(I personally am an agnostic and my good friend is an athiest.)
My friend pointed out to me that many creationsts have selective belief when it comes to science. He said that they usually except the scientific method when they get sick or need surgery, but when it comes to trying to understand human existence, the scientific formula is all of a sudden void.
Does anyone else have any comments, objections etc to this idea? It would be nice to get comments from believers and non-believers.
Science measures and compares within time. Its existence is inbetween before and after. Being exists “now” and this now cannot be measured by science so the nature of human existence is the experience of “now” which is out of the domain of science limited to recording the effects of “being” manifesting for us within time.
Nothing objectionable. That would be prudent in my opinion. Science does not answer metaphysical questions such as “existence” or being. And we do have, understandably, a natural propensity to inquire thoughts like this. We have beliefs that cannot be justified through empirical means.
I don't happen to be a creationist in the usual sense- I think evolution or something very much like it probably happened. However, I wouldn't call the creationist belief in science 'selective', or at least, not unusually so. Science covers a broad range of subjects, and just because we accept what the nutritionist or the astronomer tells us about something, does not obligate us to accept what the paleontologist (sp) or the physicist says. If it could be shown that some sort of medicine the creationist uses was developed using evolutionary theory, then your atheist friend would be on to something.
well frankly you shouldn’t accept anything at face value, be it religion or science. (notice my title?)
Should we accept the unproveable science of quantum mechanics?
Or how about some electrical theory? Are you an old school type that believes in positive going to ground or a new ager, that believes ground flows to positive?
I think an absolute rejection and pseudo science replacement (oft found in YEC) is bad, but questioning something is not.
(on a side note, one of my favorite pseudo science facts is that T-rex was like a dog to adam, and ate vegetables not meat.)
Eh, yes and no. It seems to me, that the creationist is primarily a person who [i]doesn't like [/i] evolution. This person heard somewhere that 'questioning stuff' was a good thing, and YEC was born. So, I would agree with your statement above conditionally- it depends on who the 'you' is. If 'you' don't know anything about science (other than it's conclusions make you uncomfortable) then your 'questioning' has to begin with a period of [i]learning[/i], and learning is primarily a conformist activity (people tell you stuff, and you believe them).
ucc,
once again I agree, without learning how to apply knowledge, you won’t know what knowledge to reject/accept.
Last night while falling asleep I came across the TBN station where they were comparing the YEC to the traditional evolution timescale of a 20 bln year old universe. I don’t remember everything they were saying most of it was ridiculous. Like they know the Earth was formed in water (the aether) and that it only became a nuclear reactor after the flood. (from a geological stand point this is ridiculous, the evidence of a constantly enraged earth that has in fact gotten calmer if anything.)
Then they were preaching that evolution teaches that man made god (which of course it doesn’t, evolution doesn’t mention god, like most sciences.)
It’s a terrible path they walk. They hate science, they don’t want to understand it, and yet to a certain degree they need it in order to not look like crazy people. Like I just got done saying with Pincho, they would have been better off saying that God used His god-power to instantly create a world that appears old, and then set about explaining why He would do something like that. But they insist on dancing to science’s tune, and they obviously can’t hack it, in part because their reasons for doubting evolution in the first place weren’t scientific.
Medicine is a least as much or more a providence of engineering as science.
The ability of Science and Engineering have be shown to make great new tech possible including airplanes ect. Their ability to arive at a true understanding of the world, is much more questionable.
That being said, creationist are still full of it. I think it’s actuall quite incidious that they pick on eveolution to distract people from their own inconistancy of thought. It’s sorta like a purse snacher pointing out a pickpocket to police in order to distract them.