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People caricaturize to being attention to noteworthy attributes, that does not imply a value judgment. But I could see how you might come to that conclusion if

People caricaturize to being attention to noteworthy attributes, that does not imply a value judgment. But I could see how you might come to that conclusion if you were of the opinion that everything different from you is worse. I however am not of that opinion. And I believe people are free to pick any axioms that suit them, it is incorrect to say that “I believe they are false”, rather I accept they are axiomatic assumptions equivalent but distinct from those I have made. And I preach so that the folks making them might accept the same. You’re reaching for a lot that quite simply isn’t there. Also, I don’t have an issue with “believing science is always right”, I happen to think the scientific process science produces correct results myself. What I contest is the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow “scientific”, as the folks who believe it like to claim. There is quite simply no evidence of it that doesn’t require first axiomatically assuming the conclusion. But that axiom is so fundamental to many evolutionist’s world views that they do not fully consider its ramifications.

gjm11 2y ago
I am not, in fact, of the opinion that everything different from me is worse. (I do think it's curious that you're simultaneously (1) complaining at how I'm jumping to unjustified conclusions about your opinions and (2) jumping to unjustified conclusions about my opinions. But I suppose from your perspective it looks like I'm doing the same, so whatever.) There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while. What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at. I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that. But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.
- explaininjs 2y ago
  Again, I said “X might be the observed outcome of someone were to believe Y”, and you’ve interpreted that as me leaping to the conclusion that you believe Y. But your argument is still circular and faith based. There’s no concrete framework whereby your view is “simpler”, but if you already hold it you will perhaps feel that it is. I personally feel Genesis 1 is simpler than anything any scientist has come up with, and I choose to believe it is more correct as well. But I’m not so far down the rabbit hole to not see that other beliefs are equally well supported. But that’s all missing the main point, which is that science has no way to determine origins, and there’s no way an experiment could get us closer to determining the past. The past is outside the domain of scientific knowledge, as it cannot be experimentally verified. Experimental verification being the cornerstone of science. Consider I construct a beautiful statue in a room. You awake in the room and attempt to understand the origin of the statue. You observe it for aeons and collect many measurements about its state. You observe that over time, a layer of dust has settled on the statue, clinging to its entire surface evenly. Looking at all your scientific observations, you conclude that many millions of years ago, there was nothing. Then over time, layers and layers of dust settled. Over enough years, you posit, a statue must have formed. It seems surprising, sure. How could this chaotic dust make a beautiful statue? But the science is clear: nothing else has ever been observed that could cause that statue to exist, and winding back the clock millions of years from the observations you make would indeed produce nothing. Thus this is the simplest explanation, so no matter how unbelievable, it is what we must accept barring anything better. What’s that you say? An intelligent being might have designed the statue and put it there for you to observe? Preposterous: we have no evidence of such an intelligent designer. All we have is this beautiful statue.
  - gjm11 2y ago
    Again, you are not fooling anyone when you insinuate things and then act offended when someone actually responds to the insinuations. [EDITED to fix a typo] The past is not outside the domain of scientific knowledge. (Unless you refuse to call something "knowledge" unless it is known absolutely for certain, in which case the situation is much simpler: there is no such thing as knowledge, scientific or otherwise.) The way science works is: you have a bunch of observations, you come up with theories that attempt to explain them, you try hard to refute those theories by thinking of tests/observations/... that will give different results depending on what theory (if any) is right, and you try hard to look for alternative theories to explain the observations, and the situation you hope for -- which happens very frequently -- is that you have one not-too-complicated theory whose predictions match the observations well, and that despite extensive efforts no one has found a theory that does as well without being much more complicated (e.g., by "baking in" the actual observed results), and then that theory is the one you provisionally treat as "true" until that situation stops obtaining (e.g. because someone found a better theory, or it fails to account for new observations). (yesyesyes, this is a simplified account, but I claim it captures the essence of how science works) You will notice that nothing in that paragraph forbids those theories to say things about the past. Which is just as well, because the very most primitive scientific activity possible, namely making and reporting a single observation, is necessarily about the past. Suppose I measure the temperature of a liquid by immersing a digital temperature probe in it and looking at the output. It takes a bit of time for the sensor in the probe to equilibrate with the liquid around it. It takes a bit of time for the electronics in the probe to do their thing. It takes a bit of time for the light from the display to reach my eyes. It takes a bit of time for my brain to process that and turn it into an actual number. By the time I write "115.2 degrees C" in my notebook, the actual liquid-being-at-that-temperature is several seconds in the past. But I'm still happy writing the number down, because by far the most likely explanation for my current state of "thinking I have just read the display as saying 115.2 degrees C" is that a few seconds ago the temperature of the liquid was about 115.2 degrees C. Of course it's always possible that I've suffered some strange brain aberration, or that the probe is malfunctioning, or that an angel reached down and interfered with the experiment. Or that some currently-unknown physical phenomenon invalidates the way the temperature probe works, for this particular liquid in this particular situation. Everything in science is provisional. But the fact that something's in the past doesn't in itself make it more provisional. And, while those exotic alternative scenarios are possible, they aren't likely: strange brain aberrations are thankfully rare, lab equipment usually either works or fails in obvious ways, miracles are rare if they ever happen at all. So we generally do OK to ignore those scenarios until plenty of actual evidence for them turns up. So, anyway, what of your example? In any actually plausible version of the scenario where one human being makes a statue that's later seen by another, that other human being is going to find plenty of evidence of other intelligent beings who might have made it. (E.g., to be excessively literal about how you set up the scenario, if I observe that statue then I am going to be aware of having seen many many other statues before all of which I have good reason to think were made by people.) So if you want hypothetical-me not to think it plausible that the statue was made by an intelligent being, even though in fact you made it, you're going to have to go to great lengths to erase from the world -- or at least the portion of it that I get to see -- all evidence of other people who might have made the statue. And it's going to have to be a hypothetical-me that lacks all the real-world knowledge I have involving other people. And, well, if hypothetical-me is looking at a world from which all evidence of other intelligent beings, apart from that statue itself, has been carefully erased, then I am not sure it's much of a gotcha to say "aha, your so-called scientific approach will never discover the intelligent designer here!". If you falsify the evidence competently enough, you can indeed get someone to believe something false; how exactly is that supposed to indicate that they're doing it wrong?

gjm11 2y ago

I am not, in fact, of the opinion that everything different from me is worse. (I do think it's curious that you're simultaneously (1) complaining at how I'm jumping to unjustified conclusions about your opinions and (2) jumping to unjustified conclusions about my opinions. But I suppose from your perspective it looks like I'm doing the same, so whatever.) There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while. What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at. I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that. But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.

explaininjs 2y ago
Again, I said “X might be the observed outcome of someone were to believe Y”, and you’ve interpreted that as me leaping to the conclusion that you believe Y. But your argument is still circular and faith based. There’s no concrete framework whereby your view is “simpler”, but if you already hold it you will perhaps feel that it is. I personally feel Genesis 1 is simpler than anything any scientist has come up with, and I choose to believe it is more correct as well. But I’m not so far down the rabbit hole to not see that other beliefs are equally well supported. But that’s all missing the main point, which is that science has no way to determine origins, and there’s no way an experiment could get us closer to determining the past. The past is outside the domain of scientific knowledge, as it cannot be experimentally verified. Experimental verification being the cornerstone of science. Consider I construct a beautiful statue in a room. You awake in the room and attempt to understand the origin of the statue. You observe it for aeons and collect many measurements about its state. You observe that over time, a layer of dust has settled on the statue, clinging to its entire surface evenly. Looking at all your scientific observations, you conclude that many millions of years ago, there was nothing. Then over time, layers and layers of dust settled. Over enough years, you posit, a statue must have formed. It seems surprising, sure. How could this chaotic dust make a beautiful statue? But the science is clear: nothing else has ever been observed that could cause that statue to exist, and winding back the clock millions of years from the observations you make would indeed produce nothing. Thus this is the simplest explanation, so no matter how unbelievable, it is what we must accept barring anything better. What’s that you say? An intelligent being might have designed the statue and put it there for you to observe? Preposterous: we have no evidence of such an intelligent designer. All we have is this beautiful statue.
- gjm11 2y ago
  Again, you are not fooling anyone when you insinuate things and then act offended when someone actually responds to the insinuations. [EDITED to fix a typo] The past is not outside the domain of scientific knowledge. (Unless you refuse to call something "knowledge" unless it is known absolutely for certain, in which case the situation is much simpler: there is no such thing as knowledge, scientific or otherwise.) The way science works is: you have a bunch of observations, you come up with theories that attempt to explain them, you try hard to refute those theories by thinking of tests/observations/... that will give different results depending on what theory (if any) is right, and you try hard to look for alternative theories to explain the observations, and the situation you hope for -- which happens very frequently -- is that you have one not-too-complicated theory whose predictions match the observations well, and that despite extensive efforts no one has found a theory that does as well without being much more complicated (e.g., by "baking in" the actual observed results), and then that theory is the one you provisionally treat as "true" until that situation stops obtaining (e.g. because someone found a better theory, or it fails to account for new observations). (yesyesyes, this is a simplified account, but I claim it captures the essence of how science works) You will notice that nothing in that paragraph forbids those theories to say things about the past. Which is just as well, because the very most primitive scientific activity possible, namely making and reporting a single observation, is necessarily about the past. Suppose I measure the temperature of a liquid by immersing a digital temperature probe in it and looking at the output. It takes a bit of time for the sensor in the probe to equilibrate with the liquid around it. It takes a bit of time for the electronics in the probe to do their thing. It takes a bit of time for the light from the display to reach my eyes. It takes a bit of time for my brain to process that and turn it into an actual number. By the time I write "115.2 degrees C" in my notebook, the actual liquid-being-at-that-temperature is several seconds in the past. But I'm still happy writing the number down, because by far the most likely explanation for my current state of "thinking I have just read the display as saying 115.2 degrees C" is that a few seconds ago the temperature of the liquid was about 115.2 degrees C. Of course it's always possible that I've suffered some strange brain aberration, or that the probe is malfunctioning, or that an angel reached down and interfered with the experiment. Or that some currently-unknown physical phenomenon invalidates the way the temperature probe works, for this particular liquid in this particular situation. Everything in science is provisional. But the fact that something's in the past doesn't in itself make it more provisional. And, while those exotic alternative scenarios are possible, they aren't likely: strange brain aberrations are thankfully rare, lab equipment usually either works or fails in obvious ways, miracles are rare if they ever happen at all. So we generally do OK to ignore those scenarios until plenty of actual evidence for them turns up. So, anyway, what of your example? In any actually plausible version of the scenario where one human being makes a statue that's later seen by another, that other human being is going to find plenty of evidence of other intelligent beings who might have made it. (E.g., to be excessively literal about how you set up the scenario, if I observe that statue then I am going to be aware of having seen many many other statues before all of which I have good reason to think were made by people.) So if you want hypothetical-me not to think it plausible that the statue was made by an intelligent being, even though in fact you made it, you're going to have to go to great lengths to erase from the world -- or at least the portion of it that I get to see -- all evidence of other people who might have made the statue. And it's going to have to be a hypothetical-me that lacks all the real-world knowledge I have involving other people. And, well, if hypothetical-me is looking at a world from which all evidence of other intelligent beings, apart from that statue itself, has been carefully erased, then I am not sure it's much of a gotcha to say "aha, your so-called scientific approach will never discover the intelligent designer here!". If you falsify the evidence competently enough, you can indeed get someone to believe something false; how exactly is that supposed to indicate that they're doing it wrong?