Redeeming science-1

DANIEL MORGAN SAID:

“It is an unfalsifiable argument to claim that God made everything such that it looks 4 BY old, etc. “

Several problems:

1.A claim can be true, and still be unfalsifiable.

Indeed, any true claim is, by definition, unfalsifiable. Only a false claim can be falsified, so only a false claim is falsifiable.

2.So the real question is whether a given claim is verifiable, not whether it’s falsifiable.

3.There are indirect as well as direct methods of verification.

4.Falsification is a criterion for scientific theories. But unless you subscribe to logical positivism, then the verification principle is not a general, epistemic criterion.

Indeed, the verification principle came to grief in part because it was too restrictive even for scientific purposes.

2.The claim of mature creation is not that God made everything such that it looks younger than it really is.

Rather, the claim is that God made a fully functioning universe. One “incidental” consequence of mature creation is that natural artifacts will appear to be older than they really are as judged by “ordinary” natural processes.

Continuing:

“But it also indicates a sort of deception if this same God wanted us to believe that things weren't old.”

I’ve been over this ground many times before:

1.Natural artifacts have no intrinsic appearance of age, whether new or old. That’s a purely contingent relation. It’s a judgment we render from experience, based on the ordinary processes of nature, when we extrapolate from the present to the past.

2.Danny believes that that universe is about 14 billions years old. He would appeal to the scale of the universe as measured in light years to arrive at this figure.

But one incidental consequence of this dating technique as that distant objects appear younger than the really are, due to the time-lag in the transmission of light from there to here. We see an image of what it used to be, not of what it is today.

So, if we were to apply Danny’s criterion to Danny’s own claim, then we should deny that the universe is 14 billions years old since Danny is appealing to “deceptive” evidence.

Shame on you, Danny! Naughty, naughty boy! No wonder we Christians suspect the morals of militant unbelievers!

3.This is not just an argument from analogy. The very question at issue is the age of the universe, and the methodology for arriving at such a date. So Danny’s criterion directly undercuts his own appeal.

4.As I’ve also pointed out on several different occasions, it is anthropomorphic to simply equate a naturally occurring, periodic process with a “clock.” The natural function of a periodic process is not to tell us the time.

Now there’s nothing wrong with our attempting to put it to such a use. But to say that there would be something deceptive about a periodic process giving us a false reading when it was never designed to performed such a function is really pretty childish.

By Danny’s logic, fingers were made for keyboards, noses were made for crack cocaine, ears were made for orchestras, and necks were made for gold chains. For, otherwise, the Creator would be deceiving us.

Continuing:

“I think the problem is starting with Scripture, then digging to find evidence to support different conjectures. Why not start with observation? People without the Bible for thousands of years would've done just that -- looked at things without that bias. And, these people would've surmised the same things that modern science has -- that the idea of an earth completely deluged, and all plant life and animal life refilling the earth, some time around the first kingdom of Egypt, is just silly.”

Since I’ve discussed the flood on several occasions, I won’t repeat myself yet again. But let’s take a different example of someone who has an extrascriptural starting point, and then goes digging to find evidence to support his preconception.

I’m going to quote something from Ernst Mayr. And who is he? Well, according to no less an authority than Stephen Jay Gould, on the dust cover of this very book, Mayr is “the world’s greatest living evolutionary biology.”

According to Mayr, “The most convincing evidence for the occurrence of evolution is the discovery of extinct organisms in older geographical strata,” What Evolution Is (Basic Books 2001), 13.

But on the very next page, he registers the following caveat:

Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series. New types often appear quite suddenly, and their immediate ancestors are absent in the earlier geological strata. The discovery of unbroken series of species changing gradually into descending species is very rare. Indeed the fossil record is one of discontinuities, seemingly documenting jumps (saltations) from one type of organism to a different type. This raises a puzzling question: Why does the fossil record fail to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution?” (14).

He goes on to harmonize the “factual” claim with the actual state of the evidence by saying that only a small fraction of organisms are ever fossilized. Of that fraction, only a further fraction are accessible.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that this explanation fully accounts the state of the evidence.

At most, this would only prove that the fossil record is consistent with evolutionary theory. What it would not prove is that the fossil record implies evolution.

His leap of logic from consistency to implication is viciously circular. If we already knew, as a result of the evidence, that evolution was a fact, then we would be justified in harmonizing the fact of evolution with apparent evidence to the contrary.

But when the “most convincing” evidence for evolution” is the very evidence that “fails to reflect the gradual change one would expect from evolution,” then it’s fallacious to first appeal to the fossil record to establish the “fact” of evolution, then offer a harmonistic expedient to square the actual state of the record with the “fact” of evolution.

That would only be valid if, on the one hand, he had direct, unambiguous evidence for evolution while, on the other hand, apparent evidence to the contrary came from a different source.

But when it’s the same source for both, his procedure is tendentious. For the factuality of evolution is only as convincing as the most convincing evidence for evolution. And if the “most convincing” evidence “fails to reflect what one would expect from evolution,” then we can hardly stipulate the “fact” of evolution as an unquestionable benchmark, and then relativize all counter-evidence to yield right-of-way tto that absolute datum.

Mayr then proceeds to shore up the fossil record with other lines of evidence. But, by his own admission, these are less convincing lines of evidence.

So did Mayr abide by Danny’s dictum? No, he began with his foregone conclusion, made selective appeal to the evidence, then attempted to explain away the contrary evidence. A sterling example of what happens when you don’t begin with Scripture.

Continuing:

“But then, he goes on to imply that laws are ‘real’...”

In the way that he (Poythress) defines scientific laws?

Continuing:

“If there is a God, there seems to be no need for ‘laws’ at all.”

Depending on the definition, I agree. But is Danny interacting with the definition offered by Poythress? Or his own?

Continuing:

“I would turn this argument on its head and point out that a natural universe requires uniformity (let's not get into induction, please) and natural law to be feasible, and to bring about life.”

One of the problems here is that Danny is acting as if natural laws were abstract universals or platonic forms, subsisting outside of space and time, such that a physical universe will merely “exemplify” a set of natural laws.

But if one is a materialist, then a natural law does not exist over and above its concrete instantiation. Rather, a natural law is a physical law, inseparable from a physical universe. More precisely, a natural law is simply a label we use to designate certain natural forces or constants, and not a form of extrinsic scaffolding, which holds everything in place.