Sunday, August 15, 2010

One more for the road

JD WALTERS SAID:

“But to look to Genesis for evidence of the emergence of biological and geological processes is anachronistic. Ancient people simply didn't have that knowledge.”

i) If you deny the inspiration of Scripture.

ii) Moreover, the question is not whether Genesis operates at the same level of technicality as modern cosmology/geology/biology, but whether it makes factual claims that intersect with scientific claims.

“Even when YECers deny evolution they still have modern biology in mind when they speculate whether Adam had a navel, or whether Eve had more ribs than Adam.”

Are you suggesting that midwives knew nothing about the umbilical cord? Likewise, did ancient people never observe the number of ribs on a skeleton?

“There is no indication that what God created would come fully formed with a previous biological or geological history that never happened. We're reading too much into these narratives if we speculate like that.”

It’s hardly speculation. Ancient Israelites knew about farming. They knew how long it normally takes from sowing to reaping. It took longer than one day. Same thing regarding the lifecycle of animals.

You can try to deny that the creation week is literal. But you can’t deny that ancient Israelites knew how long many of those processes ordinarily take.

“You seem to be arguing exclusively from an a priori philosophical concept of creation ex nihilo when you infer that it wouldn't allow us to say at what point in the 'cycle' creation came into being. There is no such speculation in the Bible.”

i) I think creation ex nihilo is a Biblical concept.

ii) Moreover, I don’t have to answer you on exegetical grounds, since your objection wasn’t predicted on exegesis. Rather, it was predicated on modern science. A philosophical concept is perfectly legit when dealing with that type of challenge.

“Even ex nihilo creations that might have been involved in the nature miracles, like the multiplication of loaves and fishes, do not give warrant for assuming that that's what happened in the original creation. The miracles take place against the backdrop of an already existing creation, and obviously God wasn't going to wait billions of years to bring the fish Jesus needed into being for the hungry crowds. This was a special case, which does have some affinity with God's original creation to be sure, as they are both of the same author, but the two scenarios are not completely analogous.”

But, of course, the creation week is “special” too. That doesn’t happen every week.

“No, my point was that, as I said above, we should not read any kind of modern biology into these narratives. When God says, let the waters swarm with living creatures, we have knowledge of what 'swarm' entailed. We can't read into it that fish popped into existence (whether instantaneously or gradually) with a previous developmental history that never happened. It's a word picture.”

Of course, the traditional interpretation antedates modern biology. So there’s nothing anachronistic about the traditional reading.

“All the propositional knowledge we get from Genesis about creation is that God created and ordered the universe to make it a place that reflected his glory (see the 'cosmic temple' exegesis of Walton, Beale, Alexander and others). Any other inferences about what the biology of the first created things was like, etc. is unwarranted.”

Genesis is discussing prototypical natural kinds. How did they originate?

“Like I said, your philosophical speculation about the point at which creation ex nihilo instantiated a cycle is just that, speculation. There is biblical warrant for it. And in the absence for such warrant, I think it's best to infer that real history goes back as far as we have physical evidence for it, which is 13.4 billion years.”

Of course, that’s a non sequitur, since there’s no biblical warrant for the modern figure either.

“…and inferences about the emergence of fully formed organisms are unwarranted.”

Something that normally takes months or years to develop is attributed to the span of a day. And it didn’t come from preexisting organisms of the same kind. So, yes, “mature creation.”

“God did create the preexisting material, but as formless and chaotic. It was not 'mature', and its description is precisely meant to convey that it wouldn't have had any prior development. Development starts with God's process of differentiation and sequencing.”

Maybe you’re simply confused about the meaning of “mature.” Have you never noticed that YEC writers think the creation of all things involved a temporal process (albeit in six days)?

“No, we would still be reliant upon appearances, because the biblical record itself might be part of the cycle prior to when God actually created.”

On the face of it, you’re committing a level-confusion. But perhaps you’d like to explicate what you think you mean by that.

“In the absence of such a reason, when theistic evolutionists look at the Earth's developmental record they will properly assume that it was part of real history.”

Strictly speaking, they don’t see the external world. What they see is a mental image. Coded information.

“They see no reason to think that God started the cycle in medias res (and the biblical creation account is not a reason for them to do so either, because as I said above it doesn't give us that kind of information). But if the YEC account is true, and the biblical God would do something like that (start the cycle in medias res), then we would have reason to worry about exactly when in the cycle God started.”

i) For some reason you’re hung up on the “in medias res” phrase. I used that in reference to Omphalism, not YEC. And I used Omphalism as a limiting case. It takes the idea to a logically possible extreme.

ii) It’s no more worrisome than other hypothetical conundra, like the Cartesian demon, brain-in-vat, or Last Thursdayism.

iii) And the same time, the Biblical process of creation does have some story-like features: God creates by “speaking” the world into existence: like a bard.

“And since you're trying to absolve the YEC God of deception for creating at least some appearances of things that never happened, you can't protest that it would deceptive for part of the biblical framework of real history to also be apparent.”

i) You’re equivocating. As I’ve said before, I use the lingo of “deception” because that’s how the objection is phrased.

ii) Genesis says the creation week is real. Exodus says the exodus history is real. And so on.

You’re the one who’s interpolating the notion of “unreal” history into the YEC interpretation. If you’re going to frame the issue in those terms, I may use the same term when I cite counterexamples, but that doesn’t mean I agree with your rhetoric.

And the rest of what you say is just repetitious.

“And the Wheeler-Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is just that, an interpretation, and to my mind a not very convincing one. QM is a formal apparatus that is consistent with several metaphysical pictures.”

Of course, that’s one of the problems with modern science.

“But I think we've established the consistency…”

Established in your own mind.

“The speed of light is calculated from Maxwell's theory using two other constants, the vacuum permittivity and vacuum permeability. Amazingly, these last two have nothing to do with rates or time, and their value is measured using electrical capacitors.”

Of course, a physical constant is, itself, a temporal category (constant through time), so all you’ve done is to conceal the circularity of your procedure. How do you measure constancy without comparing it to another process? Unless you simply posit a physical constant.

“…because biblical life durations are given in years who size was determined by rotations of the moon, which makes it directly comparable to the scientific one.”

Which doesn’t invoke physical constants a la modern physics.

“Fine. Then the biblically derived age of the Earth is not in conflict with the scientific one, but neither does it trump the scientific one.”

I’m not vying for absolute chronology. Relative chronology will suffice. What events in what sequence. My objection to your position is with the whole evolutionary narrative.

“And I found it very intriguing that you link to a book by Robin Le Poivedin to argue for temporal metrical conventionalism. He is, of course, the author of ‘Arguing for Atheism’ and would probably argue that his view of time and the laws of nature are inconsistent with the biblical doctrine of creation. Secular philosophers can be a two-edged sword.”

Now you’re degenerating into silliness. You think I have to agree with everything a writer says to agree with anything a writer says?

“I saw lots of people, including my parents, get very badly hurt by promiscuous claims to miracles and revelation. God revealed to middle-aged men that underage girls should have sex with them 'out of love'. He also revealed that it was his will for my younger brother to be tied to a chair with tape over his mouth for hours at a time for 'correctional' purposes, my parents not being allowed to see him at all (he was SEVEN YEARS OLD). He also revealed that the cult leader's teenage daughter, who refused to have sex with her father and other men in the 'royal' household, was possessed and should be subject to a brutal exorcism involving beatings and abuse. And you have the nerve to casually dismiss my resulting caution in the face of supernatural claims as 'overcompensating'. In some of your reviews of universalists you attribute their (mistaken, in your view) sentimentalism to them having grown up within the safe haven of the Church, and taking its coziness and warmth for granted. Well I don't know what your background has been, but something insulating has definitely made you callous to the experience of others. If 'playing it safe' means I don't fall prey to those kinds of abusive, demonic claims (which I bought hook, line and sinker, because hey who was I to go against the Endtime prophet?), then I consider a few false negatives a worthy trade-off.”

Yes, I do have the “nerve.” You’re not simply sharing with us your personal coping mechanism. Rather, you’re like a recovering alcoholic turned crusading prohibitionist. If you can’t drink, then nobody else should either!

That hardly gives you the right to filter every other Christian through the grid of you unrepresentative experience. I daresay that only a fraction of Christians come from a cultic background, and their experience shouldn't be allowed to warp Christian theology in the opposite direction.

“Instead of insinuating that I might be a closet atheist, maybe you should be praising God that I emerged with my confidence in the essentials of the faith still intact. Unless your zeal for meticulously correct doctrine outweighs your desire that none of God's sheep be lost. It is only by the grace of God that I am still a Christian. Many, many people who left the same cult became hard-core atheists, or because they were raised in isolation from the world and never learned a real vocation were forced into prostitution and stripping to make ends meet, and many just committed suicide.”

Some of that is promising. However, other elements are not. You’re on a destination unknown. For all I know you might be flirting with universalism or postmortem salvation.

And your overriding need to domesticate miracles, to subsume miracles under some natural covering law, is disturbingly reminiscent of Howard Van Till’s ill-fated strategy.

29 comments:

  1. While one has to feel some sympathy for anyone who has experienced such horrific childhood abuse, the claim that young-earth creationism is part and parcel of "promiscuous claims to miracles and revelation" is just silly. Furthermore, the whole line of argument that follows is deeply offensive to those of us who were taught young-earth creationism by loving parents who (based on the same high view of Scripture) took a dim view of incest, to say the least.

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  2. "i) If you deny the inspiration of Scripture."

    Nothing in the Bible suggests that inspiration included that kind of knowledge. Did Paul say that every scripture is profitable for reproof, for instruction in righteousness, and knowledge of biology and geology?

    "ii) Moreover, the question is not whether Genesis operates at the same level of technicality as modern cosmology/geology/biology, but whether it makes factual claims that intersect with scientific claims."

    The only factual claims it makes that intersect with science are that God ordered and structured the Universe to make it a place fit to manifest his glory. Again, see Walton and Beale. Even the number and sequence of the days and what was created on them is a stylized literary patterning, with two pairs of three days for God to create the structures and then the creatures to fill them. The number 7 is highly symbolic: It took seven years to build the Jerusalem temple, and the root of the word is 'savah' which means 'to be full or satisfied, to have enough of'. Therefore obviously (according to the Hebrew writers) God had to complete his work on the seventh day, the day of rest, the day of completion.

    "Are you suggesting that midwives knew nothing about the umbilical cord? Likewise, did ancient people never observe the number of ribs on a skeleton?"

    I wasn't talking about ancient people, I was talking about modern YECers. My point is that, from their context of acquaintance with modern biology, they pose questions to the text that it never intended to address.

    "i) I think creation ex nihilo is a Biblical concept."

    Not when you load it with speculation about what point in the cycle God started from. There is a difference between the biblical and philosophical concepts of ex nihilo.

    "ii) Moreover, I don’t have to answer you on exegetical grounds, since your objection wasn’t predicted on exegesis. Rather, it was predicated on modern science. A philosophical concept is perfectly legit when dealing with that type of challenge."

    My objection is predicated on science, on philosophy and on exegesis. I've already argued repeatedly that there is no evidence in the Genesis text for God starting at any particular point in the development of vegetation and animals when he created.

    "But, of course, the creation week is “special” too. That doesn’t happen every week."

    Except with creation there's no reason, other than the Genesis 1 timeframe (which is a literary construct), to assume that God worked as fast as he did with the loaves and fishes.

    "Of course, the traditional interpretation antedates modern biology. So there’s nothing anachronistic about the traditional reading."

    Maybe not with respect to modern biology, but intertestamental exegesis was full of attempts to get information from the text that it never intended to give. The same goes for medieval and more recent Jewish and Christian exegesis.

    "Of course, that’s a non sequitur, since there’s no biblical warrant for the modern figure either."

    It's not a non-sequitur. The Bible doesn't give that information, we get that from science. My point has been precisely that the biblical account is neutral about the issue.

    "Something that normally takes months or years to develop is attributed to the span of a day. And it didn’t come from preexisting organisms of the same kind. So, yes, “mature creation.”

    Again, you're getting too much information out of the text. It doesn't specify what form the emergence of those creatures took. Can we stick with what the Bible says please? The Earth 'put forth' vegetation, and the waters 'swarmed' with creatures. At some point in the process there weren't these things, and then there were. That's all the information we get.

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  3. "Maybe you’re simply confused about the meaning of “mature.” Have you never noticed that YEC writers think the creation of all things involved a temporal process (albeit in six days)?"

    It may be we're talking about slightly different things. Although I do have a problem with it, in these posts I have not primarily been concerned with the possibility that the first man, even though only a day old, looked 30 (or whatever your ideal age is). I have been concerned that the fossil and geological record give evidence, to take just one example, that millions of species that don't exist today and didn't exist 10,000 years ago, nevertheless once did exist, flourish, and die out, leaving traces in sedimented rock, which itself appears to have accumulated over millions of years. It would be one thing if there was no evidence of the existence of any other species other than those that have been around for the past 10,000 years. My problem is that the rocks tell a story of a time when completely different sets of species flourished on the earth and died out, before our current set evolved. To accommodate the Genesis creation account as interpreted by YECers, all the evidence we have of those species is evidence of events which never took place. That's why I used the Don Draper analogy: he presents evidence in the form of his fake purple star and personal belongings of a life he never actually lived. That's what I find deceptive.

    "On the face of it, you’re committing a level-confusion. But perhaps you’d like to explicate what you think you mean by that."

    Simple. If you're going to make a radical disjunction between appearances and the external world, so that all we have access to are mental contents, then the Bible and its accounts are only part of those appearances, since we only have access to the Bible through appearances. You can't arbitrary stipulate that one set of appearances (the ones we have when we hold and read a Bible) can provide our anchor to the external world. The kind of sensationism you're talking about is too strict for that.

    "Strictly speaking, they don’t see the external world. What they see is a mental image. Coded information."

    If you're going to espouse that kind of extreme Lockean sensationism, where all we have access to are our mental contents, you'll quickly be threatened by skepticism about the external world from which even appeal to the Bible or revelation won't help you. After all, you couldn't claim that you have access to revelation, you could only claim that you have access to a mental image of revelation.

    Unless the understanding that we have access to the external world through our mental images is primary, and that our connection to the external world is grounded in those experiences themselves, all we can be is Chesterton's madman, locked up in the endless circle of our own mental images, but which is a very small circle indeed.

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  4. "For some reason you’re hung up on the “in medias res” phrase. I used that in reference to Omphalism, not YEC. And I used Omphalism as a limiting case. It takes the idea to a logically possible extreme."

    For the reasons I gave above, any YEC account is going to have to resort to Omphalism to explain away the fossil record, light we receive from stars that are billions of light years away, etc. To save the appearances, YECers have to postulate that many events from the distant past we have evidence for simply never took place.

    "ii) It’s no more worrisome than other hypothetical conundra, like the Cartesian demon, brain-in-vat, or Last Thursdayism."

    It is if you believe in a God who would plant traces of a history that never happened. You might not take brain-in-vat scenarios seriously...unless you happen to know a scientist who has a brain-jacking interface set up in the apartment next door.

    "i) You’re equivocating. As I’ve said before, I use the lingo of “deception” because that’s how the objection is phrased."

    So you wouldn't object to the idea that God started real history five minutes ago, or more generally that we have no way of knowing where real history leaves off and the apparent history begins?

    "ii) Genesis says the creation week is real. Exodus says the exodus history is real. And so on."

    But on your own account, your knowledge of what Genesis says is only an appearance, a mental image. You can't use that to ground knowledge that those events took place.

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  5. "Established in your own mind."

    So you take back what you said in your previous post about how accepting the full evolutionary history has no bearing on whether and how many supernatural influences there have been throughout history?

    "Of course, a physical constant is, itself, a temporal category (constant through time), so all you’ve done is to conceal the circularity of your procedure. How do you measure constancy without comparing it to another process? Unless you simply posit a physical constant."

    Remember the fine-tuning argument? Physical constants define a world. If any of them were slightly different, or have not been constant through time, life as we know it would be impossible. So yes, in a sense we just 'posit' them, but we posit them to account for our existence in a life-supporting universe, and thousands of experiments confirm that they are indeed constant through time.

    "Which doesn’t invoke physical constants a la modern physics."

    So that makes it more reliable? Now you're sounding silly.

    "I’m not vying for absolute chronology. Relative chronology will suffice. What events in what sequence. My objection to your position is with the whole evolutionary narrative."

    You're going to have to explain how you think armchair philosophical antirealism invalidates the evolutionary narrative.

    "You’re not simply sharing with us your personal coping mechanism. Rather, you’re like a recovering alcoholic turned crusading prohibitionist. If you can’t drink, then nobody else should either!"

    After my repeated statements of accepting the veracity of boatloads of miracles, you think I'm trying to convince people that they shouldn't believe in miracles.

    Your extremism is not only callous at times, but also downright dishonest.

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  6. "That hardly gives you the right to filter every other Christian through the grid of you unrepresentative experience. I daresay that only a fraction of Christians come from a cultic background, and their experience shouldn't be allowed to warp Christian theology in the opposite direction."

    There's plenty of Christian silliness to go around. Think of televangelists who sell blessed 'healing handkerchiefs' or 'miracle wafers'. Think of Christian groups that refuse to use modern medicine and have their children die as a result.

    It's not as if there's a few Christians tainted by bad experience with supernatural claims and the rest are lily-white innocents who happen to have chanced on exactly the right combination of beliefs, so they don't have to worry about being critical of such claims.

    Every Christian should be equipped to critically test other people's claims. Even if Scripture is (rightly) part of that critical apparatus, the Christian must exercise reason to properly interpret Scripture and apply it to claims she encounters.

    "For all I know you might be flirting with universalism or postmortem salvation."

    Ooh, perish the thought! You think holding those beliefs is incompatible with saving faith? You think Martin Luther was damned for entertaining the possibility of postmortem salvation? You think it put him on a slippery slope to apostasy?

    Your problem is that you see a straight line leading from certain beliefs to apostasy. The Church has outlined clearly which beliefs put someone beyond the pale, and those aren't among them. Nor can you legitimately extrapolate from someone's entertaining them to the conclusion that they are in danger of apostasy.

    By the way, I'm not saying that I do hold to those things. In proper critical mode, I won't assent or withhold my assent until I've examined all the Scriptural evidence. I certainly won't take your word for it that those beliefs are beyond the pale until I've researched the matter for myself.

    "And your overriding need to domesticate miracles, to subsume miracles under some natural covering law, is disturbingly reminiscent of Howard Van Till’s ill-fated strategy."

    Just because he personally became more skeptical doesn't mean his strategy was ill-fated. Many Christians throughout history who never apostasized held similar views to his theory of 'robust formational economy'. Again, that straight line idea.

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  7. P.S. David Ernst,

    I realize you may not have been following the whole discussion, but I brought up my past experience in the context of mine and Steve's debate over whether caution in the case of accepting supernatural claims in general is justified. I did not claim that YEC is 'part and parcel of promiscuous claims to revelation', nor did I associate it with people who practice incest. The thought, as God put it in Jeremiah, never entered into my mind.

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  8. "“The speed of light is calculated from Maxwell's theory using two other constants, the vacuum permittivity and vacuum permeability. Amazingly, these last two have nothing to do with rates or time, and their value is measured using electrical capacitors.”"

    Umm, vacuum permittivity is measured in tesla-meters per ampere. Amps are charge/second. So yes, thats a rate, and it has to do with time.

    Sincerely,

    Your friendly neighbourhood professional engineer.

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  9. That would be PERMEABILITY.

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  10. Mike,

    Poor choice of words on my part. What I meant is that their measurement does not involve calculating rates, or comparing rates with rates. For example, the vacuum permittivity constant can be measured experimentally from Coulomb's law:

    Fe=1/(4pe)*q1q2/r2

    Just set two charged objects with known charge at a certain distance (r) from each other, and measure the force of repulsion or attraction. No rates involved.

    And the numerical value of these constants certainly depends on the units one chooses for the other quantities, so that value is conventional (there were unit systems which made the dielectric constant equal to one). But the constants themselves have a certain size, and they do allow for objective calculations like the one I mentioned above for measuring the time it would take for light from distant stars to reach Earth.

    And as an engineer, I'm curious: what do you make of Steve's claim that there is a vicious circularity involved in getting an objective measure of the passage of time?

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  11. "And as an engineer, I'm curious: what do you make of Steve's claim that there is a vicious circularity involved in getting an objective measure of the passage of time?"

    I attended a secular university for my engineering degree. So the first thing I'll point out is that the Triabloguers' view of science is pretty much consistent with the secular sociology of science teaching I received (note that they will argue at someone's level, even if they don't necessarily hold a view; I use 'view' in this former sense).

    The second point is that whether you think you could even get an objective measure of light depends on whether you think scientific models actually correspond to reality. I'm inclined to think that generally they do not. For the sake of argument, it's not out of the realm of possibility that a paradigmatic shift could occur wherein we conceive of light in a fundamentally different way, like phlogiston compared to our modern understanding of combustion. And I can't fault anyone for such a phenomenal take on scientific modelling. Do I think this is a problem? No. You probably have a cell-phone. The assumptions that go into the theory of wireless communications, including statistical analysis, are monumental, and yet your phone works pretty good. Newtonian physics break down at a small level. Yet they work well enough at a macro level.

    Now, I'm a little rusty, but here goes.

    The definition of light speed is circular. The meter is itself defined by the speed of light through a vacuum. Yet the speed of light is defined in meters ( 299,792,458 m/s ). Now, we measured our way to this value, and then defined the meter in terms of our known measurement. Here's the interesting thing about that: The speed of light will never change because we've simply declared that a meter is 1/ 299,792,458 the distance light will travel in a second. Under the theory that the speed of light is constant, the meter will never change. Hold that thought.

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  12. You also said that "[the constants] value is measured using electrical capacitors." Yet caps only do anything interesting with alternating current applied to them. Two things about current: Current is the flow of charge. But AC is more interesting. AC has to be described in terms of complex numbers, or frequency domain analysis (Laplace and Fourier are an engineer's good friends because they simplify the math involved with caps and inductors). Complex numbers are also called imaginary numbers, and for good reason - they are a construct we use to model what we're seeing. So already, we're seeing that we're applying conventions to even interpret the behaviour of a capacitor. And these conventions work well enough. But they are predicated on a theory of electricity. A theory which we confirm by interpreting the behaviour with our conventions. Furthermore, the speed of electricity is considered to be light speed, but the flow of electrons is not. This sort of thing has to be measured, or theorized. Yet permittivity is also defined down the road in terms of amperes, via coulomb's force law, amperes being the flow of charge. So permittivity is based on the flow of charge, and flow of charge is measured and interpreted by our electrical theory. Using capacitors to measure the absolute permittivity of a vacuum based on the relative permittivity of a capacitor which is described using conventional mathematics may result in a viable description of the speed of light, but it is all predicated on electrical theory. Electrical theory confirmed by measurements into which electrical theory feeds. It's convention upon convention coupled with interpreted observations in the real world. A paradigm shift might alter the way we view all of this. Maybe there is reason to think there might be another model for understanding all of this. The pioneer anomaly may suggest that physical theory is inadequate, and one proposed resolution to the problem has to do with the non-uniformity of time (http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0410084) in relation to constant acceleration.

    Back to the thought on the definition of the speed of light. Distance is a simpler case, but surely you are aware of the kilogram's weight loss problem. Scientists are having trouble defining the kilogram in terms of a constant, like they did with light. And of course, mass is measured by mass, which is circular.

    I think this is the sort of thing Hays is getting at. A big, circular, self-reinforcing mass of interacting measurements and conventions. Is that vicious? I didn't see Hays use the term vicious; that looks like its your word. He was just pointing out the limitation of appeals to material theory and measurements.

    Hays said this: "Of course, a physical constant is, itself, a temporal category (constant through time), so all you’ve done is to conceal the circularity of your procedure. How do you measure constancy without comparing it to another process? Unless you simply posit a physical constant." As we dig, we see that there's a mountain of temporally based measurements and human conventions which go into defining something like the speed of light.

    I *think*, and Steve is welcome to correct me if I'm off here, but Steve would consider this point to be peripheral to the main issue. His point, in this context, is that if God instantiated reality partway through, you'd never be able to tell by looking at the speed of light (e.g. by measuring distance to a star). And we'd be projecting our own interpretation of 'age' onto things. That's our problem. If God built things a certain way, and then he told us how he built it, even if our measurements look different, then the Maker has hardly deceived us. Because He told us how He did it.

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  13. Mike's comments remind me of the time when I tried to come up with a definition of just what time is. I figured I'd start with the simple equation:

    Velocity = Distance/Time.

    After multiplying both sides by Time and dividing both sides by Distance, you got an equation for time:

    Time = Distance/Velocity.

    I discovered the flaw in my thinking when I realized that this didn't solve for what Time was, as a meaningful definition, because Velocity itself requires Time. Velocity is meaningless if there is no time value; and so time cannot be defined based on its relationship to Velocity and Distance.

    This opened my eyes to the circularity of trying to define time. Indeed, I've yet to find any satisfactory definition for Time. Even Einstein's quip, "Time is that which clock's measure" is actually just a reworked example of Time = Distance/Velocity, i.e., the rate at which a clock's hands move a certain distance is defined as a "minute" and the rate at which a different clock's hand travels a different distance is called an "hour."

    In the end, time is notoriously difficult to actually define, which makes questions of whether the speed of light is constant through time so theory-laden that they are impossible to answer without a presupposed view of time already in place.

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  14. OK.

    I'm not ready to go down the rabbit hole in company with po-mo sociologists of science. I think it's too steep a price to pay in terms of the Christian belief in the intelligibility of the world, and of the human mind's ability to fathom it, that drove the original developers of modern science like Kepler and Galileo. If they thought or knew that all they were doing was making a whole bunch of assumptions about planetary motion that just happened to make the observed motion come out right, without being able to say that they had 'really' discovered that planetary orbits are ellipses, I doubt the enterprise would have gotten off the ground.

    I think I am on very safe ground to say that relativistic mechanics were an improvement over Newtonian mechanics, not just the trading of one set of arbitrary assumptions for another. And it wasn't just an improvement by some pragmatic standard of usefulness, or of relativity being better for some purposes than Newtonian mechanics. It seems clear that, however much our understanding of fundamental physics may change in the future, Einstein was onto something. He saw more clearly into the workings of nature than his predecessors, even if he didn't see everything.

    And if nobody really quite knows why quantum mechanics works, what metaphysical picture is behind it, that's not a failing of quantum mechanics, but rather of the inability of our limited categories like 'wave', 'particle', etc. to capture the deeper structure of reality. It is entirely possible, even likely that at some point our understanding will just break down, that things get too weird. But that means that human understanding actually progressed to the point where we had to throw our hands up. We got as close as we could and saw as far as we could. But it is cowardice to throw up our hands before that, or to dismiss those intrepid explorers of not having accomplished anything just because they didn't accomplish everything (note that I'm just saying this in general, not to any one here in particular).

    Mike, I'm curious based on the sketch of your understanding that you gave me whether you think all those assumptions that went into making a cell phone are equivalent to any other set of assumptions one might make when trying to construct a cell phone. If not, why not? If the conventional understanding that if we want to make something, we have to have a clear idea of what it's made of and how the parts fit together is incorrect, or we have radically wrong ideas about the parts, what does allow us to build cell phones?

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  15. "I'm not ready to go down the rabbit hole in company with po-mo sociologists of science."

    Actually, an instrumentalist view of science was around a long time before po-mo-ism:

    http://www.reformation.edu/scripture-science-byl/pages/08-instrumentalism.htm

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  16. And I must say, granted all the philosophical perplexities with the understanding of time, I don't see that it has any meaningful consequences for an issue like how old the Earth is, for example. If we can say that however long ago WW1 was, the birth of Christ was approximately 20 times that long ago (and say that the two intervals are NOT of the same size), we can also say, based on the same techniques used to date objects to 1,000 years ago, that there are objects and artifacts we can date to millions and billions of years ago.

    We can stop talking about time and instead talk about placing events in sequence. Fine. Either way if you look at the evidence, you're going to find the event of the landing on the moon in between our 'event' and WW1, and the time when Genesis was supposed to happen according to Biblical chronology in between our 'event' and the event of the Cambrian explosion. And one interval is a whole lot bigger than the other.

    And our unit of time might be conventionally defined, but the size of the temporal intervals we are measuring does not change for all that. Even if you define one second to be the interval between our time and WW1, that doesn't mean any fewer people were born and died during that second. It would be silly for an old person to say that they can't really be that old because by their (conventional) temporal metric, they're still 18. And neither would it make any sense to say that the person only appears to be old relative to some reference frame, or from the standpoint of certain assumptions.

    Now, you will say that tracing events back millions of years into the past depends on the principle of uniformity, that the same physical processes that are active now (note I'm not saying that those were the only influences active, I'm not foreclosing miracles here) were active then. Isn't that a whopper of an assumption to make?

    Well it is an assumption, or better, an interpretive principle, but geologists did not just wake up one day and decide to start interpreting the geological record on the basis of uniformity, for no good reason. And although some of the uniformitarian geologists had philosophical and theological motivations (Owen Anderson lays out some of them in his article on Lyell and Darwin, although I think his reading of the sources is quite flawed in many ways) for abandoning catastrophism, there were also empirical issues, very weighty ones. Keep in mind that most of the uniformitarian geologists who built up the present picture were Bible-believing Christians who reflexively accepted a young Earth, the Fall, and the worldwide flood, and many of them worked quite hard to reconcile their observations of the geological record with a literal reading of Genesis. If the principle of uniformity were just an interchangeable assumption, and these Christian geologists were anxious to preserve the accuracy of Genesis, why didn't they just stay with their original assumptions. After all, if all evidence is only evidence for something on the basis of certain assumptions, which themselves cannot be chosen or modified by the evidence, it would have been easy to keep in mind the geological evidence as evidence for a young Earth and a worldwide flood on the basis of the right assumptions.

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  17. No doubt there was some social pressure among Christian geologists to go with the new uniformitarianism, but as there were also Christian geologists who were capable of resisting those influences, we cannot explain the formers' acceptance of uniformitarianism by sociology alone. There was something about uniformitarianism that made it seem right, and the better interpretation of the evidence, to many believing Christian geologists.

    And lest we are tempted to conclude that one interpretive principle is as good as any other, even creationist geologists realize that, compared to the uniformitarian view, the catastrophist perspective is still woefully underdeveloped, and as a research program most of its proposals have been embarrassingly bad, riddled with basic factual errors and misunderstandings of the program they are criticizing.

    Now some will argue that we are only justified in accepting that physical processes we see operating now are in fact operating now, and that we cannot legitimately extrapolate into the past. But this view leads to a very difficult question: what is that 'now' for which we are justified in accepting the operation of physical processes? More precisely, how long is it? At the precise moment that an experiment ends, and the formulation of the process in the mind of the scientist is complete, do we lose our justification for believing that it holds 'now'? Do we lose it five minutes afterwards? 10 minutes? A year? And how about into the future? Are we justified in extrapolating that the physical process will hold one second into the future? Ten seconds?

    Thus I see no useful or even intelligible distinction between the physical processes we are justified as accepting 'now' (whatever that means) and those we are justified in extrapolating to the past or the future. We should of course grant the inevitability that in some cases God will work in a different mode, but one thing we can be sure of is that, giving the evidence of the fossil record, there would have been no time for all the millions of species that have gone extinct to flourish, develop and go extinct within the biblical timeframe.

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  18. "His point, in this context, is that if God instantiated reality partway through, you'd never be able to tell by looking at the speed of light (e.g. by measuring distance to a star). And we'd be projecting our own interpretation of 'age' onto things. That's our problem. If God built things a certain way, and then he told us how he built it, even if our measurements look different, then the Maker has hardly deceived us. Because He told us how He did it."

    That would be valid if there were any direct biblical evidence for that idea, so that God told us clearly that that's what happened during creation, and if all Christians knew that to be the case even before the rise of modern science. Instead, I see views like this become prominent only after new understandings emerged about the age and development of the Earth (and universe), and about the evolution and extinction of species.

    This suggests to me that this is not just one legitimate understanding of creation among others, but that it was put forward specifically to counter the mounting evidence for an old Earth, a long history of life on Earth well before the current batch of species came on the stage, and a vast Universe. I cannot see this as any other than an ad hoc move, and you can tell that it is because it doesn't get us anywhere: it doesn't lead to any new understanding, it does not enhance the creationist paradigm and if effectively shuts down all inquiry. Plus, if you cannot calculate to the very split second from the Bible exactly how long ago real history started, there will be a very bizarre frontier to our historical knowledge where we are not sure whether evidence that we date to, say, 7,000 years ago should be considered real history or not, because we don't know whether we should calculate the creation of the world to 10,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago.

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  19. Saint and Sinner,

    The realism/antirealism debate in philosophy of science certainly continues, with able, intelligent (and Christian) proponents on both sides, but it does not have any implications for the event sequences that are the primary obstacle to reading Genesis 1 as conveying strictly factual information. For even under instrumentalism, there are more adequate and less adequate 'useful fictions' for saving the phenomena, and if uniformitarianism and a long Earth history are the best, most illuminating interpretive principle for interpreting geology, there will still be a conflict with a literal reading of Genesis 1. You might choose to give primacy to Genesis 1 for 'real' propositional truths , but then you face the hermeneutical challenge of exactly what propositions about the natural world should be taken as factual, as revealing the essence of things. Certainly not the ones about the 'foundations of the Earth', for example.

    And John Byl does not give the full story of the realist/instrumentalist debate in the history of science and Christianity. He does not disclose that many of those Christian scientists who presented their views as 'useful fictions' did so not primarily in order to reconcile their belief in Scripture, but to avoid persecution.

    The main problem with Byl's view, however, is that he makes too strict of a distinction between observations and our 'theoretical speculations'. He argues that human beings have the ability to make the former, but we should be skeptical about our ability to make the latter, or at least that the latter can find any purchase on the way things really are. What he does not realize is that all our observations presuppose a theoretical understanding, however crude, of what it is we are observing. And that theoretical understanding has serious implications for how we act on those observations. If our 'theoretical speculations' have no purchase on the way things really are, neither do our observations.

    Granted, there may be limits to how far we can extrapolate our theoretical observations, a prime candidate for that being naturalism going well beyond what can be reasonably inferred from physical theory. But extrapolate them we must.

    The same problem attends his idea that we can confine the legitimate working of human reason to the application of deductive logic, as opposed to theoretical speculation. As any logician will tell you, however, deductive logic is a feat of theoretical speculation par excellence. Even simple logical structures like modus tollens depend upon very elaborate accounts of truthmakers, etc. for their veracity.

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  20. First, I'll answer the question you directed to me, and let Hays et. al. sort out the rest.

    "Mike, I'm curious based on the sketch of your understanding that you gave me whether you think all those assumptions that went into making a cell phone are equivalent to any other set of assumptions one might make when trying to construct a cell phone. If not, why not? If the conventional understanding that if we want to make something, we have to have a clear idea of what it's made of and how the parts fit together is incorrect, or we have radically wrong ideas about the parts, what does allow us to build cell phones?"

    Depends what you mean by 'clear'. 'Clear' isn't exhaustive. We just need a sufficient understanding, which is encapsulated in our working scientific model, in order to put things together. As long as it either accurately describes reality, OR models reality with sufficient approximation, .

    For example, you can build a bridge based on different theories of gravity, and a less precise value for PI. It won't practically make a difference, but if general relativity is closer to reality, or vice verse, then we're operating off of a system which sufficiently describes the behaviour of reality without actually describing the ontology of reality.

    But really, I'm not too interested in this point right now.

    Because you said this:

    "That would be valid if there were any direct biblical evidence for that idea"

    It's mere pretension on your part to claim biblical fidelity.

    The text of Genesis expressly makes human death a punishment by God for human rebellion against God. Are you going to suggest that a literal interpretation of this fact is novel?

    Paul then interprets this historically and factually in Romans 5. "18 Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. 19 For as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous."

    Adam and Jesus are as real as each other in the apostle's mind. The imputation of guilt from Adam and the imputation of righteousness from Jesus stand together. You cannot gut the former without tossing out the apostle's argument. His proof from Adam shows us the very nature of divine justice, and how it is defined in such a way that God can reckon people as dead or alive in a single man. Paul predicates his argument for justification by faith through one man on the fact that humanity died in Adam. And he assumes humanity died in Adam's sin. Paul grounds the Gospel in the historicity of the Genesis account.

    In other words, evolution is utterly incompatible with the heart of the Gospel. You gut justification, and you even turn death into a natural part of life, which is the furthest thing from the biblical conception of death. They could say the wages of sin is death. The evolutionist has to say that human death existed before sin ever did. To hold to molecules-to-man human evolution is to reject faithfulness to the biblical understanding of human death. You cannot faithfully hold to union with Christ and the imputation of righteousness without holding to a literal Adam.

    It is simply wishful thinking to suggest that you're faithful to the biblical narrative. You're not.

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  21. JD,

    As regards time, you wrote:
    ---
    If we can say that however long ago WW1 was, the birth of Christ was approximately 20 times that long ago (and say that the two intervals are NOT of the same size), we can also say, based on the same techniques used to date objects to 1,000 years ago, that there are objects and artifacts we can date to millions and billions of years ago.
    ---

    The problem with that is that there are observers for WW1 and the birth of Christ. Right now, I'm of the opinion that time is meaningless without an observer (and to be more specific, an observer within the system--so God Himself would not be an observer under this theory, since He is atemporal and transcends the universe anyway). I have various reasons for this position, none of which are probably going to be convincing to you, nor do I actually have the ability to explain it all myself. It's something that makes sense in my head but I lack the skills to explain it properly in a coherent way, although I can always speculate...seems to be a bit of a side track to get into all that here though.

    But if my theory is right, then it *DOES* become important as to how we define time. And that *DOES* become quite relevant to the age of the Earth.

    Speaking of the Earth, I think we must point out something there too, even for those who don't hold to my "time doesn't exist without an observer of time" theory. When we say the universe is 14 billion years old, it stipulates a relativistic frame of reference, which is the reference from the Earth itself. But the Earth itself did not exist until roughly 5 billion years ago. Which means you have around 9 billions years of the age of the universe being described from a frame of reference *that didn't exist*. So even if my own theory is wrong and one doesn't need an actual observer to have time be meaningful, you *STILL* need a frame of reference and your frame of reference is a hypothetical, non-existent one for roughly 2/3s of the claimed age of the universe.

    So, yeah, I think it's important to deal with the time issue in order to make claims about the age of the Earth or the universe as a whole.

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  22. Mike,

    Both our positions have wrinkles we need to struggle with. Mine is to explain how the Fall, original sin and salvation play out against an evolutionary backdrop, yours is to explain the evidence for an old earth, the flourishing and extinction of millions of prior species, etc. on the assumption that there was a time when every animal and man were vegetarian and man wouldn't die, and then all of a sudden we get biological death, carnivores, etc.

    But to accuse me of biblical infidelity is uncharitable and ignorant. Why do you think I'm working so hard on these questions? I'm trying to acknowledge and take the scientific evidence with full seriousness, and the biblical evidence with full seriousness. You and the other Triabloggers seem content with explaining away science and biological history via instrumentalism and 'temporal metrical conventionalism'. I can't do that. Believe me, I tried. All through high school and well into college I searched desperately for credible creationist arguments. I was completely happy for a while with the 'God created stars with their light already reaching earth' argument, until I learned more about astrophysics and it began to seem a completely ad hoc maneuver.

    I don't share your understanding of the genre of Genesis, but I can engage you on your own terms, just as Steve continually does in his apologetics.

    So let's turn to the Bible. Nowhere in Genesis does it say that human beings were created naturally immortal. On the contrary, after Adam's disobedience God bars the way to the tree of life precisely in order to prevent human beings from living forever.

    Physical immortality was not a human attribute that was taken away because of sin, but a possibility that was then denied. This is implied in God's promise that "from dust you are, and to dust you will return". Human beings were dust in the beginning, and the only way they were going to be anything else was to partake of the tree of life.

    As for Paul's use of the Adam-Christ parallel: you're right, there is a prima facie contradiction there. I still don't know what exactly to make of it. But I'm going to keep on studying and learning in hope that it will eventually work out. What I won't do is retreat into a little shell and try to suppress the evidence.

    One thing I will say about Paul, though: he doesn't seem to mind throwing together all sorts of ideas and use any textual evidence at hand to make his points. Just take two of his atonement metaphors: he refers to Christ both as a sacrificial victim, and as a scapegoat. These pictures are entirely incompatible. A sacrificial victim is without blemish (and thus can enter the Holy of Holies) and its blood cleanses the interior from human pollution, so that the Divine Presence can dwell there. A scapegoat is loaded with the sins of the people, becomes cursed and is expelled from the community. The 'technology' of atonement, if you will, is completely different in each case. But Paul is comfortable using them together.

    This should alert us to the fact that there are subtleties to Paul's use of Scripture that should not be glossed over.

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  23. Peter,

    It's not as if the Universe was empty until Earth showed up. There are billions and billions of galaxies to serve as reference points to calibrate the age of the Universe.

    And I really don't have the faintest idea what you mean that it would take a human observer to give meaning to temporal measurement. What about all the organisms that lived on the Earth before human beings showed up? What about tree rings? What about sedimentation? It's one thing to argue that natural processes went at different speeds in the past, or that the first created things would show evidence of development they never went through. But the idea that it takes a human observer to make time meaningful seems pretty far-fetched.

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  24. Mike,

    It's one thing to acknowledge that we differ in our interpretation of Genesis, and it's another thing to accuse me of biblical infidelity. Both our positions have wrinkles that are hard to smooth over. I acknowledge that the Adam-Christ argument shows a prima-facie contradiction. I'm not sure yet how it will all work out. But I do know I can't explain away the scientific evidence. Believe me, I tried. I spent all of high school and well into college frantically searching for good creationist arguments. There are none to be found.

    And while I don't share your understanding of Genesis, I do still take it as authoritative. I just don't think it gives the kind of propositional information that modern creationists are looking for.

    And let me just make a point about Adam there. Nowhere does it say in Genesis 3 that Adam and Eve were naturally, biologically immortal. On the contrary, God bars access to the tree of life precisely in order to keep human beings from living forever. This is also born out when God says that "from dust you are and to dust you will return". From dust you are...only through God's intervention would human beings not return to the dust. Thus bodily immortality is not an attribute that was removed, but a possibility that was denied.

    Paul is clearly talking about spiritual death in Romans. Biological death has a 'sting' because of our sinfulness and because it exposes us to God's judgment.

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  25. J.D. Walters:

    Your line of argument is really not worth the time to follow in depth. It is common theistic evolution boilerplate. Or, in broader terms, it consists of well-worn objections to scriptural inerrancy. The only thing that I found worth noting was that in addition to the standard claim of intellectual superiority, you also add that of moral superiority based on your personal experience.

    Tbat is to say, belief in "young earth creationism/scriptural inerrancy" equals "blind, unquestioning acceptance of parental/clerical authority" which leads to insane fanaticism. Of course, it would not enter your mind to phrase the proposition in such bald terms.

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  26. JD said:
    ---
    But the idea that it takes a human observer to make time meaningful seems pretty far-fetched.
    ---

    Well, let's start with this. In what sense is time relevant to you before you existed? For instance, think of the Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic in a ship, on a voyage that took several months. Do you *feel* that passage of time? Of course not. Do you remember it? Of course not. It was a done deal before you ever existed. All you've got is your own experiences of what several months mean to you *now* that you can use as analogous to their crossing. But what does it matter to you that they left a certain day before you were born and arrived a certain other day several months later, but well before you were born? To you, it is irrelevant. To you, it doesn't matter whether this took several months or just appears to have taken several months.

    This is similar to the point I'm driving at, although it's still a bit of an analogy.

    More importantly, you said:
    ---
    It's not as if the Universe was empty until Earth showed up. There are billions and billions of galaxies to serve as reference points to calibrate the age of the Universe.
    ---

    It doesn't matter if there are other objects. When we say that the universe is 14 billion years old (give or take) that is in EARTH years, isn't it? That is, it's from the perspective of someone on an existent Earth. And since the passage of time changes depending on the framework of relative motion, then if there is no Earth at time t (however we define that) then just what is that frame of reference? A hypothetical, non-existent Earth that is extrapolated back in time such that, if the Earth had always existed the universe would be X numbers of years old? But how does that map to reality when the Earth wasn't there?

    Further, as I've mentioned before, from the perspective of a light photon, no time has passed since the Big Bang. If that photon were an observer, how old would it consider the universe?

    Or look at it this way. When we slam particles together in an accelerator, they are moving fast enough that from our perspective time slows and we can watch the particles interact and decay and such. Suppose for the sake of argument that we smash particles together and see a new atom that exists for exactly 1 second from our perspective before it decays into subatomic particles once more, but that would have only existed for 10^-40 seconds (i.e., just above Planck time) were it not accelerated.

    How old was the particle when it decayed?

    If you still think you can answer that question then you haven't understood my point :-)

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  27. "It's one thing to acknowledge that we differ in our interpretation of Genesis, and it's another thing to accuse me of biblical infidelity. Both our positions have wrinkles that are hard to smooth over." "But to accuse me of biblical infidelity is uncharitable and ignorant."

    Walters; there is nothing charitable about glossing over the dangerous consequences of a person's beliefs. That would be profoundly hateful on my part. I'd rather be called ignorant than actually be hateful.

    "And let me just make a point about Adam there. Nowhere does it say in Genesis 3 that Adam and Eve were naturally, biologically immortal. On the contrary, God bars access to the tree of life precisely in order to keep human beings from living forever. This is also born out when God says that "from dust you are and to dust you will return". From dust you are...only through God's intervention would human beings not return to the dust. Thus bodily immortality is not an attribute that was removed, but a possibility that was denied."

    Even if the text said that they were 'naturally, biologically immortal', I doubt that would change your mind. That death is a punishment for sin presupposes that death was not a problem for Adam before the fall.

    And I'll note that covenant theologians hold to a covenant of works whereby Adam was to earn eternal life via his obedience. This is the same as to say that only through God's intervention would humans not return to dust. But that's a different thing than to say that the DEFAULT would be for God to allow humans to die, rather than only doing so AFTER Adam rebels against God - which is what the text teaches. That, and as a Calvinist, I believe that "God's intervention" (cf. Heb. 1:1-3) holds this whole universe together all the time.

    "Paul is clear

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  28. "Paul is clearly talking about spiritual death in Romans. Biological death has a 'sting' because of our sinfulness and because it exposes us to God's judgment."

    You're beginning with your extrabibilical understanding of how the world was created and allowing it to affect your exegesis.

    That this is 'spiritual death' is far from 'clear'. Romans 5:6 says, "6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. " This is undeniably speaking of Christ's bodily death. Paul connects verse 12 to the preceding verses ("12 THEREFORE, JUST AS sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin"), without any break in thought indicating that he has changed his definition of death. Indeed, he has two explicit connectors linking the thought in verse 6-11 with 12-. Verse 18 picks up after Paul's aside in verse 12. So verse 18 flows out of 12 which flows directly and draws a consequence out of the argument in 6-11: Christ died (bodily) in place of sinners. Sin came into the world through one man, Adam, and (bodily) death through sin. Then, in verse 15, we see: "15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many." Death here is still flowing out of verse 12, which flows out of 6-11. And in 17, we have this: "17 For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ." The death in verse 17 is the same in verse 12 which is the same as in verse 6. Paul's argument is that Christ died bodily for the ungodly, therefore, they can be raised from the dead and 'reign in life', as opposed to perishing under Adam: Notice the 'just as' in verse 12, and the 'as' in verse 18. Verse 18 picks up with the thought of verse 12, and verse 12 is drawing a parallel between Christ's action and Adam's action. Verse 18 completes the thought in verse 12. "18 Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men." That 'one act of righteousness' refers back to 6-11. You have no exegetical reason for changing Paul's use of death through this pericope. You need to impose a that on the text.

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