Questions I'd Love to See a Creationist Answer

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Well, ok, but to a certain extent, I am basically accepting a more instrumentalist, and fallibilist view of science, which means that how the world literally works isn't the central issue towards saying that a theory is in some sense correct. I mean, modern physics is torn between the standard model of particle physics and relativity, with both theories well supported but both having some contradiction, but I can say that the theories accepted are generally true, despite the fact that both can't be correct as-is at the same time.

I mean, the Newtonian model and the modern physics model also both contradict, but I can also hold both as generally true as well. I mean, I don't think my position is just that I have a terrible understanding of the scientific issues that are being dealt with.

I've usually heard it said that Newtonian physics is a subset of relativistic physics. Not that they contradict each other, but that Newtonian physics is only valid within certain parameters.

Well, to some extent, however, usually ideologies see people leave, or gain significantly fewer converts once their foundations are widely known as irrelevant. I mean, the ideologies that have a foundation that has been destroyed or antiquated but hasn't died yet tend to be the ideologies where knowledge of this destruction are not well-accepted among all possible joiners. I don't know what you would assign as this, but the clearest example to me of this might be socialism and Marxism. However, in both cases I would say that they likely have less converts than they used to, they have former members, and I would also argue that the failings of both systems are rarely put forward as clearly as could be done.

Well, not really. Scientific paradigms have been very instrumental in the modern understanding of scientific processes, but scientific paradigms do not follow the scientific method but rather stand above it governing what questions it is good to ask and what experiments should be done. Also, I selectively quoted Rizzo, he also said this:

"However, evidence is rarely definitive or overwhelming. We need to begin from somewhere. The Bayesian statisticians say that we begin with prior probabilities and then update them with new evidence. Prior probabilities are only slightly modified with incremental evidence. These priors function is a manner similar to a presumption."

I don't think my selective quoting impacts the validity of most of what I quoted, but some of the less essential things improve the context.


Well, no, they can't just measure the GDP and unemployment levels. The things impacting any economy at a given point in time are full of variables that will perplex any study that tries to be so simplistic. If things were so easy, then you could be the sole economist in the world. There are instead many many many different questions that must be answered, and some tenacity of researchers to continue asking questions promoting their view of things not only makes sure other important questions are asked, but also is beneficial for the entire process.

Rizzo also cited a notion that Popper had about the tenacity of researchers: "In the realm of scientific hypotheses, even the “falsificationist” Karl Popper accepted a principle of tenacity which had it that hypotheses are not to be dropped in face of any conflicting evidence. No hypothesis will have a 100% of the evidence in its favor. "

In any case, researchers only have so much BS that their colleagues will allow them to get away with before dismissing them, so I doubt that "redefine terms" and "marketing ploys" could be the only thing to save a bad theory, unless you are utterly skeptical towards these processes.


Umm.... ok?? I still don't see how this really rebuts a point that ideology is unimportant, or even shows ideology to be unadaptive. I mean, despite the people who work at the bottom of walmart, there are also business owners, investors, managers, etc, and they'll have different experiences. Let's say that you ended up later getting a job as a manager in a company in a job that you seemed to like, you might take this second experience as also being how capitalism works and revise your earlier ideas that were based upon your wal-mart job.


I am not that strongly of a falsificationist. I think that post-Popperian philosophy of science is more correct, and that science, while ideally holding somewhat to Popper, shouldn't be dogmatic about anything.


Well, it could also be the dogmatic nature of certain belief systems. Some belief systems characterize other belief systems as being completely evil and against them. This often includes certain religions. Other belief systems have a much easier process of entry and exit, as a person might at first be a conservative and then switch to another ideology without feeling too bad about it.


Maybe, I was just thinking about the old idea that in science, new ideas flood in once the scientists who made their way by the old and bad ideas died out.


Maybe, I was just thinking about the ideas that people will hold to across generations perhaps by some form of intergenerational brain-washing or some such. Frankly, I would consider ideas like this to be so rare that they generally aren't very much worth considering to exist.


I made up the term "responsiveness" and "unresponsiveness" to some extent, however, they seem to work in my spell check, so I couldn't have been the first. Frankly, I also wasn't thinking so much about the battle cry of "progress" only about society as an entity responding to new information, sort of like a super-organism.

From what I've heard what it is is that relativistic effects don't have practical impact within certain parameters. From what I've heard, the relativistic equations are always relevant, it is just that the effects don't tend to be very large unless one is talking about things that go at very high velocities. So, technically Newton's equations don't literally describe what is going on, but they describe it enough.

To go to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum#M ... _mechanics , the relativistic momentum formula is this:

p = (lambda)mv

Where lambda = 1/(1-((v/c)^2))

Now, the issue is that for small values of v relative to the speed of light, lambda isn't very different from 1. The issue is that in most cases, lambda shouldn't be exactly 1.

That would be a more accurate phrasing I suppose.

Relativistic effects, such as with velocity, are an aspect of special relativity. Gravity, or the curvature of space-time, also causes relativistic effects, which are aspects that general relativity deals with.

Right, but if this is the case, then the Newtonian equation isn't really taking all things into account. So, in a sense Newtonian relativity could be argued as incorrect. It certainly isn't telling the whole story. But, that's just a little linguistic dispute.

Yeah, phrasing the terminology correctly and so forth.

Thank you for your answer. It is informative.

I'm not so sure about consulting creation.com. Ragtime once referred me to that site, and the first three articles I read were so scientifically ignorant, I seriously wondered whether this was a spoof site designed to make creationists look really dumb. But perhaps they take more care when discussing theology.

I had a look at CMI as well when you previously linked to that. They at least make some effort to come up with coherent arguments. They're not intellectually lazy. They still have trouble. Their article on endogenous retroviruses has many problems (tell me if you want me to go through them) and when I looked up what they had to say about chalk cliffs, they didn't provide the information that would be needed to check their calculations. They just state their assumptions and conclusions, but don't explain the calculations that led them from one to the other and they don't give references that would lend support to their assumptions.