Mystical dreamers

touchstone said...

“I can't rebut what I don't have, Steve. You've not given me an argument for what constitutes *enough* survival resources for Adam so we can see your work in declaring Adam unfit for survival over the last million or more years.”

You fall back to one retrenchment after another. I spent a lot of time deconstructing your evasive endeavor to shift the burden of proof. Your response was to evade that as well.

You’re now reduced to semantic ploys about whether the argument was cast in “categorical” terms or not.

***QUOTE***

I present an astronomical phenomenon, one of the most studied in all of astronomy, and pointed out that the measurements involved

Is it all just a mystical dream, Steve? Is that your scientific argument here? If not, then how do you account for the 170,000 years implied by the speed of light?

It's not a trick question, or a trap. I'll show my work:

1. Feb 1987, light from supernova reaches earth.

2. Trigonometric measurements and light curve analysis agree on a distance from earth at approx. 167,000 light years.

3. If earth is 167,000 light years from the source of light (the supernova itself), then the shortest possible time it could have taken to get here is 167,000 years. Since light travels at most 1 light-year/year (hence the name!), if we observe light from a source 167,000 mile away, the universe must be at least 167,000 years old.

So there's my argument. If you want to press on the trigonometry or light analysis, there's a whole mess of published papers we can consult on it.

Now, how does a YEC account for this phenomenon? Can YECs explain something like this scientifically?

***END-QUOTE***

1.To judge by your pervasive performance up until now, I seriously doubt that you would understand any explanation that threatens your commitment to theistic evolution.

You have TE etched onto your spectacles. You can only see the evidence through your TE spectacles.

2.The observable evidence is not the point at issue here. Rather, what’s at issue is the interpretive framework.

At a philosophical level, this is the issue:

i) Dating is a chronometric function. Dating involves the measurement of time. The apparent (or real) passage of time.

ii) Measurement involves a metric. The application of a metric to the thing to be measured.

iii) Time and space don’t come to us in brightly labeled metrical units. Rather, we apply a metric to time.

iv) Time and space are continua. We divide up space and time, but our subdivisions aren’t given in nature. That’s simply an imposition on our part for our own convenience.

The temporal continuum is not, itself, subdivided into discrete moments or instants.

*We* can subdivide the temporal continuum into a sequence of isocronic or equidistant intervals, but that is not given in nature. It is not, on the face of it, an objective feature of the temporal continuum.

v) Time is not a “thing.” Rather, it’s a mode of being. A subsistent mode of finite things.

How do you measure a mode? Does a mode have an intrinsic topology or metrical structure?

vi) So this raises the question of whether time itself has an intrinsic metric. Or is time internally amorphous?

That’s not an easy question to answer. Indeed, the question may be unanswerable. It cannot be experimentally disproven since any chronometric experiment presumes the prior adoption of a metric rule, so the exercise is moving in a circle.

You can dismiss these metascientific questions with adjectives like “mysticism,” but adjectives are no substitute for arguments.

Is Poincaré a mystical dreamer? Or John Lucas? Or Adolf Grünbaum, &c?

3.At a theological level, this is the issue:

Did the set of contingent internal relations which constitute the physical universe come into being incrementally (cosmic evolution), or did God instantiate the set *as* a set (creation ex nihilo)?

When you talk about light reaching the earth from a distant star, that involves a relation between two objects.

There are two different way in which that internal relation could obtain: (i) incrementally or (ii) simultaneously.

Now, if you’re going to assume the posture of methodological naturalism, then science cannot speak to the issue of creation ex nihilo since, by definition (a la methodological naturalism), that would be a metascientific question.

So, by your own chosen definition, the scientific evidence can never run counter to a side-effect of fiat creation.

You can, if you like, dismiss creation ex nihilo as a mystical dream. If so, you excommunicate yourself from historic Christian orthodoxy.

Or you can affirm creation ex nihilo, but pretend that it should never be allowed to figure in our scientific models. If so, your disjunction is arbitrary.

To deny the impact of creation ex nihilo on the inaugural system of internal relations which constitute the physical universe is a form of functional atheism—in which you secularize the event to the point where primary causality excluded, and all that remains is the brute fact of second causes.

You think it’s very important to classify answers as scientific or “mystical.”

I think it’s more important to classify answers as true or false.