 21, 2002: Message edited by: MOJO-JOJO ]</p>

Kosh

I think I would have to disagree here. The Bible has been redacted extensively throughout history. It's just that the "peer" reviewers weren't very bright or consistent. Draw what conclusions you will from that statement...

MOJO-JOJO

Didn't a similar analysis like this pretty much end the career of "Jimmy the Greek"? As I recall, he was trying to explain why black athletes were such superior runners and speedsters (as their ancestors were more adept at running away from hungry predators on the African savannahs), and was subsequently fired for being a racist.

Starboy

Do you think they followed a policy such as you would find at:

<a href="http://www.copernicus.org/EGS/acp/publication_process.htm" target="_blank">http://www.copernicus.org/EGS/acp/publication_process.htm</a>?

Maybe something like that but appropriate to the scope of a peer reviewed journal/bible, might allow it to be considered a scientific peer reviewed publication?

HOLD THE PHONE! WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT! What does a document that is directly inpired by GOD need with peer review?

Starboy

[ June 20, 2002: Message edited by: gkochanowsky ]</p>