Set-theoretic, scientific, and theological ontology

[mordant]

@ethos

Why is [sic] the continental plates over 20 times older than the osceanic [sic] crust?

Because of subduction.

@ethos

What about experiments demonstrating psychic functioning?

What about them? What experiments? By whom? With what controls?

Most of the time when people talk about “experiments” on such matters they are starting from predetermined conclusions and a desire or need to believe and there’s nothing scientific going on at all. Just a standard con game. Preselected subjects / audience, specific-sounding questions or statements that are just statistically probable, and similar cold reading techniques.

Prophecy of the Biblical sort works roughly the same way. When I attended a Bible Institute in the Long Ago, they even taught me that prophecy was more “forth telling” than “fore telling” at the time it was given, and its fulfillment only made post hoc sense to those experiencing its “fulfillment”; you could even have partial or multiple fulfillments, plus figurative and literal ones. Which is just to say that Biblical prophecy is very vague and non-specific and eventually matches up with something that actually happens so that you can claim it was foretold.

[ethos]

@mordant

Because of subduction.

What stops the continental plates from subducting as fast as the oceanic crust?

@mordant

What about them? What experiments? By whom? With what controls?

Telepathy Research

[CyberLN]

The user called Ethos has been escorted from the building.

[Sheldon]

@ethos

Actually I proved that each creative day is 9,500 years long.

proved…. with the woo woo of numerology.

@ethos

I think the creation of ‘the heavens and the earth’ is not the creation of the universe,

I think Superman is real, what do I win?

@ethos

It’s true, it is a simple calculation.

Simple, and bullshit.

@ethos

@Sheldon

Panpsychism is untestable, and unevidenced.

What about experiments demonstrating psychic functioning?

I give up, what about them? I’d bet my house that’s bullshit as well.

@ethos

Why is the continental plates over 20 times older than the osceanic crust?

Continental crust is less dense and more buoyant, causing it to resist subduction when it collides with oceanic crust. Since you asked, and this has squat to do with the fact that the geological record demonstrates unequivocally that no global flood has ever occurred.

@ethos

I define “exists” as “real and quantifiable property”

Real

adjective

1. actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed.

You’re welcome…

@ethos

What stops the continental plates from subducting as fast as the oceanic crust?

They’re different densities.

@ethos

@mordant

What about them? What experiments? By whom? With what controls?

Telepathy Research

Rupert Sheldrake, the guy who believes dogs have telepathic abilities, priceless. Do I even need to say his work lacks any empirical research / evidence at all?

“The problem with Rupert Sheldrake, however, is that his ideas do not really survive critical investigation and so they remain within the realm of pseudoscience. Also, his book, The Science Delusion (2012), which many celebrate as an attack on the dogmatism in science, instead involves a distortion of how science actually operates.

Despite having a PhD in Biochemistry, Sheldrake has received a great deal of criticism from the scientific community for his work on telepathy. He views this attack as a refusal to look at the evidence he has collected over the years on this topic; however, none of his experiments has ever been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, suggesting that there is no compelling evidence in the first place.

In Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, Sheldrake describes how he videotapes the behaviour of dogs and concluded that they knew when their owners set off to go home. Dogs would apparently wait by the doorway before they could hear the noise of their car approaching, for example.”

Oh dear…CITATION

@CyberLN

The user called Ethos has been escorted from the building.

Damn, every time I open my heart. Not to worry he can use telepathy…

[Calilasseia]

@ethos

Actually I proved that each creative day is 9,500 years long.

Blind assertions do not constitute “proof”.

[cynical1]

If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit…

[Walter]

I’m somewhat sad that I’m too late for this one.

Rather than tackle any one of the many, many claims made, I’d have asked one question.

How do you reconcile the absolute, unchanging and unchangeable truth of the Bible with the tentative, provisional and changeable findings of science?

The moment you connect a Bible passage to a scientific finding, that finding doesn’t become absolutely true or proven. It remains tentative and provisional and may be overturned or refuted by future findings and discoveries. Whereas, what is written in the Bible, being absolute truth, cannot be overturned or refuted by anything. There is no Bible 2.0, where scripture is continually brought into line with the latest scientific discoveries.

You can’t connect science with scripture because they deal in different aspects of truth in different ways. Scripture is supposed to be believed by faith and without evidence, whereas science is supposed to be believed without faith and with evidence.

This whole thing is a square peg in a round hole.

Thank you,

Walter.

[Sheldon]

@Walter

The moment you connect a Bible passage to a scientific finding, that finding doesn’t become absolutely true or proven. It remains tentative and provisional and may be overturned or refuted by future findings and discoveries.

Well I have seen some of them latch onto that, as if the willingness of the method to objectively and open mindedly discard an error, is evidence it’s all unreliable. They never see the irony that the alternative (the creationist stance) is to cling to obviously erroneous beliefs and claims.

Irony impaired, bless em.

[Sheldon]

@Calilasseia

@ethos

Actually I proved that each creative day is 9,500 years long.

Blind assertions do not constitute “proof”.

Many would argue that alone they don’t constitute credible evidence, since blind assertions can be made that contradict one another.

[mordant]

@Walter

Whereas, what is written in the Bible, being absolute truth, cannot be overturned or refuted by anything.

Just to be clear, this is the contention of Christians using inerrantist / literalist interpretive systems, not usually of liberal Christians – at least not across the board.

[Walter]

Well, please help me out here mordant.

I would have thought that YEC Christians would necessarily be literalist and inerrantist in their treatment of god’s Word. Which would mean that they treat it as absolute, unchanging and unchangeable. The complete opposite of scientific data, which we know is tentative, provisional and fully open to being changed by new data.

Which was my point. They are trying to bring together two things that are irreconcilable opposites.

Unless there’s something in the equation I’m not seeing?

Walter.

[CapriMark1]

@Walter

The complete opposite of scientific data, which we know is tentative, provisional and fully open to being changed by new data.

Data isn’t tentative and provisional, but interpretation of that data certainly is, which is why new data can change the way we look at things. After a while, though, the interpretation is considered to be a good one and becomes well accepted. Evolution is one of those and the fossils are the source of the data.

[mordant]

@Walter

Well, please help me out here mordant.

I would have thought that YEC Christians would necessarily be literalist and inerrantist in their treatment of god’s Word.

Yes that is so. I was just responding to the one sentence I quoted and not so much to you personally but rather because I see the general principle that (1) many of us are former fundamentalists and (2) most of the theists who come here to “debate” are fundamentalists and so (3) we often forget that even in the US, evangelicals are only about a third of Christians and on a worldwide basis maybe half that. They have an outsized influence but I don’t want to paint all Christians with that particular authoritarian / literalist / inerrantist brush.

For the record, I think even liberal Christians don’t represent some positive influence OF the Christian faith so much as a positive influence ON it – in other words they make the best of a bad job because by and large they’re already accepting and kind by nature. Sometimes they are even former fundies themselves, and rather than leave religious faith altogether, they got away from much of the toxicity and stuck with the better lights of the ideology. It’s still way too crufty for me, and doesn’t address the unsubsantiatable claims about God, but still, in my experience they do really see the Bible as a guide or template for living but only through a certain lens and not infallible. Fundies will sometimes make fun of them, saying things like that they treat the Ten Commandments like the Ten Suggestions. It really is a significantly different mindset.

Also the OP in this thread was about set theory or modal logic which would be way beyond a fundamentalist of any stripe. That is more the province of new age types or intellectual iconoclasts who think they have found a “proof” when all they have found is a theoretical argument with a flawed premise.

[Walter]

I agree, Caprimark1. My bad for wording that poorly.

What I should have said is this. The interpretation of all scientific data is considered to be tentative and provisional because there is always room for a model, a theory or a paradigm to be overturned by the fresh interpretation of new data and evidence.

As new and better evidence comes in it enables a reappraisal of the old, so while the data and evidence itself doesn’t change except by being added to, the way they are reformulated into something new, does.

A classic example being Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe was not static, unchanging and eternal, but dynamically expanding, changing and appearing to have an origin.

Thank you for the correction of my oversight,

Walter.

[Walter]

Thank you for that clarification, mordant.

I now see things more clearly.

Walter.