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resedit wrote:

we don't know jack.

That's what I think aswell.

We are like fish in the water, they only know the water in which they are swimming in.
How could they know about earth life when submerged for life?

And maybe it's not that important to know, would it change anything? would it change anything about who you are?

I try to give it a rest but you right that science often tries to say things as truth which in most cases is not even close to the truth.

We don't know jack yes because we ain't jack

We know a lot more than we did 50 years ago.  I'd say that's pretty impressive actually.

I'm not saying that more knowledge necessarily increases mankind's general happiness.  Ignorance is bliss -- just look at a toddler.

Not sure what toddler means? baby? kids?
If so yes we should look more at toddler's, they got true wisdom about what's important.

resedit wrote:

Newton was a genious. Yet it is common knowledge now that his laws are good for high school, crude engineering, but are incorrect for many things - they don't take into relativity. Yet in his day, they passed all the scientific scrutiny. But they are incorrect. They just did not know how to demonstrate it.

How much of our own science today do we think is correct, just as Newton did, but we just don't know how to demonstrate the cases where they do not hold?

Newton's laws are NOT incorrect. If they were incorrect, then they would not apply every corner of physics. Nothing will be even considered as a hypothesis for physics if it does not follow newton's laws. Newton's laws are inaccurate. They do not explain, by theirselves, a number of cases. However, they are still used to prove things. Even bosons (the smallest known particles; force carriers) obey the laws. This all goes in with the concept of coherence, for a theory to be considered correct, it has to either correspond with the existing theories/physical laws, or provides enough evidence to prove otherwise.

Back to paleontology with a basic question ?   According to the conservative portions of MiniThink readers, are the dinosaur fossils in fact as old as paleontologists have claimed, often hundreds of millions of years ?

I'd like to know the conservative consensus on this point, so we don't have to belabor any points under agreement.

Nefarious Bidding wrote:

Back to paleontology with a basic question ?   According to the conservative portions of MiniThink readers, are the dinosaur fossils in fact as old as paleontologists have claimed, often hundreds of millions of years ?

I'd like to know the conservative consensus on this point, so we don't have to belabor any points under agreement.

What do you mean by "conservative portions"? Pretty much everyone here, except Res, believe the Earth is older than a few thousand years.

I also want to say this on page one, I sympathize with Res and I agree wholeheartedly with him that "we dont know jack" and that I think may people believe what they do because so many people tell them they should, when they have really made any inquiry of their own. People make fun of someone like Res because he is religious and is percieved as having swallowed something a book or priest told him.

And that strikes everyone as incredibly dull and antiquated because scientists are today's priests. Most people accept what they say because they have been trained to believe science is a more true explanation for everything, even if only the scientists can really know these things.

The problem I personally have with "scientific creationists" or "ID" or "young earthers" is that they seem to say on one hand "science doesnt know everything" and then they go to prove an "unscientific" idea, namely their faith, by using science. And what wild results they get sometimes! Of  course on the other hand, I also think it is really funny when people who are not scientists argue ID is so wrong etc when they never investigated any of the stuff they are arguing about so dogmatically. I think Res is right, most people, if scientists just told them such a thing is true, would believe it. If all scientists said the moon is actually made of cheese and gave a crazy theory that only scientists truly understood, I think most people would believe it.

I am not saying science is false, I am just saying that I personally am comfortable with a little ambiguity on the matter.

mo' ron wrote:

StaticAge wrote:

I am not saying science is false, I am just saying that I personally am comfortable with a little ambiguity on the matter.

Most people here accept ambiguity. I myself could believe that our evolution was guided by some higher being or race. There's no concrete evidence for it though, and I wouldn't argue about it, but I don't reject the idea that a god could be around. There's just no non-circumstantial evidence for it.

But on things that aren't ambiguous (like the Earth being older than a few thousand years), how can you really just leave that alone, in a thread like this?

God just made the world look like it's 4 billion years old to test people's faith, because the stories about Him didn't have enough holes already to constitute a proper test of faith in and of themselves.

resedit wrote:

Proost wrote:

Just believe in both.
The world ain't black and white, rather grey.

I do believe in evolution - on a micro level.
Darwins finches did probably start as one species. Wolves/Coyotes/etc. probably started as one species. Bison and Cattle even quite possibly started as one species.

I don't have a problem with that. What I don't believe is that dinosaurs went to birds or fish to frogs etc.

I believe there is another way it could have happened, I see problems with the existing model - and how data collected can be used to support ID just as easily as it is used to support evolution - thus the conclusion one comes to is solely an interpretation of the data.

Is the Earth also only 6000 years old ? 

I ask, because if it isn't....then what happens to the frog that "micro-evolve" for 500,000 generations ?  Its always going to stay a frog ?

Pro_ wrote:

the question I have for you is which type of belief is more important to you?  What would you do if evidence came along that blatantly contradicted your faith based beliefs?

You make a great point, but you also have to admit at bottom it gets unhinged again, because in order for something to come qualified as evidence, it is something that already is seen to stand for a certain perspective and interpretation of truth, and if someone doesnt agree with that interpretation, then the evidence isnt evidence anymore.

If the glove doesnt fit, you must acquit- hey, what do you know, the glove seems not to fit! Did that evidence really prove anything as true, or did it merely provide an escape from truth?

resedit wrote:

If we looked at what evolutionists were saying 50 years ago, how much of the science holds today?
Hell - they didn't even know about DNA back then!

Yes, they did, actually. It's been a wonderful tool for guiding biological research.

resedit wrote:

How much of the cosmos understanding 50 years ago holds today?

Most of it. We figured out the Big Bang in the 30's, 40's and 50's and have been filling the unknowns ever since.

resedit wrote:

How much of our current thought, that those who reject are called "illogical" for - will we still cling to 50 years from now? Both fields are going under considerable amounts of change.

No idea. But I suspect we've got a decent handle on it.

resedit wrote:

How much of our own science today do we think is correct, just as Newton did, but we just don't know how to demonstrate the cases where they do not hold?

I have no idea, but in the case of Newton, we found that he wasn't wrong, but rather merely brushed the surface. Occasionally we find that our understanding is completely wrong, but it's not that often and generally limited to a small field (such as, time and space are not what we thought they were). If you're waiting for a discovery that invalidates the last seventy years of biological, geological, and paleontological research, I wouldn't hold your breath.