Not so ancient mariner wrote:The difference being that the evolutionists did not start off with pre-conceived ideas.
Sorry, but they start off with the preconception that there is no God and will do anything to maintain that belief. For example, Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist (and self-proclaimed Marxist), is certainly one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology. He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
‘Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that Miracles may happen.
(Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons (review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997), The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.)
Not so ancient mariner wrote:Their beliefs develop (it's an ongoing process) from the results of observation and measuring the world and universe around them.
"Observation" is the last thing they use. You can observe and test something that is happening now (operational science) but the further away from something you get, timewise, the harder it is to test something and the best way of working out what happened in the past is to refer to eyewitness accounts.
For example, in 1895-6, Marie Curie discovered that the element uranium was radioactive. That is the starting point for direct observation. Various forms of the element have a claimed half-life (uranium-233 to uranium-238), varying between 69 years and 4 1⁄2 billion years. Now, over 100 years have passed since her discovery, so the half-life of 69 can be tested and observed. But 4 1/2 billion years? Come on! When I was doing my professional training at the Cranfield Institute/Royal Military Academy of Science Shivenham, we were taught that, to establish a trend, a certain percentage of samples must be taken from across the board. It's a long time ago since I did that, so I can't remember the figure, but 17% minimum runs in my mind. If a daily reading of decay was recorded from 1896, or whenever that particular variant of uranium was identified, it would show the trend from that point. One could reasonably extrapolate it back maybe a few years. but 118 years is a negligible percentage of 4.5 bn years and, as it does not cover the entire range, simply cannot be used to set a trend. I would have more respect for a scientist who said something along the lines of "based on the readings to date, IF we assume that the trend remained [constant/logarithimic/whatever the method of predictability is] AND IF we assume that conditions (atmospheric/whatever) remained the same as they are now, AND we assume that the starting level was x, then we believe that x happened umpteen years ago. But no, they make all these assumptions and then state their beliefs as though it was observed fact.
I have tried to be very careful to say that what I have presented earlier is "evidence for", not "proof of", and if I have given an otherwise impression, I apologise. However, it has been shown by real-time observation across many disciplines that the evidence, which is available to both camps, concurs (not necessarily proves) the Genesis account. Having been brought up to believe totally in evolution as the origin of everything, and then challenged to look at the counter-arguments, the evidence compels me to reject the worldview.
Now, although I am very happy to debate origins, to try and put the thread back on tract, I am as surprised as you are that established technology has not been used to build more effective wind turbines. Somebody, somewhere, has achieved a massive fail there!
