awip2062 wrote:Nunavuter wrote: If only Creationists could move beyond the 17th Century, we'd be getting somewhere.
17th Centrury?
*looks about her house, at her clothing, at her computer....*
Do look around your house and ask yourself how it is that all those things exist.
The business of science is the process of determining how things work in the natural world. The application of discoveries in thermodynamics, mechanics, electromagnetism, chemistry, materials science, and myriad other disciplines make those things possible.
But more profound than the production of technological toys is the knowledge of the interconnectedness of the principles governing nature. This was the great conceptual breakthrough.
The laws of gravitation that determine how an apple falls from a tree govern the motions of planets in orbit. The behaviour of electrons in a chemical reaction are congruent with those properties that govern the behaviour of circuits, including the complex circuitry of computers. Genetics unifies the laws of heredity long known by animal breeders and botanists with the processes that govern the emergence of new types of disease and strains that resist antibiotics.
As late as the 1700s people would store gunpowder in churches in the notion that god would not allow harm to befall a church, and therefore the gunpowder would be safe. Many a church was reduced to kindling after lightning struck the steeple. Ben Franklin would later demonstrate that lightning was a form of electricity, and it became apparent that the tallest structures in a given area were
more likely to be hit due to the nature of electrical currents. A lightning rod to channel the current safely into the ground was the answer.
Creationists have no problems with the discoveries of science when these provide them with computers, cars and airplanes. They trust that radar actually works to help guide planes and track weather fronts. I'm sure that few doubt the reality of nuclear power plants, or the ability of geologists to locate oil deposits in the Earth's crust.
But if the Doppler shift that helps police catch speeders also suggests that the universe is vast and expanding, they cry foul. They believe science might know enough about the behaviour of atomic particles to build a nuclear reactor or an MRI machine, but it must be clueless when it comes to radiometric dating. Geologists can judge the prospects of locating oil in a stratigraphic layer based on the fossils they find there, or monitor mountain formation, earthquakes, volcanoes and track the motion of the continents using GPS, but surely their theories regarding the formation processes and the timelines involved are mistaken.
The selection by Creationists of the scientific theories that must be wrong is not based on the relative strengths of the theories, but rather the degree to which a given theory conflicts with their interpretion of a religious text.
The twin ironies in this exercise are both their need to find scientific "proofs" of their religious faith, and the false dichotomy that if a given scientific idea can be demonstrated to be false then their religious belief
must be true. (The possibility that a different scientific theory or even a different religious concept might be more accurate is not entertained.)
As for the 17th century, that was when Bishop Ussher made his now famous calculation regarding the age of the Earth. It was also the century that saw the beginning of the scientific revolution.
