| Subject: Hitting the Bottle |
Author:
Damoclese
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Date Posted: 09/13/04 1:23am
In reply to:
Wade A. Tisthammer
's message, "Ingoring the substance" on 09/13/04 12:17am
To say that the fossil evidence are
>beyond question is both highly dubious and
>inappropriately arrogant given the evidence to the
>contrary.
The fossil record is questionable in certain ways. I doubt anyone would question whether or not those creatures were ever really alive.
Your questioning of the fossil record, on the other hand, rests on little substance other than "There have been times scientists have mistakenly classified fossils, and a few times where they thought something was a fossil but it wasn't."
You know that information because science has error correcting mechanisms which is a strength, but you choose to temeritously highlight those very errors (which you know because science told you) as something so devastingly mistaken that it casts doubt on the entire field of palentology. That, I'm afraid, is not a sufficient reason to cast doubt on the fossil record. It does, however, indicate that science is keeping itself honest; in some cases painfully so and embarassingly so to those involved.
>
>
>
>Precisely. Theism offers explanatory power here.
"God did it" offers no explanatory power.
Great scientific questions such as "Hmm, I wonder why light seems to bend in a prism?" would not have been answered or remedied by proffering God as the answer. In fact, it'd have stifled intellectual growth.
>>
>>You speak as though all other possible worlds are not
>>of intricate mathematical order. How do you know that?
>
>I can easily envision possible ones that aren't.
And I can easily envision a conquistador wearing a pink rabbit on his head. That doesn't demonstrate knowledge that there is in fact a conquistador wearing a pink rabbit on his head.
A
>world being that of chaos, with no consistent
>mathematical order of any kind.
Even in chaos, there are times and places where things seem "orderly". How do you know our current universe isn't in such a state?
Picture a hard drive
>with thoroughly randomized data. No functioning
>program. But if a program was found with a highly
>sophisticated operational mathematical matrix
>patterns...
Then we assume that given a four billion years random processes could not produce such a thing? Monkeys on a typewriter require something in the millions of years to write Shakespeare, I wonder what they'd come up with in roughly 22 billion years?
>
>I didn't say all other worlds do not have
>intricate mathematical order, only that it seems
>awfully interesting that out of all possible ones,
>this universe is intricately mathematically ordered..
>(Again, think of the randomized computer hard drive>)
But we don't "know" that this universe is in fact intricately mathematically ordered. We've only been here for a snippet of the time all of this stuff has been going on. Our existence is said to be something less than a second on the universal clock. To infer that because we perceive mathematical order at this particular time means that the universe is fundamentally "orderly" seems to me to be too much of a saltation.
In fact, in cosmology it seems that the beginning of the universe was much less than orderly.
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