Asteroid craters and evolutionist confusion of interpretation with fact

The problem with leaving EvC, which I finally did recently, is that inevitably somebody posts something I'd like to talk about.  And I've been tempted a couple times recently to go back and join a thread.  What keeps me from it is the very reason I left:  the attitude there is hard to take, and it's a waste of time.  The dragged-out frustrating struggle just to get a simple point across, which often ends in failure anyway, is not worth it any more, and the expressions of hatred against creationists and Christians seem to have escalated and I don't want to be guilty of provoking more of it, let alone my own breakdowns of patience.

But I suppose there may continue to be issues raised I'll want to follow.  This one about asteroid craters I think I'd be foolish to debate anyway -- the mere thought of how it would play out is exhausting -- but I have a few thoughts about it so I'll write them here and leave it at that.   
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YECs and Asteroids

Greetings!
...A recent topic on the subject of impact craters on the Moon got me thinking about the impact craters on Earth. On another forum, I posed this question to the creationists in attendance

Something I’ve been pondering, recently.Most people know about the meteor impact that ‘killed’ the dinosaurs. What they often don’t know is that many, many other things died out around this time, too - fish, plants, even certain mammals and birds - it was a worldwide extinction event ...

One of the main things a YEC has to say, and keep saying, to this sort of presentation, is that this idea of a great extinction event rests purely on the evolutionist interpretation of the fossil record. As usual it is presented as fact although the evidence for it is nothing but the absence of those supposedly extinct life forms from some of the sedimentary layers. That's all. Dinosaur fossils don't appear in a certain layer where they are expected according to the theory of the strata as representing long ages of time. They aren't in that sedimentary rock, therefore they didn't live in the era of time the theory assigns to that rock, therefore they must have all died out. Now we're informed that "many, many other things died out around this time, too -- fish, plants, even certain mammals and birds -- it was a worldwide extinction event..." Which means ONLY that these other creatures ALSO aren't present in sedimentary layers where evolutionist theory expects them to be.

... and it left its mark in the Yucatan. [Here he posts a map of the Yucatan peninsula and an aerial shot of the outlines of a crater at that location.]

So this supposed extinction event -- again, merely an interpretation of the absence of some fossils in some sedimentary layers though treated as unquestionable fact as usual -- is interpreted to have been the result of an asteroid or meteor impact on the Yucatan peninsula. Millions upon millions of years ago of course, as the theory goes.

So now we get some information about the evidence for such impacts. Yes, this is REAL evidence. There WERE such impacts on the earth, lots of craters to prove it. I wouldn't take anything they say about WHEN they occurred very seriously of course.

One bit of evidence for such impacts is the presence of a fine layer of iridium on the surface of one of the sedimentary layers, above which dinosaurs do not occur, iridium being known to result from meteoric impacts. This is probably real evidence of meteoric impact but not necessarily of any supposed extinction event as a result of it, which, again, is evidenced ONLY by the LACK of certain fossils in the layer above.

That’s about 170 km wide - quite an impressive impact, and it would have had effects all over the earth, both immediate and longer-term.

This assertion also rests on an assumption that is not necessarily true, which I'll get to.

I’m absolutely not the person to tell you about them...I suck at math. But, fortunately, Purdue University developed this really cool website that actually lets you calculate such things. So we can see what effects such an impact would have, here.Impact: Earth!

What can happen to you would depend on your proximity to the object - for instance, I put in 1,000 km away, and it informed me of all sorts of pleasant things, like my clothes igniting, a fiery hellstorm raining death upon from the skies, and being drowned and/or crushed by the resultant tsunami. Really, really unpleasant stuff. But the thing is, that’s not the first time this happened - most people also don’t know that the KT impact isn’t the only big impact the Earth’s taken, nor is it the biggest.

There are two craters which are even bigger than the one in the Yucatan - the one in Sudbury is about 250 km, and the one in Vredefort is a whopping 300 km.List of impact craters on Earth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAnd keep in mind - these are just confirmed craters. There unconfirmed ones that we haven’t found yet, that could drawf even that, but for the sake of argument we’ll just stick to what’s been confirmed. So, you’ll notice that there’s quite a few big impacts that would have done huge damage to the earth - not all as drastic as the top five, but still quite noticeable. Forest fire, tsunamis, tremors, et cetera. This would have been quite noticeable to anyone alive at the time.

Now, with an old-earth model, I don’t see it a major problem. When the big first two hit, life on Earth wasn’t [sic] still microbial, and wouldn’t have been affected by it too much, I don’t think. These impacts are few and far between - there are a lot of them, but that’s about what you’d expect if the planet’s been around billions of years. You can only dodge the bullet so many times.

I’m not sure how this works with a young-earth model, though, and I’m curious if any of the reside YECs could proffer an explanation. Obviously, these meteors haven’t hit since the flood - if they’d all struck within a relatively short amount of time, they would have utterly annihilated life on this planet.

Just one big one, like the one in the Yucatan, is enough to cause mass extinctions worldwides. Two, within 4,000 years, would be utterly devastating. The top five largest craters are quite close to or exceeding the Yucatan’s in size, and there are dozens of smaller, but still significant craters around the globe. Clearly, they haven’t hit in recorded history, so what does that leave us? Before the Flood?

If they’d happened before the flood, there wouldn’t even need to be a Flood - everything would be dead, not to mention that it’s not given note anywhere in the Bible. I think I recall someone saying that the Flood could have caused the meteor impacts in the first place, but I don’t see how that make even a little sense, not to mention that the acid rain, massive fish extinctions, and fireballs raining all over the place are something that Noah would have made notice off.

So I’m curious what the YEC ‘interpretation’ is for these impacts. I really didn't get much of a response - one of them talked about angels holding battles inside of protective barriers, but it wasn't very serious, and none of the creationists seemed interested in providing any real feedback, which is odd since they're usually a chatty bunch on that forum. So in interest of refining the argument, I thought I might bring it here to see how well it stacks up and what possible objections there might be.

All I can do is guess from a Floodist perspective of course.  If these meteors hit during the Flood they'd have hit land that was under water, and the lower the land the deeper the water above it, which could have mitigated the drastic effects predicted above.  I checked all the craters referred to and they are all a few thousand miles away from where Noah would have been (even assuming the continents had not yet split).  I didn't check the altitude of the areas where they hit but obviously a few of them hit in lower altitudes.  So these hits might have rocked the water enough to make Noah and family seasick but most likely they wouldn't have produced flame or even as much heat as supposed here. 

If they all occurred during the Flood event, especially if some occurred during the first phase of the forty days and night of constant rain, the result might have been surprisingly minimal. Perhaps a lot of steam rose, which turned into rain in its turn. (The timing would have to take into account when the strata were laid down, and I don't know how to calculate any of that.)

Since I think the strata were all produced by the Flood I also think the iridium layer was deposited during the Flood. What got deposited in any given layer of course is simply a matter of what the Flood happened to deposit there, and nothing to do with great aeons of time.

There's my guess.  SO glad I don't have to "debate" it with all the usual misreadings and angry denunciations and weird denials of the obvious. 

The main point here I think is the way the interpretation of the absence of fossils in a certain layer is treated as undeniable proof that there was a huge extinction event in the distant past. Typical presentation not of FACT, not of simple PHENOMENA, but always of interpretation, of theory, masquerading as fact.

Compromising the Bible to Accommodate Science

On a thread at EvC Forums I was presented with the information that some of the greatest Christian preachers of the 19th and early 20th centuries had accepted certain compromising ideas about the Bible in reaction to the claims of science of their day.  They believed what science was saying about the Old Earth, though not about evolution, and they came up with various ways to make the Bible fit the claims.  I don't know how many resisted the claims altogether, that would be interesting to know, but the fact is that there were some of the best of the best who came up with ideas that accommodate the Bible to science. Spurgeon was one for instance.

There was an exchange of posts on the subject, starting with a post by "kbertsche" HERE:

From about the mid-19th to mid-20th century, most conservative Christians accepted the geologic evidence for an old earth and incorporated it into a view known as the "Gap Theory". This view was popularized by Thomas Chalmers in the early 19th century, and became the de facto view of conservative Christians after C.I. Scofield incorporated it into his reference Bible in the early 20th century. As Bernard Ramm wrote in 1954 (see the wikipedia article referenced above):

"The gap theory has become the standard interpretation throughout hyper-orthodoxy, appearing in an endless stream of books, booklets, Bible studies, and periodical articles. In fact, it has become so sacrosanct with some that to question it is equivalent to tampering with Sacred Scripture or to manifest modernistic leanings".

Who held to an old earth in this period (mid-19th to mid-20th century)? Most of the conservative Christian scholars and Bible teachers, including most of the scholars who opposed the Tuebingen school and modernism. Here are a few of them:

• James Montgomery Boice (1938-2000). Pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia; chairman of International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.
• William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). Prominent anti-evolutionist; prosecutor in Scopes “monkey trial”.
• A.A. Hodge (1823-1886). Old Princeton Theologian.
• Charles Hodge (1797-1878). Old Princeton Theologian.
• H. A. Ironside (1876-1951). Bible preacher, commentator, and author.
• C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Literature professor and Christian apologist.
• J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937). Theologian.
• J. Vernon McGee (1904-1988). Founder of Thru the Bible ministry.
• C.I. Scofield (1843-1921). Known for his Scofield Reference Bible.
• Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892). Known as “the prince of preachers”.
• R.A. Torrey (1856-1928). Editor of "The Fundamentals"
• Benjamin B. Warfield (1851-1921). Theologian; Champion of biblical inerrancy.
• Edward J. Young (1907-1968). Theologian; Champion of biblical inerrancy.

In a subsequent post kbertsche explains that not all of them adhered to Gap Theory, some arguing for Day-Age theory that makes the word "day" in the first chapter of Genesis refer to a very long period of time, and in one case Theistic Evolution.

The last post in the sequence to this point was mine, which follows:

[Ringo quoting me] All I see in this barely plausible scenario is the desperation of these men in the face of the science of the day that they were unable to criticize.

[Ringo] That's a pretty good description of creationism in general.

[Faith} I agree in general with this.  The turn of science to antibiblical assertions put Bible believers in a difficult position.  Having always admired science, and thinking it a gift from God, many scrambled to accommodate their beliefs to what the scientists were saying.  I believe this was a fatal error, understandable though it is.  By coming up with accommodating ideas like Gap Theory they avoided the conflict and appeared to find common ground sufficient to let them continue in their faith and preach their faith to their congregations.

But the conflict is inevitable and can't be avoided.  Gap theory is a wild speculative solution that ends up being no solution.  Same with the other ways the Bible was compromised to accommodate science.  I hadn't known until kbertsche demonstrated it that so many of the greatest preachers had succumbed to this kind of solution, and it was quite startling because those men preach solidly Biblical sermons, the best of the best.  I had no idea there was a rotten spot in the floorboards as it were, that could bring the whole house down.  That's the problem with ALL compromising efforts. 

It's the same problem with the modern Bibles.  Christians can go along for years trusting in those Bibles and then suddenly grasp the implications of the untrustworthiness of the Greek texts that underlie them, and their lack of knowledge of the history of these things, and the corrupted nature of those texts, then cause many to lose their faith and leave them with a bitter cynicism about Christianity. 

Those great preachers who gave into the Old Earth and tried to make the Bible conform to it have built a house of cards that subsequent generations can blow down with a breath, leaving them with very flimsy support for their faith.

I appreciate that they didn't have the time, and it wasn't their calling either, to try to answer the claims of science, but a strong stand on the Bible against the science they couldn't understand might have served us all better in the end.  Others might have been inspired to learn more science earlier, might have seen through the purely interpretive and speculative and unprovable nature of the claims that were being presented as Fact for one thing, might have stayed on top of the claims down the decades instead of being lulled to sleep by a false reconciliation at the expense of the Bible. 

It was quite a shock to me to find out what these men believed. While most of them didn't give in to evolution it is painful to see them accommodating to the Old Earth, which the Bible really can't be made to support without strain.

Review of Grand Canyon Argument against Old Earth Geology

UPDATE: Because the argument I'm presenting here based on the Grand Canyon that I try to keep focused on in the debate, is so simple it easily gets dismissed as simply ignoring the other pieces of this enormous puzzle, so I feel I have to explain why that's not the case.

The idea is that I'm pointing out something so essential that nothing else can challenge it no matter how many questions people might want to raise otherwise. If this argument shows as definitively as I believe it does that the strata cannot possibly be hundreds of millions of years old, then no other considerations can undo that conclusion. If this is true, then the particulars such as the angle of repose of the grains of sand in the Coconino Sandstone, for instance, simply cannot be used to prove the Old Earth but are going to have to be understood some other way.

This is the kind of argument I'm always looking for, the pivotal argument, the one that undoes all the others, and I think I've found it in this case (also the genetic argument but that one got garbled in the last debate round at EvC so I'm going to have to work on it some more.)

============================================ The original post: After some months of debate at EvC Forums I feel the need to restate my arguments here.  Over there anything I say is subject to such a barrage of strange objections it's easy to lose track of the simple point I'm trying to make. 

So I want to restate the argument for the Flood which is really mostly against the Old Earth point of view that has the earth about four billion years old. 

I have one very simple argument about that which is based on cross sections of the Grand Canyon - Grand Staircase area that runs from Arizona to Utah.

I've been unable to load any images into my blogs for some time so all I can do is paste a link to one of these cross sections:

Grand Staircase image

This shows the depth of the layers of rock at the north end of the Grand Staircase to be about two miles, and the number of layers to be roughly about 26.  Clearly these layers were originally continuous at that depth for more than two hundred miles to the Grand Canyon area and beyond, but the strata above the Kaibab level eroded away over the Grand Canyon and chunks of the strata above that level also eroded away in the Grand Staircase area, forming the stairs of the staircase.

This shows that all those layers were in place at one time, and this fact is emphasized by the intrusion of the magma dike at the north end of the Grand Staircase which penetrates upward through the entire stack from bottom to top, showing that it did not occur before they were all laid down.   It is also shown by the fault lines that split the whole stack; It is also shown by the distortion of the whole stack as a block as it follows the curve of the mound over the Grand Canyon.  If that rise had occurred before they were all laid down, the upper layers that were laid down later would not have remained parallel with the lower block of layers but would have been horizontal and butted up against the upgrades and curves.  That is not the case.  The entire stack as a whole follows the curves across the entire landscape, the layers all remaining parallel to one another.  It is also shown by the fact that the canyons and stairs were cut after they were all laid down.  Clearly they were all laid down and THEN there was a violent upheaval of some sort, tectonic force no doubt with attendant earthquakes plus the volcanic activity that is shown in the magma.  All this occurred TO THE ENTIRE STACK after it was all laid down.

What is my point?  My point begins with the observation that according to conventional Geology each of those layers represents a time period of millions of years.   Here's another diagram  showing the time periods assigned to the layers in the Grand Canyon. Scroll down about half way to see it.   Really wish I could post just the image, sorry it's so awkward this way.

Now consider that conventional Geology describes the planet Earth as a "very active" planet, and ask yourself why in that case those strata are depicted as so neatly parallel over what adds up to hundreds of millions of years, how ALL of them were obviously laid down one on top of the other before the land was tilted, before the mounded rise formed, before the canyons and stairs or cliffs were cut, before the magma rose up through the layers and before the faulting occurred.

The obvious conclusion is that those hundreds of millions of years did not happen.  It's all a fiction.

When I presented this scenario at EvC of course I got all kinds of objections.  "Well but surely each of those layers would show a great deal of activity if you looked into them minutely" for instance.  But of course that doesn't answer why they ALL follow the same contours as a block.   And "Really there's nothing odd about there being no activity on the planet for hundreds of millions of years, and then a lot of activity all at once."  Really?   They also suggested that this could have happened in this particular area and nowhere else. To this I can only say that you also find blocks of strata everywhere distorted by tectonic force as a block. There is nothing quite like the Grand Canyon of course which shows the Geologic Column to such a great depth. And they objected to the use of a diagram at all, as if the artist wouldn't have known not to draw the strata parallel if they weren't parallel. And of course the usual objections were raised about the Young Earth arguments as well, which became a major distraction from the main point I was making. 

But this one simple observation stands against the whole Old Earth argument.  I think it's open and shut myself.

From there I go on to argue that the actual appearance of the strata in that area is much better explained by the Flood, and that gets into all kinds of other considerations.  But rather than lay those out here I just want to keep it simple, showing that the conventional explanation does not account for the actual formation of the strata.

And yes, there is The Great Unconformity at the base of the Grand Canyon too.  I believe that also occurred at the same time as all the other activity I've described, and there are some posts on this blog about it, but it's not necessary to insist on that to make the point I'm making here.  Many creationists treat the Great Unconformity as already there when the Flood occurred and laid down the strata above it.   I don't, but it doesn't interfere with the point I'm making here to leave it at that.

EvC, What a disgusting place

Just a brief one:

Decided I need to try to learn more about the different creationist positions so I've been reading a book by Kurt Wise and watching some videos of Steve Austin (Here's one for instance. I already knew something about his nautiloid find and it was interesting to hear more about it.

So after digesting some of their thinking I went to EvC and did a search on "Steve Austin" and guess what I found?

NOT ONE MENTION OF ANY OF THE SCIENTIFIC POINTS HE HAS ARGUED, NOT ONE! Oh well, maybe I didn't look far enough, that's possible.

But what I DID FIND is:

• one remark that his work on the Grand Canyon was nonsense or something to that effect, no content, just a slur,


• comments about how his being a YEC (Young Earth Creationist) disqualifies him from the getgo,


• some claims that the Institute for Creation Research BOUGHT his degree for him,


• and that he lied about what geologists believe about the time frame of sedimentary deposition. "Lied." It never occurs to anyone at EvC that a creationist probably has a GOOD SOURCE for his information and I'm sure Austin had one.
  

ALL SLANDER AND SLURS, NO EVIDENCE, NO QUOTES, NO REFERENCES, NO CONTENT! NOBODY DISCUSSED ANYTHING STEVE AUSTIN HAS TO SAY ABOUT FLOOD GEOLOGY! NOBODY!

THIS IS TYPICAL. MANY TIMES WHEN I'VE SEARCHED FOR SOMETHING SUBSTANTIVE AT EvC THIS IS WHAT I'VE TURNED UP.

SCIENCE, HA!!!
THEY DO NOT DISCUSS SCIENCE, THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT SCIENCE. No integrity or serious purpose among them. All they care about is getting rid of creationism ANY WAY THEY CAN.

Right now there is not one decent creationist and maybe only five or six reasonably qualified evolutionists at EvC and that's probably being generous. If I eliminated everyone who made snarky remarks or wrote contentless posts when they should be giving substantive scientific comments there might be none left.

The Scientific Method is Not Applicable to Questions of Origins and the Unwitnessed Past.

As I've reported recently, I no longer care what Science has to say about anything Biblical. Science is out of its proper sphere when it says anything along those lines. They can stand me up against a wall and shoot me dead, which seems to be their attitude toward Bible believers anyway, I've given up on Science completely when it comes to these concerns. Science does fine with technology, medicine, etc. (for which we should thank God), but it has nothing to say about the history of this planet or life on this planet. They don't even have the wit to recognize that it CAN'T pronounce on such things because there is no way to replicate the past to subject it to experimentation, therefore no way to falsify any conclusions they come to, violating all the supposed essentials of the scientific method.

A big razzberry to the pretensions of almighty Science!

They are tediously pedantically mind-numbingly self-congratulatory about their supposed standards and methods which they themselves cannot meet when it comes to questions of origins and events in the pre-historic past. Here is one such typical tedious litany of their creed, from one of the darkest places on the web:

We already have the ground rules for scientific inquiry. They are well known and easy to find.

1: Observation/Question
2: Hypothesis/Prediction
3: Experiment
4: Conclusion (tentative)
5: Publication/Peer Review
6: Repetition
and if that repetition continually provides the same conclusion,
7: Consensus (still tentative, but less so as evidence accumulates).

The topic is whether Intelligent Design meets scientific standards. I'm not a follower of Intelligent Design because Christian versions of it usually fudge the time frame of the first verses of the Book of Genesis to make room for billions of years, and some of them also make room for evolution as well. Their main concern -- which I CAN agree with -- seems to be to demonstrate that some elements of Nature exhibit qualities that could only have been designed, which implies that there must be a Designer. They refuse to identify the nature of this Designer, because they want to keep within scientific standards and not venture out into "religious" questions. (I'm not even going to give a moment's consideration to the ridiculous claim made by Scott Johnson that ID originated with some occultic theory about "aliens" seeding this planet. Although I appreciate much of what he has to say, Scott Johnson is unfortunately illiterate on many things as well, including the origin of Intelligent Design, so he lumps things together and jumps to conclusions based on the mere similarity of terminology although it supports completely different ideas. He apparently knows nothing about Michael Behe or anything else in this field. He also has the unfortunate habit of denouncing his critics so he never will learn any of it). *

As for this list of scientific ground rules ...

1: Observation/Question
2: Hypothesis/Prediction
3: Experiment
4: Conclusion (tentative)
5: Publication/Peer Review
6: Repetition
and if that repetition continually provides the same conclusion,
7: Consensus (still tentative, but less so as evidence accumulates).

...when it comes to questions of the origin of this planet and life on this planet about as far as Science can go is through Rule 2. They have gone this far. They have their hypothesis of Evolution to explain all the variety of living things as having developed one from another. Some will claim that God set it in motion, some will postulate some kind of biochemical origin, but all their theorizing rejects the simple straightforward Biblical account of the Creation.

So they have their hypothesis. They really have nothing more. They can't meet Rule 3, Experiment, as I say above, because you can't replicate unknown one-time events in the past. Whatever experiments they do in the present in an attempt to reconstruct past events still involve purely hypothetical application to the past, the mere bald assumption that they apply. In contrast, the experimental method has established all sorts of scientific facts over the centuries, facts in chemistry and physics particularly, that have become the basis of our sophisticated technologies. But it's a delusion to think they can extrapolate this method to the unknown past to make it known. At best this is an untestable hypothesis in itself, but that doesn't stop them. They go on assuming they can penetrate the past too and that they have in fact done so.

Since they can't meet Rule 3, of course Rule 4, any Conclusion they may come to, cannot be scientifically established either and remains a conjecture or a hypothesis. Rule 5, Publication and Peer Review OUGHT to illuminate the fallacy of their claim but it only validates their same errors of assumption because they all share them and don't see that the scientific method is not applicable. The assumptions can't be falsified so they can just go on building their fantastic belief system without correction.

Then I have no idea how Rule 6, Repetition, could be meaningfully applied here since the only repetition possible is a repetition of the same fallacious procedures and erroneous reasonings and bald assumptions. If they do arrive by this means at Rule 7, Consensus, it can only be because they've all been deluded along the same line of reasoning. Or perhaps if they don't all come to the same Consensus, as long as they are following out this same fallacious notion that they have a method that can penetrate the past, alternative theories are simply going to suffer the same fate and remain ONLY alternative theories. Until of course Consensus IS arrived at by the same illegitimate means and the whole Scientific Community endorses it no matter how delusionally derived.

Since Science with respect to the Origin of Species can't meet these criteria, it's high nonsense for them to hold Intelligent Design to them. They have a Faith system they delusionally believe is based on Science so it's interesting that's what they accuse IDers of. And Creationists in general of course.

In this particular case, the straw man of ID is more ridiculous than usual:

Now one could spend a lifetime finessing that definition of the scientific method (and indeed, philosophers of science do just that) but those are, more or less, the ground rules. ID fails to meet just about every one of them. Here is how ID functions;

1: Conclusion; Jesus loves you (not tentative).
2: Observation; Gee, lots of stuff is really complex!
3: Conclusion; See 1.
4: Publication; Popular press only. Peer review is such a pest!
5; Conclusion; Still the same as 1.

Actually, no, this is not how ID functions. For one thing IDers are not all Christians. ID really does start with the Observation of design in living things, meeting Rule 1. I believe it was Behe who made the observation of the intricate mechanism of the bacterial flagellae as an example of Irreducible Complexity which implies Design. They go on from there to hypothesize that therefore there must be a Designer, meeting Rule 2. As with mainstream Evolutionist Science there are no Experiments, Rule 3, that can be done to verify or falsify this, so the scientific method comes to a halt with the Hypothesis here just as it does with the hypotheses of mainstream Evolutionist Science.

What we have are competing Hypotheses, competing Interpretations between Evolutionism and Creationism. We do NOT have the scientific method because the material does not lend itself to that method and to keep on insisting on it is simply to dig deeper into delusion. Which this person of course goes on to do:

For ID to be taken seriously, it must adhere to the scientific method. It doesn't so it isn't. It really is that simple. Anyone who disagrees should provide details of those ID experiments and peer reviewed publications that directly address design.

And as long as they continue to insist on such criteria although there's no way to apply them to unknown one-time past events, they will continue in their delusion.

ALL there is from a scientific perspective on the questions that have been answered by Evolution is Observation and Hypothesis. There is no testability, no falsifiability possible. You come to a conclusion, if you do, simply on the basis of your judgment as to which Hypothesis best accounts for the Observation. Science bends over backwards trying to prove that Irreducible Complexity isn't really irreducible but COULD HAVE evolved, by pointing to this or that other biological system that appears to have some part of the same design fully operational in itself. Then they declare this pure hypothetical to be established fact: therefore it DID evolve.

Different sorts of eyes found all over the biological world are pulled out of context and mentally arranged in a series of hypothetical stages based on a very rough assessment of their mode of function and level of complexity, and this bit of mental juggling is taken to PROVE that the human eye evolved through some version of these hypothesized stages. All they have is an hypothesis as usual but they declare it Fact and that's ALL evolutionist Science has, the pronouncement of hypotheticals as Fact. Which of course is NOT science according to the list of rules I'm addressing.

That's all Darwin had too, just a hypothesis for how evolution COULD have happened, by which it has been declared to have happened in fact, and that's all his followers continue to have, although an elaborate system of sophisticated hypothesizing has been built up around it that further obscures this simple truth by giving the illusion of scientific validation. (Lots of science DOES go on AROUND these hypotheticals without changing their status as hypotheticals). They really believe it. But it is NOT derived from the scientific method.

Since they don't have an established fact, ID can of course quite reasonably continue to answer them with their own hypothesis: Irreducible Complexity still looks irreducible to them (as it does to me) still looks like it had to be designed. This is on EXACTLY the same plane of reasoning as puffed-up Science's. It's just as good reasoning in other words. The jugglings to prove it evolved are clearly just mental gymnastics that could prove just about anything you want since there is no objective test they could be subjected to. All Science has over ID (or Creationism either) is Establishment clout, a bully system and a history of mutually self-confirming peer-validated delusion. It does not have scientific method, it does not have superior reasoning.

But I'm not an IDer. I'm a straight Biblical Creationist. I believe Genesis as written, I don't find billions of years hidden away between any of its verses, I do not find evolution implied in any of it. I still believe that as far as one CAN go scientifically on these questions, Creationism's scientific reasoning is far superior to mainstream Science's. I think for instance that Observation of many quite visible characteristics of this planet should lead inevitably to the Hypothesis that the planet was once destroyed by a worldwide Flood. Of course I originally had help to this hypothesis by the Biblical revelation, but I do believe as far as scientific Rules 1 and 2 go, these are clearly met by the simple observation of a wrecked planet and the hypothesis that the worldwide Flood did the wrecking.

But the bottom line is always this: Jesus said we are to become as little children, and that means believing the revelation of God as simply true because He gave it. The more one follows this simple belief the more vistas open up to which the unbeliever can never have access. What to arrogant Science is myth or at least prehistoric -- the Creation, the Flood and so on -- is Witnessed History to Bible believers. Having Witness Testimony gives us a source of evidence the unbeliever forfeits.

The Bible shows many marks of authentication as God's word, and believers embrace those wholeheartedly no matter what "contradictions" unbelievers dig up against it. That's the way the Bible was designed, as Blaise Pascal said: to give enough light to lead the believer, along with enough obscurity to mislead the unbeliever. God rewards simple trust based on simple recognition of His work, He does not honor entrenched skepticism.

God showed us what happened in the past. It's far far from contemporary Science's idea of it. I trust God, not Science.

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Addendum:
Here's another post at deepest darkest EvC demonstrating that they have no idea what subject matter is amenable to the scientific method and what is not:

An IDer poster there said:

If I had my druthers, science classes should have the freedom to apply all of the evidence supportive to ID, including that evidence which conventional science disallows.

And the owner of the board replied:

... but then it wouldn't be science anymore, would it.

As I have argued above -- and throughout this blog for that matter --by the strict definition of science, neither is evolution science.

The Opening Post of this thread is excellent and well worth a read. It provides three examples of theories that took time to gain acceptance within the scientific community: continental drift, dark matter, and mitochondrial origins. Acceptance was gained by doing more and more research and gathering more and more evidence and publishing that evidence in more and more scientific papers in the scientific literature.

In the case of continental drift and dark matter I believe there WAS good evidence that supported their case and eventually won the day -- because they are subjects to which scientific method can be applied (though I'm not sure about continental drift since it implies a lot about a past that can't be studied). In the case of mitochondrial origins it seems likely that it wasn't science but simply the acceptance of the hypothesis that established it, that is, it won consensus just because the interpretation began to grow on the Scientific Community, since theories about origins are about the past as I say above, which isn't amenable to the scientific method as spelled out in the seven-point list of rules above.

Approaches to gaining acceptance that were notable by their absence:They did not lobby school boards and legislatures to teach their theories in public schools.

They did not conspire and plan ways to change public perception of their theory.

They did not hold seminars and debates to promote their theory to the public.

Intelligent Design is not science. If it were science you wouldn't be forced to propose changes to the definition of science so that it could squeeze in.

Those particular scientific propositions didn't use this sort of approach but I'm not sure that's because they had such solid scientific credentials. Perhaps they did. But the same can't be said for the theory of Evolution. If Evolution were actually founded on the scientific principles that are constantly being trumpeted for it his point would apply there, but it isn't and it doesn't.

It shouldn't be too hard to make the case that Evolution WAS in a sense promoted by a conspiracy to change public perception, if not an organized conspiracy certainly an informal conspiracy of true believers determined to make everybody else a true believer too. Evolution isn't lobbying for inclusion in the schools now because they are now the Establishment and don't need to, but that is pretty much what they did back in Darwin's day and for some time afterward. It was polemics galore that launched it, from Thomas Huxley's polemics to the Scopes trial which was popularized by a movie, along with ridicule of religious belief. It was all propaganda, intellectual bullying, browbeating the public and especially the intelligent young -- not science, not the scientific method -- that put Evolution in the schools. Or really, kicked the Bible out of the schools, since Evolution was already being taught. So they dressed up Evolution as True Science -- Emperor's New Clothes of course -- and the argument continues to rage. You know why? BECAUSE IT ISN'T SCIENCE! If it really were science nobody could argue against it, but it's patently NOT SCIENCE.

Darwin had ONLY a hypothesis, a very simple idea for HOW evolution MIGHT have happened, and that's all Science has for Evolution even now. In the days of the Scopes trial it should have been even more obviously the case, yet Evolution won, having no science, only propaganda. But you now fault ID for using the same methods Evolution used (and truth be told, still uses, since it has no scientific foundation whatever).

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* After doing this post I went and heard Scott Johnson's talk on this subject and I report on it at End Times Monitor.

THE CREATIONISTS WIN THIS ONE

I was led to this wonderful written debate because somebody just started a debate ABOUT this debate at EvC limited to four participants. But the original debate, between Australian creationists and evolutionists, is great stuff, at least the Creationist side is. The Evolutionist side is the usual abstract obfuscations, misrepresentations and ridicule.

FROM THE CREATIONIST INTRODUCTION:

Modern historical geology was built on philosophical assumptions which excluded the biblical notion of a recent global watery catastrophe—by definition, rather than observation. (p. 10)

EXACTLY! By DEFINITION, NOT OBSERVATION. OBSERVATION DOES TURN UP EVIDENCE FOR A GLOBAL FLOOD, BUT YOU DO HAVE TO OBSERVE.

On page 12 the creationists outline my favorite biological argument:

Textbook examples of adaptation by natural selection (first described by the creationist Edward Blyth, pre-Darwin) always involve loss of genetic information. Mosquitoes may adapt to a DDT-containing environment by becoming resistant, because some already have the genes for DDT resistance. But overall the population loses genetic information (any genes not present in the resistant ones are eradicated from the population, since the non-resistant mosquitoes killed by DDT cannot pass on genes).

EXACTLY! EVOLUTION DEFEATS EVOLUTION. They say "genetic information," I say "genetic diversity" or "genetic potential" -- same thing only their term is probably clearer.

Mutations cause several thousand human diseases. Even where a mutation is beneficial (e.g. wingless beetles on windy islands), biological complexity is virtually always destroyed, not increased. (p. 12)

Oh, these guys are good! This essay is SO clear too. I'm tempted to copy out too much of what they say.

This observed downhill trend of heritable changes in living things (mutations, selection, adaptation—even to the extent of speciation17—and extinction) is consistent with the concept of original created gene pools (with high initial variety) being depleted since. To suggest that the informationally downhill ‘micro’ changes one observes (routinely but erroneously used as ‘proofs of evolution’) can accumulate over time to give the required (uphill) changes for microbe-to-man evolution is like a businessman arguing that many small losses will produce a profit, given time. The observed changes do, however, fit a Creation/Fall model well.

SO well said.

5. The age of things The evidence for a ‘young’ earth/universe is, by definition, evidence for biblical creation, because naturalistic evolution, even if possible, would require eons. There is much evidence consistent with a relatively young age of the universe, such as the decay of the earth’s magnetic field, including rapid paleomagnetic reversals; fragile organic molecules in fossils supposedly many millions of years old; too much helium in deep zircons; not enough salt in the sea; carbon-14 in coal and oil supposedly many millions of years old; polystrate fossils23 that extend through strata supposedly representing many millions of years; inter-tonguing of non-sequential geological strata; the small number of supernova remnants; magnetic fields on ‘cold’ planets; and much more (see What about carbon dating?). Elapsed time extending back beyond one’s own lifetime cannot be directly measured, so all arguments for either a long or a short age are necessarily indirect and must depend on the assumptions on which they are inevitably based.

Young-earth arguments make sense of the fact that many fossils show wellpreserved soft parts. This requires rapid deposition and rapid hardening of the encasing sediment. Observations of e.g. multiple geologic strata and canyons forming rapidly under catastrophic conditions in recent times indicate that the entrenched slow-and-gradual, vast-age thinking may well be markedly in error. (p. 14)

The immense complexity of the human brain—its consciousness, creativity and power of abstract reasoning, with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most ‘obvious’ evidence for intelligent creation.

We have seen that life is characterized by incredibly complex information-bearing (programmed) systems. No spontaneous physico-chemical process is known which could have generated such programs in the first place, without outside intelligence. And as information is transmitted, it is overwhelmingly observed to degrade, not build up. (p.15)

The most reasonable inference from such observations is that outside intelligence (vastly surpassing humanity’s) was responsible for an immense original store of biological information in the form of created populations of fully functioning organisms. Again, this is powerfully consistent with the Genesis creation account.

I'm just going to post this as is. It's a great statement. You can read ahead to the evolutionist introduction and then the follow-up arguments. I think the creationists blew the evolutionists out of the water throughout but of course that isn't going to be so obvious to the evolutionists.

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And here they go. The opening post at EvC for the debate-about-the-debate is the typical evolutionist litany. Many of the points in the creationist introduction I've appreciated above are dismissed as PRATTs -- "Point Refuted A Thousand Times" -- but of course just because they've come up with something they consider to be a refutation does not mean the point has been refuted, or even slightly dented by their argument, and that's why the same arguments keep getting repeated. Factually and logically the creationist points still stand after the evolutionists have done their worst, and all they are doing in the end is claiming victory without having accomplished victory. But what do you expect from an evolutionist site like EvC?

I considered doing my own answer to the poster's debunkery but decided no, I'll wait to see if a debate actually gets going there.

Why can't those people THINK? Excuse me, but that IS the problem here. Most of his "refutations" on his long list of the creationists' arguments (it's a good list but I'm unable to reproduce it here because of a nightmare of formatting problems) are flat out denial of the OBVIOUS.

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Sat Nov 21. Here's one of the evolutionists wondering if the list can be pared down:

I'd like to suggest that we see if we can pare down the list of items to discuss. We can remove those that we can all agree on (there must be some)...

For removal could we look at those that are marked as PRATTs in the OP? Even one or two of them? Some of those (e.g., salt in the oceans IIRC are even rejected by some major creationist organizations.)

ABE
Sigh, nope, they don't even reject the ocean salt one. Let's see if we can be smarter than that here.

Of COURSE they don't reject the one about ocean salt, IT HASN'T BEEN REFUTED. And why don't YOU sketch out the refutation if you think it has? Good grief. The polystrate trees also haven't been refuted. They CAN'T be refuted. They indisputably falsify the evolutionist interpretation of the strata.

How about removing those from the evolutionist side?
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11/23: So I'm not going to be very interested in this debate, it appears. If they're going to dismiss my favorite irrefutable point (microevolution always loses genetic information) as a PRATT and not even try to produce some refutations for me to laugh at it's not worth my time.