On another blog/forum a interesting point came up that is always relevant in the great Creation-Evolution Revolution discussions of our times.
Always, creationists, get thrown at us that the experts/scientists decide what is true about the biological, geological, cosmological origins for the universe. THEN they invoke arguments as if to persuade the public based on the merits of the evidence.
Creationists and good guys everywhere ae offered authority and then arguments in a contradictory way.
What is a expert/scientist is these matters.
Surely the scientist , at a atomic level dealing with basic laws in human ability, is someone who has a knowledge base, passing a threshold, in a subject and then, importantly, is intellectually engaged in figuring out new knowlegge about same subject.
A scientist is a activist in intellectual discovery, regardless of accomplishment. Science is only a verb. Never a noun.
Therefore a scientist is ANYONE, regardless of degrees from education institutions, who has this knowledge base/activism.
Therefore any YEC/ID creationist etc is a scientist or as much a scientist as any opponent regardless of degrees on the wall.
The degrees mostly come from memorizing things that any thoughtful person who is interested will memorize over the years. Now I’m told that getting some degrees does demand innovative work. I question how innovative from the nature of it all and my observation in such papers written for the final degrees.
Anyways God is the first scientist and then anyone, human, who has applied thier intelligence to it with crossing thresholds of knowledge and serious attempts to figure things out.
Therefore I think on TSZ everyone , literally, is a scientist who is regular. Not just those who in their mid twenties got some stupid degree signifying very little. Then just teaches but still says they are a scientist. They are not if not activated.
Is this correct or revolution in the wrong way??
The YEC or ID Creationist is not usually acting on that knowledge, and perhaps doesn’t really have the knowledge needed.
So what is the point of redefining the term “scientist” so it becomes completely meaningless? I mean, apart from the transparant attempt to trivialise professional expertise.
Bravo Robert!!!
You have saved The Speculative Zone… again…
True science ceases to exist the moment the scientists involved either ignore the evidence or assume something to be true when it is not, and continue to support their preconceived ideas by applying confirmation and optimism biases…
Materialism, with its baby Darwinism, ceased their existence as sciences at the moment of their conception. Obviously some very powerful forces continue to keep those ideologies on life-support and pretend that materialism and Darwinism are sciences and are well, when they have been dead since their conception…
Well, science is a methodology, and, of course, it requires a lot of preparation to do it right. Thus, I’d agree that a scientist would be someone looking for answers using scientific methodology. However, the distinction between what creationists do, compared to what scientists do, is that creationists do not follow procedure. Instead they pick and choose, and deform, and bastardize, as needed to get the results that they want, rather than follow the evidence. Of course, this is not something only creationists do, but it is their prevalent methodology. I’ve had discussions with plenty, and even the ones that look honest at first, quickly show that honesty is last in their list of priorities. I’d offer gpuccio as example. The guy went all the way to claim, adamantly, that affinity has nothing to do with protein function, rather than admit that he got an answer to his supposedly unanswerable questions. That makes creationists’ “science” questionable at best, and hard to keep calling science for fear of insulting people who honestly practice it.
Scientist at least try to keep it honest, and the “I-want-this-to-be-the-result” is far from being the prevalent procedure. Normally, when some scientist is biased, some other scientists figures it out, present the problem to the biased scientist, and the evidence settles the matter. With creationists that’s damn hard. Pretty close to impossible. I am tired of seeing the very same mistaken notions, deformed evidence, and poor philosophical “grounds” of what creationists pretending to be performing science insist on presenting. This goes on across generations of creationists regardless of how many times the explanations are offered to them as to why they’ve got it wrong. At least with scientists, the most stubborn insisting on the wrong positions eventually die and their failed notions with them. With creationists the failures and misrepresentations are passed on generation after generation, with new generations adding smoke and mirrors to their bullshit at best, but never fixing their deep foundational problems.
Finally, scientists want to learn something. Creationists only want to prove that their imaginary friends are real. Huge difference.
Which then basically rules out creationism as a scientific endeavour:
We can also add creation.com to the list of creationist organizations putting a particular conclusion before they even examine the facts:
“Facts are always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information. By definition, therefore, no interpretation of facts in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record.” – https://creation.com/what-we-believe
That’s partly because they lack the training in basic reasoning, but that’s not even most of it. They are utterly convinced that if evolution is true, then life lacks all purpose, value, dignity, etc. They don’t want evolutionary theory to be true because they are terrified of it.
You can’t have a rational conversation with someone whose entire identity is premised on denying the truth of what you’re trying to say.
More terrified than you finding out its false?
Yes. Absolutely.
In fact none of us are even remotely afraid of finding out it’s false, yet those on the other side really are absolutely debilitated by the thought it might be true.
Exhibit A) Creationists made this picture, this is what they see as the consequence of believing that evolution is true:
I have no reasons to believe that evolutionary theory is false, though of course it probably is — most theories will eventually be replaced by a better theory and there’s no reason to think that the same won’t eventually happen with evolutionary theory as well. But that would require evidence that passes muster by the standards of the scientific community and not just semi-literate screeds from crackpots on the Internet.
Shame on us phoodoo for trying to think for ourselves when there is a qualified priesthood we can go to to find out what to believe.
Why would anybody be terrified if evolutionary theory was false? I know I wouldn’t.
These days it’s hard to find a sentence so completely wrong outside of politics. Phoodoo can’t help us think for ourselves when he/she can’t even think for himself or herself and doesn’t understand the science that he or she is supposedly criticizing, and the idea that scientists are some sort of secular priesthood is just right-wing conspiratorial anti-intellectualism.
You’re shot yourself in the foot Mung.
I like how you implicitly impugn religion here. 🙂
As an Earth scientist I would be absolutely thrilled if evolution was proven to be false. This would mean a revolution in the field at least as dramatic as plate tectonics was in the last century. It would open up untold avenues for exciting new research.
Fine. that might be true but could not be true depending ion the person.
The knowledge is there and after years of interest a creationist, without degrees, could master the foundation of knowledge AND THEN go forward with figuring things out.
its not meaningless or its original invention was meaningless. It was first NATURAL PHILOSOPHER. It still is. They just add in a vigourous methodology to it.
ITS not trivializing professional expertise.
your saying its only professional IF someone recognize them by way of degrees .
if its by way of effort, as long as within the rules, or by work then YES the p[erson who has applied themselves to the foundational knowledge and is a activist in it iS a scientist. No need for thumbs up by some institution in your mid twenties.
its a real thing in its DNA. there is no need for legitimacy from degrees on the wall.
Be that as it may I was seeking to persuade that any human who applies thier intelligence to figuring something out about nature, inventions too, and crosses a threshold of knowledge on the subject, and new conclusions are based on the knowledge (so methodology) is a practicing scientist.
yes mankind is rewarded for its competent efforts in intellectual things regardless of ones youth and education degrees.
Entropy,
Scientists want accomplishment and want conclusions to be confirmed that they like or love. not merely learning things. They note nobel prize winners.
Creationist thinkers, like me, aim and succeed in using/following all the evidence there is there.
Its really that having settled conclusions before investigation makes one never give up until the evidence fits. Its not a rejection of the evidence but a continued investigation.
You bump into this from inarticulate creationists.
Yet they are honest, competent, incompetent, as anyone.
Case in point.
They are saying YES they know some conclusions AND SO any so called facts are just not facxts but human incompetence. So organized creationism seeks to debunk those facts.
Its not rejection or a weird dumb hopelees further investigation.
Its confidence in a witness. A faith. Then using the intellect to take on all comers.
Kantian Naturalist,
Basic reasoning is all mankinds inheritance. BASIC. Better reasoning is for students of this historic subject.
Everyone can say the other side is afraid of being wrong.
Everyone is.
Yet organized creationism is scientific in intents, results, and then some failuyre.
The other side too. I know that.
this thread is about thinking for ourselves but literally our thinking is legitamate as scientific thinking. If we are within the rules.
all, most, regular people on TSZ are scientists doing science. you can tell from the basic knowledge and then innovation in ideas.
Most people could not understand what is talkled about here until a long time of learning basic foundations of knowledge.
Obviously people who came here already were accomplished in these subjects though everyone might deny to this to everyone.
I’m saying NATURAL PHILOSOPHY does belong to mankind regardless of trivial years in ones mid twenties.
If mankind obeys boundaries.
As I understand it, most hypotheses are implicit claims of what the scientist thinks might be true (or even would prefer to be true). But two problems arise: First, test methodology requires that the hypothesis being incorrect is the default, requiring solid positive evidence to override. Second, more often than not the test results support the default rather than the hypothesis under test. Oops, sounded like a good idea but testing shows it to be wrong. Return to drawing board.
Contrast with the “creation scientist” who begins with Absolute Truth (isn’t it the ICR that requires all member scientists to sign a pledge agreeing that none of their findings can contradict scripture?) and all “experimental results” are filtered through this foregone standard.
Ask a scientist what would be required for him to change his mind, and the answer always boils down to observation, to test results. Ask the creationist, and he’ll tell you he’ll never need to change his mind, since he cannot be wrong. God said so!
The scientist isn’t memorizing and regurgitating “scientific scripture” when he doesn’t know what his results will be before testing. But it’s not surprising that creationists, whose ONLY avenue to knowledge is memorizing scripture, cannot grasp any other method. Byers’ word “scientist” is indistinguishable from “heathen” or “infidel” — a follower of Wrong Doctrine. The scientific “bedrock” of uncertainty lies too far outside his mental model to even be terrifying.
You are just trying to give equal weighting to the contributions of professional researchers and the bloviations of rather insistent internet posters, rather than dealing with the fact that YECs and ID creationists (you know, the “good guys”) are simply a bit understocked with professional scientists from the relevant disciplines.
I really don’t care, as I think it ultimately comes down to the quality of the arguments, but I would like to take this opportunity to point out that the only person that is in the habit of richly sprinkling credentials around here is one of your “good guys”.
🙂
Again, there’s a method that helps against those tendencies, and, when not, the culprits eventually die and their biases with them. Not so with creationists pretending to do science, who perpetrate problematic approaches generation after generation because they want a single conclusion to prevail, and could not care less about the scientific method and safeguards.
B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t
You’re talking about creationists here buddy.
Of course it’s a rejection of the evidence on the part of creationists Bob. It’s in their statements of faith! “No evidence can be right if it contradicts scripture.” They reject evidence right and left when it doesn’t conform to their preferred conclusion, and they declare so, except for those hypocrites in the ID movement, who do the very same thing, but declare otherwise.
Doesn’t matter how articulate they are. They all end up pretending and making ridiculous claims for the sake of their favourite claims. Same example: gpuccio is very articulate, yet he doesn’t mind making the ridiculous proclamation that “affinity has nothing to do with protein function,” just so that his “unanswerable” questions keep their “unanswerable” status.
The enormous majority of creationists pretending to do science are dishonest Bob. At least the ones outside the ID community declare their disdain for evidence in their statements of faith (but deny such thing in their discussions, go figure).
Funny thing: how many degrees up on the wall did Bart Barrell have when he was the first person to observe (and publish) on overlapping reading frames?
None. He was a high school grad, he never went to college.
Didn’t matter, because he had the data.
You are drawing the wrong distinction.
I guess bad science is still science.
And, if they are smart enough, they will cease being creationists.
Flint,
if god was the creater and genesis was true then a human investigater of natures truths would be right to start from the God/genesis witness.
you can only say that drawing conclusions is corrupted by faith in Gods word.
Wel is it corrupted? No! creationism mostly debunks error. then adds its opwn, with boundaries accepted from the bible. YET its still always about making a case based on raw facts.
Anyways any one is a scientist , creationists too, if following rules.
one could say genesis is the first hunch/hypothesis/spark. then the investigation goes forward for organized creationism.
Corneel,
Yes I’m giving equal weighting to the intellectual activism of someone/anyone engaged in origin issues or anything in science.
Its a DNA/genetic relationship and not superficial anatomy(degrees).
Entropy,
This is clearly not so.
Its not rejection of evidence. Its rejection that there is evidence against scripture. Thus organized creationism then shows this by scientific investigation.
YEC are Christians, dare I say, on a curve have innate more intergrity then others.
Possibly your frustrated by not persuading people on some points.
its very possible heels are dug in without good justification but they are right someone else would have an answer.
they really are just saying more investigation will show we are right.
i get frustrated, if thats the word, at evolutionists not seeing thinghs my way.
My biggest one being why they say they have biological scientific evidence for the evolution theory when its just a untested hypothesis using foreign subjects to make its case and convince themselves.
I don’t recognize yEC in your portrayal.
its all integrity and intellect and by scientific rules for debunking and a wee bit of original(bible) hypothesizing.
DNA_Jock,
A goopd example for what I’m saying.
Amen. BINGO.