Steve wrote:
I think that science is defined more simply
as a branch of philosophy that uses
empirical evidence to justify belief.
I won't argue with that notion. What I have called "restrictions" of science
are the various notions that I have come across ( in many of which I concur ) of
what would qualify as an empirical justification of belief. These include
notions of predictive value, repeatability and to some degree notions of
simplicity. Perhaps rather than calling them "restrictions of science" I should
have called them restrictions which many individuals place on science. At any
rate my point was not to argue precisely what empirical justification of belief
should entail. My point was that when using most any criteria approximating the
generally accepted notions of empirical justification, the set of hypotheses
which can be empirically justified is a smaller set than the set of hypotheses
which cannot be empirically disproved. ( I mean this as one would ordinarily
word things - I realize that when one counts negations, it is not true in a
rigorous sense. ) This would seem especially true in an area such as natural
history where the available evidence is inherently limited. I don't mean to
split hairs about this. I just think it is clear that there are hypotheses
which although not empirically disproved are still not considered as valid
possibilities ( such as my "aquarium of the aliens" suggestion ). I suspect that
this is partly because most of us ( in all honesty ) only accept those
hypotheses for serious consideration which fit within our own world view. The
various aspects that I called "restrictions of science" are sometimes used to
help justify this restriction of the field of view. I think it is a
challenging task to sort out the degree to which these world views have affected
the generally accepted conclusions in the realm of natural history.
To put my view yet another way - I think it is of greater value to accurately
describe the "perimeter" of the set of hypotheses that have not yet been
disproved than it is to spend an undue effort arguing the merits of a given
point solution within that set.
Steve also asks:
Doesn't the notion of a young earth
contradict a good deal of "natural data"?
I agree that this is the "right" question to be asking. I am not yet sure that
I agree with Steve's apparently implied answer.
Bill wrote:
A number of years ago I agreed with Norm, that
it was possible to rationally interpret the evidence
and arrive at a young earth. But I was willing to
consider the other side. I had already read what
the young-earth creationists had to say on the
subject, so I started reading what conventional
geologists had to say. What I found was that the
conventional geologists have a number of means
for dating geologic strata, and that there is a great
deal of agreement among the various methods.
Furthermore, their science seems to be sound.
While I would not say that I can show it possible to rationally interpret the
evidence and arrive at a young earth, I do admit that I have not yet seen that a
young earth has been shown to be impossible. I too am willing to consider the
other side. I have evidently not been as convinced as Bill that the evidence on
the "other side" has been thoroughly sound. I still feel the need to thoroughly
examine the evidence piece by piece.
Perhaps I could relate a personal experience. I too noticed the claims of
concordance between dating methods. In trying to evaluate these claims, it
seemed that of all the various approaches to dating, I had my best shot at
having access to all the relevant raw data in the study of geomagnetism,
especially in the subject of oceanic magnetic anomalies. I read everything I
could find on this subject. I especially liked those authors that not only
presented polarity maps but also showed the raw intensity traces from which they
were derived. In looking at many sets of such traces, I could not but be
impressed by their striking similarity with what my EE friends would call band
limited noise. A rough mental calculation of the spatial frequency filtering
effect of the measurement process from the ocean surface seem to allow for this
possibility. I created computer simulations of the measurement process using
various subfloor magnetic models. The resulting randomly generated traces did
seem impressively similar to the observed traces. Moreover, I could make
eyeball correlations between my randomly generated traces that looked about as
convincing to me as did the vast majority of the trace correlations in the
literature. There were some notable cases in certain locations in the Pacific,
but they appeared to be the exception rather than the rule. I searched through
the last few decades of the Journal of Geophysical Research and some other
journals to find all the traces I could. I had to conclude that I was not yet
convinced that the oceanic magnetic anomalies are in one to one correspondence
with an historical sequence of global geomagnetic polarity reversals. This was
a very limited conclusion that said nothing about continental drift in general,
still the one to one correspondence usually claimed does seem to be at the heart
of the role of the oceanic magnetic anomalies in geologic dating. My wife and I
wrote a paper about this and the editors of the Origins magazine were kind
enough to print an abbreviated version in No 1, 1993. I will not go into the
details of the argument here. Nothing ever came of it in terms of response. I
do not entertain any notion that I have in any way "disproved" the generally
accepted theory in this area. However, I do believe that I have pointed to an
area where the case for using oceanic magnetic anomalies for dating purposes is
rather weak. This experience left me less than greatly impressed with any
notion of a uniformly high standard of rigor in the geologic sciences. I think
that there are legitimate unanswered questions regarding most of the other
dating methods also, although I have not been able to answer them for myself one
way or the other by repeating the degree of effort I put into the above study.
I would be very interested in the review by Dalrymple which Bill mentioned but
will write separately requesting it.
Norm Smith
74532,66@compuserve.com