Saturday, December 30, 2006

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven

ANONYMOUS SAID:

“I’m a bit confused by your references to ‘metrical conventionalism’. How precisely do they impugn naturalism but not the exegetical methods that scholars employ to, say, date the book of Mark? More specifically, since time is amorphous by your own account, time would be just as much a problem for the bible scholar’s dating techniques as well, no?”

Hi Andrew,

Several issues here:

i) I haven’t committed myself to the position that metrical conventionalism is true. It may be, as Le Poidevin indicates, that the debate between objectivism and conventionalism is undecidable. See p11 of his discussion:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/11/measure-of-all-things_30.html

Indeed, you might want to read the whole chapter for basic background info.

But even if the question is undecidable, that’s sufficient to render equally undecidable the implicated question of what would follow if one or the other (objectivism or conventionalism) were true.

Certain consequences would follow if either position were true. But even if, say, objectivism is true, if the truth of objectivism is undecidable, then the consequences are undecidable.

If something is true, but you can’t know it’s true, then it might as well be false. At that point the only rational course of action is to suspend judgment.

ii) Metrical conventionalism is concerned with the question of whether it’s meaningful to ask if to successive intervals (or distances, depending on who you read) are objectively isochronic.

It doesn’t disallow a temporal sequence, involving relations of temporal priority, simultaneity, or posteriority.

iii) There’s more to the dating of the Gospels than the question of relative duration. There’s also the question of relative sequence.

What happened when? Were they written before or after the fall of Jerusalem? Were the Apostles still alive?

Metrical conventionalism doesn’t obviate those internal relations.

iv) If metrical conventionalism is true, it would mean that the chronological descriptions in Scripture are true in relation to the temporal metric employed by Bible writers. They would record an accurate sequence. And the overall chronology would be accurate measurement of the time lapse *according to* the metric in use.

But the measurement would not implicate an absolute or relative chronology in objectivist terms.

The conventionalist/objectivist question is a more specialized question than Scripture was designed to answer.

v) There’s an asymmetry between YEC and evolution. The age of the world is not intrinsically important to Christian theology.

It’s only important in relation to other issues, such as inerrancy, hermeneutics, and special creation.

By contrast, it is intrinsically important to Darwinism, for Darwinism needs huge time scales to even get off the ground. Therefore, Darwinism has a direct investment in chronology in a way that Christian theology does not.

vi) I’m less concerned with defending YEC chronology per se than I am with rebutting bad objections to YEC chronology—objections that are philosophically inept and theologically pernicious.

“Additionally, I’m aware of no time keeping device that does not index itself to some observed phenomenon (spring rates in wind-up clocks, atomic clocks, sundials). Natural phenomena is *all* we have to guide us, so why does the use of ‘natural’ phenomena (to establish the age of the earth, for instance) constitute a weakness of some sort? The notion of time that we *all* use can’t be separated from the periodicities we perceive in the natural world (including crowing roosters, or the rising and setting sun). What else is there?”

i) As I’ve said on several occasions, I have no a priori objection to the use of natural processes to tell us the time. What I object to is critics of YEC who toss around terms like “deception” or “illusion.”

This betrays a fundamental lack of objectivity on their part, in which they conflate the natural function of a natural process with the artificial function we assign to it.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the artificial assignment, as long as we recognize the artificiality of the exercise.

But to *expect* that a natural periodic process ought to yield accurate chronological information, and if it doesn’t, then God is deceiving us or nature is illusory, is guilty of an anthropomorphic projection onto nature. That’s philosophically naïve.

ii) In addition, physical dating involves a backward linear extrapolation from the present into the past.

Once again, I don’t object to that type of retrojection up to a point. But this procedure makes certain assumptions about the initial conditions and uniformity of nature.

Yet, from a theological perspective, that is guilty of an overgeneralization. For the physical universe is not a uniform, open-ended continuum.

Rather, the universe had a point of origin in a timeless act of fiat creation. It is not the result of a purely incremental, bottom-up process. Rather, it was front-loaded and instantaneous.

Therefore, the backward extrapolation breaks down. For the extrapolation is an extrapolation from natural cycles. It takes for granted the existence of natural cycles.

But running the cycle back in time is internal to the cycle. It doesn’t take you outside the cycle to the external origin of the cycle.

“More to the point, according to my understanding, a rooster and a cuckoo clock are essentially the same: both are time keeping devices identified by humans to keep time quite reliably (though neither perfectly) and both are based on processes that are thoroughly naturalistic.”

No, a cuckoo clock was designed to tell the time. That’s its only or primary function. And since we designed it for that very purpose, we’re in a good position to say so.

But a rooster was not designed to tell us the time. Now, we can still use the rooster *as if* it were an alarm clock.

But if a rooster fails to crow at the right time, it’s not as if God would be deceiving us or periodic processes are illusory.

It would simply mean that since a rooster wasn’t designed to be a reliable time-keeper, then if a rooster turns out to be an unreliable alarm clock, it’s chronological utility is limited.

We wouldn’t expect a rooster to be completely reliable as an alarm clock. It is simply convenient for us to co-opt its natural tendency to crow at sunrise to tell us the time.

TOUCHSTONE SAID:

“Also, teleology is enthusiastically accepted by science (methodological naturalism). Remember those spears we were talking about from 375,000 years ago that got dug up. Those spears were identified as the target of teleology -- a goal-oriented effort on the part of the makers to fashion raw materials into spears. Arson investigators and homicide detectives work at determining whether teleology (human planning and execution) was at work in starting the fire or causing the victim's death. Oh, and of course SETI looks for teleology in communications or modulated phenomena. You get the idea -- teleology is not forbidden as a factor in science.”

In context, the discussion was over inanimate, naturally occurring events like radiation and ice sheets, not the intervention of rational agents. As usual, you can’t follow an argument.

“But if scientific estimates *do* have some correspondance to reality -- something we can rely on, then, how does a YEC dispose of all the estimates that come in at hundreds of thousands, millions and billions of years?”

Metrical conventionalism is one consideration, while creation ex nihilo is another.

12 comments:

  1. Steve,

    What you say makes sense to me, as does the content of the link you provide. However, it seems to me that this philosophical problem (for evolution) can be overcome w/ an equally philosophical solution.

    An evolutionist can claim (quite reasonably, I think) that he is not wedded to any theory of time. All he requires is that *enough* natural events (random mutations, in particular) took place to account for present-day complexity, regardless of how or even whether those events can be marked off in time. On this view, ‘time’ is a convenient term for the evolutionist to relate his theory to because it is so commonplace, but it is in reality just a stand-in for ‘number of events’. Such a reinterpretation (replacing time markers w/ the events to which they relate) would leave the theory intact: one could just talk about sequences, events, and number of events, while leaving the notion of duration undecidable.

    In short, I don’t see how a question that is undecidable can make a dent in evolutionary theory, unless it can be shown that evolution has falsely staked a claim on the decidability of said question. I don’t believe that it has or, if it has, that it needs to.

    Thanks again,

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Andrew,

    I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I don't deny anything you said here.

    You seem to be interrelating certain statements I made which I never meant to interrelate.

    I'm not invoking metrical conventionalism to undercut evolution.

    Rather, I'm invoking metrical conventionalism to undercut an objection to YEC.

    Metrical conventionalism is not an objection to evolution, but rather, a way of responding to an objection to YEC.

    I did note that the time factor is more fundamental to evolution than YEC.

    But that was simply to make the point that I don't have the same direct stake in the YEC timetable than an evolutionist has in a Darwinian timetable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Steve,

    I guess I’m suggesting that any argument for/against YEC can be purged of references to duration/time by the same reinterpretation I alluded to in my original post. Therefore, I don’t see how those arguments stand or fall on any theory of time, since, in fact, they can be rendered invariant w/ respect to any notion of time by the appropriate substitution of terms.

    By the way, I’m agnostic on origins (at present), and I no longer believe that creation w/ the appearance of age necessarily constitutes deception. It just seems to me that metrical conventionalism is a nonstarter as a defeater for any argument against (or for)YEC.

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  4. If the objection to YEC is a chronological objection, because YEC says the world is around 6-10K years old while, according to modern science, we know that the world is *really* 14 billion years old, then metrical conventionalism disarms that particular objection since the world wouldn't *really* be of *any* particular duration—whether long or short.

    Of course, there are other objections to YEC, just as there are other objections to naturalist evolution.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I guess I’d suggest that scientists have found that many more ‘natural events’ have taken place than 6-10K years (almost coterminous w/ recorded history) would allow for. If we eliminate references to time and focus instead on ‘events’ we arrive back at square one: the objections still stand. Time becomes irrelevant, since on reinterpretation what we adduce are the ‘events’ that science infers, not the associated timetables.

    Evolutionists would claim that, based on the evidence, the earth was privy to a number of ‘natural events’ that number many, many orders of magnitudes greater than what we’d expect if history were limited to a span of 6-10 k years.

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous said:
    I guess I’d suggest that scientists have found that many more ‘natural events’ have taken place than 6-10K years (almost coterminous w/ recorded history) would allow for. If we eliminate references to time and focus instead on ‘events’ we arrive back at square one: the objections still stand. Time becomes irrelevant, since on reinterpretation what we adduce are the ‘events’ that science infers, not the associated timetables.

    Evolutionists would claim that, based on the evidence, the earth was privy to a number of ‘natural events’ that number many, many orders of magnitudes greater than what we’d expect if history were limited to a span of 6-10 k years.

    ****************************************

    Sorry, but you're using two arguments which cancel each other out. If time is irrelevant, a la conventionalism, then you can't appeal to a limited time span to rule out the number of events.

    That assumes the objective identity of temporal intervals or distances, which conventionalism denies.

    You're claiming that there are two many successive events to fit into a TEC timetable.

    But if conventionalism is either true or undecidable, then the diachronic continuum has no objective time span, whether long or short.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Sloppy wording on my part.

    I’m treating 6-10K years as more or less synonymous w/*human* history (recorded or not). So 6-10k years becomes a label for a collection of 'events' rather than a duration.

    What I meant to convey is that natural history is orders of magnitude more voluminous than human history. There appear to be many more historical ‘data points’ than just those that are contemporary w/ humankind.

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous said:

    I’m treating 6-10K years as more or less synonymous w/*human* history (recorded or not). So 6-10k years becomes a label for a collection of 'events' rather than a duration.

    What I meant to convey is that natural history is orders of magnitude more voluminous than human history. There appear to be many more historical ‘data points’ than just those that are contemporary w/ humankind.

    ****************

    Sorry to belabor the point, but you still seem to be saying that it's not possible to squeeze all these events into a YEC chronology.

    Which is another way of saying there isn't enough time for them all to happen, one after another.

    Doesn't that bump up against metrical conventionalism?

    ReplyDelete
  9. I think the evidence could be regarded as suggesting that a great deal happened *prior* to humankind.

    For instance, there is no evidence for dinosaurs coexisting w/ humans (while we have ample evidence for Mastodons and other now extinct species dating back to the last Ice Age).

    Also, there is evidence of numerous cataclysmic events so powerful that they would likely have wiped us out had we been around; even if they weren’t this powerful the sheer concentration of them over the course of human history would've made the earth a moonscape of destruction.

    In the same vein, I can’t imagine a mere 500 generations or so of humankind being contemporary w/ the massive level of extinction to which the fossil record bears witness, since such extinction would likely be driven by an extremely high frequency of climactic and environmental upheavals that would’ve either killed off humans as well or at least left some evidence of a human impact.

    As for dating techniques, what science does is measure a number of events relative to a natural periodic process and makes the implicit assumption that a similar number of events would have occurred in the past relative to the same process (as you know). I don’t see this approach as bullet-proof but I also don’t see how it is obviated by metrical conventionalism.

    The key question now is how many natural events can reasonably occur relative to an identified natural periodic process (between any two successive periodic events, say) and can it change appreciably.

    Science would admit that it could theoretically change but would be skeptical (and I think rightly) of the claim that it can change by orders of magnitude and would additionally expect to find a reasonable explanation for the change, not willy-nilly variation that is forever sealed off from us by the ‘veil of perception’.

    If I tell you I ran fifty miles from sunup to sundown, you’d congratulate me, but if I told you I ran a thousand, you’d call me a liar. Appeals to metrical conventionalism wouldn’t sway you.

    Similarly, if I wanted to estimate the number of days it took Asians to migrate to North America over the land bridge during the last ice age I could get a reasonable lower bound by considering the distance that a typical healthy modern male could cover if he were really hustling, then assume the same for the ancient traveler.

    I could be confident about the lower bound estimate because I’m pretty confident that the number of steps a modern and ancient human can take (all else being equal) in a day (sunup to sundown) is roughly the same. Any differences would be well shy of orders of magnitude, or else we’d have to posit superhuman powers for early humans.

    How would metrical conventionalism throw this kind of analysis out the window?

    My point is that I guess I just don’t see the dating methodologies sciences uses as succumbing any more to M.C. than the above examples.

    Perhaps I’m being a dolt, but I feel metrical conventionalism defeats those who consider time a reality ‘out there’, an ‘abstract universal’, or ‘God concept’, not those who relate time to its *use*, which for me is a relation of one set of events that fits our paradigm of periodicity to another set of events (that may or may not fit that paradigm). Talk of actual duration needn’t figure into the picture at all.

    As always, thanks…Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  10. Saturday, December 30, 2006

    To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
    ANONYMOUS SAID:

    “I’m a bit confused by your references to ‘metrical conventionalism’. How precisely do they impugn naturalism but not the exegetical methods that scholars employ to, say, date the book of Mark? More specifically, since time is amorphous by your own account, time would be just as much a problem for the bible scholar’s dating techniques as well, no?”

    Hi Andrew,

    Several issues here:

    i) I haven’t committed myself to the position that metrical conventionalism is true. It may be, as Le Poidevin indicates, that the debate between objectivism and conventionalism is undecidable. See p11 of his discussion:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/11/measure-of-all-things_30.html

    Indeed, you might want to read the whole chapter for basic background info.

    But even if the question is undecidable, that’s sufficient to render equally undecidable the implicated question of what would follow if one or the other (objectivism or conventionalism) were true.

    Certain consequences would follow if either position were true. But even if, say, objectivism is true, if the truth of objectivism is undecidable, then the consequences are undecidable.

    If something is true, but you can’t know it’s true, then it might as well be false. At that point the only rational course of action is to suspend judgment.

    ii) Metrical conventionalism is concerned with the question of whether it’s meaningful to ask if to successive intervals (or distances, depending on who you read) are objectively isochronic.

    It doesn’t disallow a temporal sequence, involving relations of temporal priority, simultaneity, or posteriority.

    iii) There’s more to the dating of the Gospels than the question of relative duration. There’s also the question of relative sequence.

    What happened when? Were they written before or after the fall of Jerusalem? Were the Apostles still alive?

    Metrical conventionalism doesn’t obviate those internal relations.

    iv) If metrical conventionalism is true, it would mean that the chronological descriptions in Scripture are true in relation to the temporal metric employed by Bible writers. They would record an accurate sequence. And the overall chronology would be accurate measurement of the time lapse *according to* the metric in use.

    But the measurement would not implicate an absolute or relative chronology in objectivist terms.

    The conventionalist/objectivist question is a more specialized question than Scripture was designed to answer.

    v) There’s an asymmetry between YEC and evolution. The age of the world is not intrinsically important to Christian theology.

    It’s only important in relation to other issues, such as inerrancy, hermeneutics, and special creation.

    By contrast, it is intrinsically important to Darwinism, for Darwinism needs huge time scales to even get off the ground. Therefore, Darwinism has a direct investment in chronology in a way that Christian theology does not.

    vi) I’m less concerned with defending YEC chronology per se than I am with rebutting bad objections to YEC chronology—objections that are philosophically inept and theologically pernicious.

    “Additionally, I’m aware of no time keeping device that does not index itself to some observed phenomenon (spring rates in wind-up clocks, atomic clocks, sundials). Natural phenomena is *all* we have to guide us, so why does the use of ‘natural’ phenomena (to establish the age of the earth, for instance) constitute a weakness of some sort? The notion of time that we *all* use can’t be separated from the periodicities we perceive in the natural world (including crowing roosters, or the rising and setting sun). What else is there?”

    i) As I’ve said on several occasions, I have no a priori objection to the use of natural processes to tell us the time. What I object to is critics of YEC who toss around terms like “deception” or “illusion.”

    This betrays a fundamental lack of objectivity on their part, in which they conflate the natural function of a natural process with the artificial function we assign to it.

    There’s nothing inherently wrong with the artificial assignment, as long as we recognize the artificiality of the exercise.

    But to *expect* that a natural periodic process ought to yield accurate chronological information, and if it doesn’t, then God is deceiving us or nature is illusory, is guilty of an anthropomorphic projection onto nature. That’s philosophically naïve.

    ii) In addition, physical dating involves a backward linear extrapolation from the present into the past.

    Once again, I don’t object to that type of retrojection up to a point. But this procedure makes certain assumptions about the initial conditions and uniformity of nature.

    Yet, from a theological perspective, that is guilty of an overgeneralization. For the physical universe is not a uniform, open-ended continuum.

    Rather, the universe had a point of origin in a timeless act of fiat creation. It is not the result of a purely incremental, bottom-up process. Rather, it was front-loaded and instantaneous.

    Therefore, the backward extrapolation breaks down. For the extrapolation is an extrapolation from natural cycles. It takes for granted the existence of natural cycles.

    But running the cycle back in time is internal to the cycle. It doesn’t take you outside the cycle to the external origin of the cycle.

    “More to the point, according to my understanding, a rooster and a cuckoo clock are essentially the same: both are time keeping devices identified by humans to keep time quite reliably (though neither perfectly) and both are based on processes that are thoroughly naturalistic.”

    No, a cuckoo clock was designed to tell the time. That’s its only or primary function. And since we designed it for that very purpose, we’re in a good position to say so.

    But a rooster was not designed to tell us the time. Now, we can still use the rooster *as if* it were an alarm clock.

    But if a rooster fails to crow at the right time, it’s not as if God would be deceiving us or periodic processes are illusory.

    It would simply mean that since a rooster wasn’t designed to be a reliable time-keeper, then if a rooster turns out to be an unreliable alarm clock, it’s chronological utility is limited.

    We wouldn’t expect a rooster to be completely reliable as an alarm clock. It is simply convenient for us to co-opt its natural tendency to crow at sunrise to tell us the time.

    TOUCHSTONE SAID:

    “Also, teleology is enthusiastically accepted by science (methodological naturalism). Remember those spears we were talking about from 375,000 years ago that got dug up. Those spears were identified as the target of teleology -- a goal-oriented effort on the part of the makers to fashion raw materials into spears. Arson investigators and homicide detectives work at determining whether teleology (human planning and execution) was at work in starting the fire or causing the victim's death. Oh, and of course SETI looks for teleology in communications or modulated phenomena. You get the idea -- teleology is not forbidden as a factor in science.”

    In context, the discussion was over inanimate, naturally occurring events like radiation and ice sheets, not the intervention of rational agents. As usual, you can’t follow an argument.

    “But if scientific estimates *do* have some correspondance to reality -- something we can rely on, then, how does a YEC dispose of all the estimates that come in at hundreds of thousands, millions and billions of years?”

    Metrical conventionalism is one consideration, while creation ex nihilo is another.
    posted by steve at 8:40 AM
    9 comment(s):

    Anonymous said:
    Steve,

    What you say makes sense to me, as does the content of the link you provide. However, it seems to me that this philosophical problem (for evolution) can be overcome w/ an equally philosophical solution.

    An evolutionist can claim (quite reasonably, I think) that he is not wedded to any theory of time. All he requires is that *enough* natural events (random mutations, in particular) took place to account for present-day complexity, regardless of how or even whether those events can be marked off in time. On this view, ‘time’ is a convenient term for the evolutionist to relate his theory to because it is so commonplace, but it is in reality just a stand-in for ‘number of events’. Such a reinterpretation (replacing time markers w/ the events to which they relate) would leave the theory intact: one could just talk about sequences, events, and number of events, while leaving the notion of duration undecidable.

    In short, I don’t see how a question that is undecidable can make a dent in evolutionary theory, unless it can be shown that evolution has falsely staked a claim on the decidability of said question. I don’t believe that it has or, if it has, that it needs to.

    Thanks again,

    Andrew

    12/31/2006 2:08 PM
    steve said:
    Hi Andrew,

    I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I don't deny anything you said here.

    You seem to be interrelating certain statements I made which I never meant to interrelate.

    I'm not invoking metrical conventionalism to undercut evolution.

    Rather, I'm invoking metrical conventionalism to undercut an objection to YEC.

    Metrical conventionalism is not an objection to evolution, but rather, a way of responding to an objection to YEC.

    I did note that the time factor is more fundamental to evolution than YEC.

    But that was simply to make the point that I don't have the same direct stake in the YEC timetable than an evolutionist has in a Darwinian timetable.

    12/31/2006 2:59 PM
    Anonymous said:
    Hi Steve,

    I guess I’m suggesting that any argument for/against YEC can be purged of references to duration/time by the same reinterpretation I alluded to in my original post. Therefore, I don’t see how those arguments stand or fall on any theory of time, since, in fact, they can be rendered invariant w/ respect to any notion of time by the appropriate substitution of terms.

    By the way, I’m agnostic on origins (at present), and I no longer believe that creation w/ the appearance of age necessarily constitutes deception. It just seems to me that metrical conventionalism is a nonstarter as a defeater for any argument against (or for)YEC.

    Andrew

    12/31/2006 11:10 PM
    steve said:
    If the objection to YEC is a chronological objection, because YEC says the world is around 6-10K years old while, according to modern science, we know that the world is *really* 14 billion years old, then metrical conventionalism disarms that particular objection since the world wouldn't *really* be of *any* particular duration—whether long or short.

    Of course, there are other objections to YEC, just as there are other objections to naturalist evolution.

    1/01/2007 8:41 AM
    Anonymous said:
    I guess I’d suggest that scientists have found that many more ‘natural events’ have taken place than 6-10K years (almost coterminous w/ recorded history) would allow for. If we eliminate references to time and focus instead on ‘events’ we arrive back at square one: the objections still stand. Time becomes irrelevant, since on reinterpretation what we adduce are the ‘events’ that science infers, not the associated timetables.

    Evolutionists would claim that, based on the evidence, the earth was privy to a number of ‘natural events’ that number many, many orders of magnitudes greater than what we’d expect if history were limited to a span of 6-10 k years.

    Andrew

    1/01/2007 11:24 PM
    steve said:
    Anonymous said:
    I guess I’d suggest that scientists have found that many more ‘natural events’ have taken place than 6-10K years (almost coterminous w/ recorded history) would allow for. If we eliminate references to time and focus instead on ‘events’ we arrive back at square one: the objections still stand. Time becomes irrelevant, since on reinterpretation what we adduce are the ‘events’ that science infers, not the associated timetables.

    Evolutionists would claim that, based on the evidence, the earth was privy to a number of ‘natural events’ that number many, many orders of magnitudes greater than what we’d expect if history were limited to a span of 6-10 k years.

    ****************************************

    Sorry, but you're using two arguments which cancel each other out. If time is irrelevant, a la conventionalism, then you can't appeal to a limited time span to rule out the number of events.

    That assumes the objective identity of temporal intervals or distances, which conventionalism denies.

    You're claiming that there are two many successive events to fit into a TEC timetable.

    But if conventionalism is either true or undecidable, then the diachronic continuum has no objective time span, whether long or short.

    1/02/2007 6:55 AM
    Anonymous said:
    Sloppy wording on my part.

    I’m treating 6-10K years as more or less synonymous w/*human* history (recorded or not). So 6-10k years becomes a label for a collection of 'events' rather than a duration.

    What I meant to convey is that natural history is orders of magnitude more voluminous than human history. There appear to be many more historical ‘data points’ than just those that are contemporary w/ humankind.

    Andrew

    1/02/2007 10:03 AM
    steve said:
    Anonymous said:

    I’m treating 6-10K years as more or less synonymous w/*human* history (recorded or not). So 6-10k years becomes a label for a collection of 'events' rather than a duration.

    What I meant to convey is that natural history is orders of magnitude more voluminous than human history. There appear to be many more historical ‘data points’ than just those that are contemporary w/ humankind.

    ****************

    Sorry to belabor the point, but you still seem to be saying that it's not possible to squeeze all these events into a YEC chronology.

    Which is another way of saying there isn't enough time for them all to happen, one after another.

    Doesn't that bump up against metrical conventionalism?

    1/02/2007 4:31 PM
    Anonymous said:
    I think the evidence could be regarded as suggesting that a great deal happened *prior* to humankind.

    For instance, there is no evidence for dinosaurs coexisting w/ humans (while we have ample evidence for Mastodons and other now extinct species dating back to the last Ice Age).

    Also, there is evidence of numerous cataclysmic events so powerful that they would likely have wiped us out had we been around; even if they weren’t this powerful the sheer concentration of them over the course of human history would've made the earth a moonscape of destruction.

    In the same vein, I can’t imagine a mere 500 generations or so of humankind being contemporary w/ the massive level of extinction to which the fossil record bears witness, since such extinction would likely be driven by an extremely high frequency of climactic and environmental upheavals that would’ve either killed off humans as well or at least left some evidence of a human impact.

    *****************************

    Okay, but as you know, YEC generally appeals to some form of flood geology to account for much of the fossil record.

    So that, by itself, isn't directed related to metrical conventionalism or fiat creation.

    Of course, flood geology raises its own set of issues, but that's the point—it's a separate argument.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Steve,

    I notice that while you address the first half of my last comment directly above, you pushed the second half back a few days. I guess I understand why you did this: you feel you already addressed my objections in a prior post. Fair enough.

    At the risk of beating a dead horse let me ask this:

    Doesn’t metrical conventionalism only question the putative status of time as an‘absolutely real’ entity, *not* 'time' when it is used merely as a codeword for the uses to which we put natural and/or manmade periodic processes?

    As I’ve said, I regard ‘time’ in the latter sense as being untouched by MC and the latter sense is the sense that science uses.

    More importantly, I’m claiming that MC is only an argument against an argument against YEC if the opposition is invested in time in the *former* sense. But the arguments against YEC typically aren’t (or at least needn’t be), in my view, so invested, so MC never gets off the ground.

    I'd also like to know how/if your notion of the 'uniformity of nature' relates to MC.

    Andrew

    ReplyDelete
  12. “Doesn’t metrical conventionalism only question the putative status of time as an ‘absolutely real’ entity.”

    I don’t see that MC questions the ontological status of time as an absolutely real entity. But maybe that depends on what you mean.

    What do you think is the alternative? Time as a psychological projection of sorts, a la Kant, Augustine, McTaggart?

    If so, I don’t think that MC denies the objective, extramental reality of time.

    Rather, it denies that our measurement of time corresponds to an objective feature of time.

    YEC if the opposition is invested in time in the *former* sense. But the arguments against YEC typically aren’t (or at least needn’t be), in my view, so invested, so MC never gets off the ground.

    People who object to YEC, to the extent that they have a philosophy of time, either operate with some version of the A-theory or the B-theory of time, both of which regard time is real (=objective) in some sense or another.

    For example, the typical opponent of YEC believes in mainstream cosmology, historical geology, and macroevolution.

    But it would be difficult to square that with, let us say, a Neokantian epistemology in which time and space are merely psychological projections onto an otherwise chaotic and unknowable world.

    “I'd also like to know how/if your notion of the 'uniformity of nature' relates to MC.”

    I don’t see that it does.

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