Bob, I find your demand for the verification of my views to be, frankly, a
bit hypocritical. I will explain further down.
When you use "in principle impossible to confirm " to a person like me
who has done graduate work in philosophy, it has certain implications. To
a philosopher of the logical positivist school, it means that it is not
merely impractical or difficult, it is impossible. For instance, if I said
that the universe and everything in it were expaning at a uniform rate,
that is impossible to verify. If I say that unobservable demons move all
physical objects, that is, in principle unverifiable. Or your
It bothers you that I can't prove my view of how the Bible fits into
geologic/anthropologic history. Let me point out several important items.
My view is consistent with all known facts. It doesn't conflict with any
piece of observational data except it goes against the sensitivities of
Christians. All other concordist attempts are already falsified and
contradicted by vast amounts of data--yet christians believe those are the
best approaches. To me the question is if not my view, then what view would
match the data. The more liberal approach, as has been debated here at
much length, seems to me to give in to the idea that there is little of
historical or scientific value in early Genesis and that it is just a
theological lesson. And this raises the question in my mind what it means
for the Bible to be inspired? If God doesn't know how the world was
created, then he probably didn't create it. If God doesn't have the power
to inform us in a simplified way how the universe was created, then I doubt
he has the power to actually create. And if he tells us a fable when he
could easily tell us the truth, then he is not to be trusted. So, to me, if
you can't offer a scenario that matches facts and doesn't ignore
anthropological/geological data by the bucket load, your question is
meaningless. Propose something that works, matches the data and avoids the
criticisms you are directing at me and your criticisms will carry more
weight with me.
>
>Besides there is a more "practical" way to search for evidence to confirm
>your view. You decide where in the Mediterranean basin was the probable
site
>of the Garden of Eden and where the Noachian civilization was perhaps
>located, raise a few million bucks for a drilling project, and start
drilling
>some bore holes to see what you can find.
There are a few boreholes in the Mediterranean drilled by the Ocean
Drilling Program and/or Joides. This is the way that the geologic history
of the Mediterranean was discovered. However, a borehole is about 3-6
inches wide and the Mediterranean is 964,000 square kilometers wide. There
is a very small likelihood of hitting something significant. If you were
to drop a core at random onto the state of Texas, you would be very
unlikely to retrieve evidence of civilization in that core.
>
>You say, "But then, I would point out that all scientific views are
>unprovable. Scientific theories can only be falsified, not proven." That's
>not so, as Popper later granted, since to falsify P is ipso facto to verify
>not P, as Rob Koons pointed out in a different list. And what if countless
>attempts to falsify a scientific view fail, and all further attempts to do
so
>have been exhausted, is the view finally proved, or is it just "not
>falsified"? Besides, who's paying attention to the Vienna Circle these days?
>
>I go with the OED definition of "prove," also provided by Koons, as "to make
>good, establish, to establish a thing as true; to demonstrate the truth of
by
>evidence or argument," According to this definition It seems to me your
>theory is not proven.
I have cited anthropological data ad nauseum to show that humans were
religious, artistic, caring, inventive etc for the past 2 million years.
Yet everyone wants to ignore that data and believe that mankind is only
10-100 thousand years old. Does that data not count as supportive or
confirmatory of my views? I have also demonstrated that the Mesopotamian
flood can not possibly match the Biblical account. It is illogical to
believe that a story of a physical event can be true if it matches nothing
in reality. If we applied this approach to life in general, then Clinton
was telling the truth when he said he didn't have sex with Lewinsky and
every criminal can be said to tell the truth when claiming they didn't
commit the crime.
>
>To say "In that regard my views are no different than the Laws of Newton" is
>completely inaccurate, again, IMHO. Instead I would say that your views are
>more consonant with the many-worlds hypothesis, which is indeed, impossible
>in principle to confirm.
ACtually, the many worlds hypothesis is not impossible to confirm in
principle. It too is very difficult. Why? A calculation, any mathematical
calculation, requires the manipulation of a physical object, be it a bead
on an abacus, or the firing of neurons in your brain, or the on off states
of your computer which are manipulating electrons. Now, there are
mathematical calculations which require more calculations than there are
particles in the universe (10^80). If a quantum computer is built which
can solve one of these problems in a finite time, we would know for certain
that it had manipulated more than 10^80 particles confirming the many world
hypothesis. This is because it must have manipulated particles in another
universe.
"Shor, in constructing his proof of a quantum computer's potential, in
effect wrote a program for a computer that doesn't exist. It factors large
numbers by working on all the possible answers to a problem simultaneously.
Correct answers--that is, factors of the number in question--appear in the
form of a unique interference pattern at the end of the computer's
calculations, which the computer could read like some otherworldly
supermarket bar code. Shor's program cleverly causes all numbers that
aren't factors to cancel out in the interference pattern, like waves whose
crests and troughs annihilate each other.
"Deutsch claims tht if a quantum computer that can run Shor's program is
ever built, it will be difficult for other physicists to deny the
many-worlds model of quantum mechanics, fantastic as it seems. For
example, he asks, what would happen inside a quantum computer that used
Shor's program to factor a number that is, say, 250 digits long? To solve
such a problem, he answers, the computer would have to perform roughly 10^
500 computations. 'There is no way that we know to get the answer in fewer
than that number of steps,' he says. 'If you were to write down on a piece
of paper what the computer is doing, you'd have to write down about 10^500
different lines of reasoning. That's an irreducible number. The outcome
depends logically on all those components. Now, there are only
10 80 atoms in the universe.' So, if a quantum computer can solve a
problem in which the number of calculations greately exceeds the number of
atoms in the universe, how did the computer do the calculation?
"'It's pretty clear that it wasn't by jiggling about the atoms and energy
and stuff that we see around us,' says Deutsch. 'Then where was it
performed?'
"Deutsch emphasizes again that computation is a physical process. Just as
someone using an abacus must push beads around to get an answer, a computer
must manipulate real particles--atoms or photons or what have you. And if
a computer must manipulate ;more atoms than exist in one universe to
complete a calculation, it must be drawing on the resources of many
particles in a vast web of linked universes." ~ Tim Folger, "The Best
Computer in All Possible Worlds," Discover Oct. 1995, p. 95
**
"Computation, he notes, is not an abstract process. Ultimately it must
have some physical basis. Whether it's atoms or photons-- or electric
currents in a conventional computer--something must be manipulated in some
way to carry out a calculation. To make his point Deutsch cites the work
of Peter Shor, a mathematician at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey." ~
Tim Folger, "The Best Computer in All Possible Worlds," Discover Oct. 1995,
p. 94-95
>
>But I'll go along with your terminology. Your view regarding the
>Mediterranean basin as the site of Eden and Noah's flood is not confirmed,
>and for practical purposes is unconfirmable. I take it that that is an
>accurate statement?
No. It is going to be difficult but even as you note, boreholes might turn
something up. It is not an unconfirmable hypothesis.
And what confirmations do you have of your anti evolutionary views? All
living forms were profoundly different in the past. No modern species of
vertebrates are found prior to the upper Cretaceous (one tooth from a
living species of shark is found in the upper cretaceous). It is an
unfortunate reality that to say that God progressively created life or that
he guided the evolution of life IS exactly the type of hypthesis that the
logical positivists would rule out. They would say that is in principle
unverifiable. So, if you believe that God created the world, if you believe
that God guided evolution, you are holding exactly the type of view that is
in principle unverifiable. So why are you so adamant that my views, which
ARE in principle verifiable, must be rejected because they aren't confirmed?
And several years ago, circa Sept 1, 1996,
(http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/199609/0001.html) you wrote:
>I hypothesize that the right hemisphere of the brain is the primary locus of
>religious faith, and is the channel, as it were, through which God revealed
>Him/Herself to and communicated with human beings. I suggest that in far off
>historical times, the function of the right brain may have been more dominant
>than it is today. The right hemisphere developed historically in the human
>race more rapidly than the left brain, as it does in individual development.
and
>
>The "window of opportunity" for God's special revelation is closed, and the
>various revelations have been gathered together in the Bible. Anticipating
>the maturing and dominance of the left brain in human history, and subsequent
> subordination of the right brain, and with it the cessation of revelatory
>dreams and visions, it might seem that God ordained the composition of the
>Scriptures to consolidate and contain what had been revealed in the great
>revelatory age, the age of the active right brain.
>
This is in principle unverifiable. Demonstrate that God is talking to the
human brain via observational data! You can't. You can't demonstrate with
any observational evidence that the right brain was more dominant in the
past than today. You can't use observational data to support your idea that
the left hemisphere develops more rapidly today than in the past. Who
measured the rates of left hemisphere development 20,000 years ago, who?
You can't use observational data to demonstrate that God is no longer
communicating with man either. Yet you reject my view because it hasn't
been verified (which is ok), but you then start talking about my view being
in principle unverifiable and yet hold many views that are outside the
realm of any verification. If there ever was an unverifiable (in principle)
hypothesis, it was that above. If you are in the habit of rejecting views
because they are unverifiable, maybe you should live consistently and
reject some of your own views. People in glass houses should throw
stones--it is hypocritical.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution