Point one: the point is not that anyone alive was here to see it. Rather it is that chemistry (via radioactive decay timing), geology (via plate tectonics), cosmology (via galactic modeling), and astronomy (via redshift and other observations) gives us (grown up, scientifically knowledgeable persons) a pretty definitive answer.
What does plate tectonics have to do with this? The bias throughout your response is quite telling...it suggests A: that I think science is worthless and wrong, B: that I am not familiar with any of these things, and C: that I am immature. Wrong, on all counts, to be elaborated later.
Point two: if what science (in general, not some one minor point) tells us is totally bogus and only personal experience counts, then I would claim that G!d, having provided the data and the means to understand it (our minds) has lied to us and all of existence is questionable. I personally do not find that existentially, rationally, or spiritually an answer worth considering. So I will stick with the data G!d gave us (say chemistry which states that the natural occurring uranium in the earth dates it to 3-6 billion years old).
Ah, so I'm not only a moron, I'm G-dless as well??? You don't know me from Adam, but you feel free to level ad-hominem defense? If that is your first line of defense, ad-hominem, I think it speaks volumes to both your character and the degree of defense you actually have available. Talk about logical fallacies...
You are the one who baited the trap, I'm here to show how fallacious your arguments are...not only yours, but the typical person ensnared by the meme of science.
And I thought I was being generous with a 100 million year margin of error...you give yourself 3 billion years. Golly, in three billion years all sorts of things can happen...like maybe the disappearance of an entire galaxy.
Point three: Schrödinger’s cat has nothing to do with the bias or lack of bias in scientific experiments. The cat is not the problem, the problem is that we cannot know beforehand how a particular sub-atomic event will proceed (I am pretty converse with quantum mechanics). Let us take something really, really simple and fundamental, like the speed of light. Since Romer first measured it in 1676, it has been measured and re-measured many hundreds of times in at least a dozen entirely independent ways and (except for measurements or calculations later found to be flawed) has consistently been found to be 300,000,000 m/sec plus or minus some error. That error may or may not be bias (it can be systemic) but we now know it to within parts per billion. If research is “inherently biased” this one case disproves it unless you want to take the extreme view that we must be absolutely correct in science (100% true, 100% accurate).
Schroedinger's cat makes the point that what can be known can only be known by observance, and by observance we interfere with what can be known. So Schroedinger's cat is extremely relevent to the discussion, in that bias is inevitable.
I never called into question the speed of light, that is your straw man.
Point four: if that (absolute truth) is what you are looking for, do not bother, except for deductive logic and arithmetic nothing is absolutely known. That is why science has to correct itself… that is the nature of scientific knowledge, the scientific methodology. The goal if science is to get a picture or model of reality that is closer and closer to actuality (I do not know of a single scientist or philosopher who believes we will ever arrive at an absolute answer). Hard evidence that “contradicts the party line” is what leads to scientific progress. The fact that the sun and not the earth was the center of the solar system led to the overthrow of Ptolemy by Copernicus. The fact that early theories of electricity and magnetism were contradicted by Faraday’s work is what led Maxwell to develop his equations. The hard evidence of Lavoisier, Dalton, Avogadro, and Brown is what led to the abandonment of continuum theory for atomic theory. The fact that the Michelson-Morley experiment contradicted Maxwell’s “aether” is what led Lorentz, Poincare, and Einstein to relativity. The “ultra-violet collapse” is what led to the development of quantum theory by Planck, Einstein, and Bohr.
Yet, the attitude you display in your responses is precisely that of "absolute truth," as in anybody who challenges the least little portion of it must be either a lunatic, a moron, G-dless, or some combination thereof.
Even your lead off statement,
If one wishes to discuss young earth stuff, post it here. I do not want to waste valuable interfaith space on what the scientific community considers baseless pseudo-science.
"I do not want to waste valuable interfaith space," in other words your time and energy, defending your beliefs, your meme.
So what? What is so special about you that you feel you do not have to defend your beliefs while challenging others? That is ego- and cultural- centric and smacks of elitism and cultural superiority and imperialism.
And science corrects itself? Yeah, right. Just try. Ever read "the Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn? Science is rife with politics, with old orders only giving way in the most grudging manner to new orders.
Which is right? Newtonian Physics or Einsteinian Physics? Trick question, they are both right. Nasa, decades after Einstein, put several men on the moon with Newtonian physics. Is Einstein the be all and end all? Not likely, he's just one of the best "we" have so far...but even his thinking is merely a way of looking at things...not the only way, merely "one" way...there are many ways.
And if you really want to condescend to the point of earth centric reasoning (and might as well get the flat earth accusations out of the way now too), that returns to your arrogant suppositions based in the cultural elitism of your meme about me as a person.
Yes, Mach died unable to believe in atoms because he could not see them; yes, Einstein never did accept the quantum mechanics; and, yes, some physicists create unscientific and metaphysical systems to keep locality, time, and Einstein correct (“many-worlds” interpretations”). But note, Mach and Einstein were just mistaken. The “many-worlds”, “many-minds”, “consistent history” interpretations of quantum mechanics are, I would claim metaphysical, interpretations of the science, not the science itself.
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
If anything it serves to reinforce what I've said here for years, science is a religion.
Point five: if you want to buy the standard Western myopic version of fossils, you are free to. The ancient Greeks and Chinese knew full-well of the existence of fossils (see Mayor’s work or the history of the Tianyu Museum fossil collection). And, IMO, verbal histories and accounts from Native American, Australian, and Asian sources also point to the existence of fossils (or even entire frozen specimens being found). That should not be too surprising really; Solzhenitsyn talks about how his road crew in the Gulag found a frozen Mastodon and fell on it to eat the contents of its stomach and roast its flesh.
Me? Myopic? That's laughable, considering the intensely myopic view you are endorsing here. Quite the contrary, I've endorsed and maintain a broad, encompassing view trying to account for as many angles as possible. Absolute truth can never be known, particularly since "truth" is such a vague and obtuse word to begin with. I find that such an encompassing view is far more conducive to interfaith communication than myopic "my way or the highway" views, particularly when one suggests that anybody who disagrees with one is G-dless.
Point six: the existence of extinct creatures during what we would call "The Age of Man” (last 2,000,000 years or so) should not really be so surprising as the coelacanth shows. Your perception of not “quite right” is a little culturally biased, IMHO.
Ah! Is this a glimmer of hope, an "escape clause," or trying to steal my argument to support your own?
I would also suggest that your perception is just that...your "perception." It is no more objective than mine.
Point seven: in your experience a 12" fragment may be rare, but the case of the full skeleton of Archaeopteryx or Thalattosaurus shows that, while it may be rare, it is not unheard of. The Chinese “Cave of White Bones” was well-known for millennia. The frozen tundra delivers up frozen extinct species to this day (see Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”). Ditto for salt licks and tar pits (you don’t think Native Americans say these before their conquerors?). I am sorry, coming from a verbal culture you must understand that just one story about a “monster’s bones” would promulgate everywhere pretty rapidly.
Did you ever dig anything out of a tar pit, personally? Besides the fumes that would drive a sensible person away, digging in a raw tar pit is so hazardous as to be avoided at all cost. You failed to mention the occasional human remains found in tar pits of hapless individuals who failed to heed this. Looking at a modern tar pit that has had numerous engineering supports to allow safe excavation and applying that to a hunter-gatherer tribe is just so culturally myopic...this is an untenable position.
Salt licks are a possibility, as are coal seams and some other less hazardous geologic features. But finding "complete" examples of creatures the size of a horse and larger is simply unheard of. An archeopteryx is the size of a chicken (and it was not found "wild," both examples were excavated). And short of Inuits, Laplanders and convicts, who in their right mind goes into the tundra? I bet Solzhenitsyn did not find any dinosaurs.
I do not believe it took Egyptians migrating from Africa to teach the secrets of building pyramids or Red Earth people migrating from Europe to teach astronomy to “the savage natives of the Americas”. A full stegosaurus skeleton was recovered from the Blue Lick a few years ago, why could not have the “savages” done the same thing?
YOU do not believe...that's fine. You don't have to. But that is one "possible" alternative that *has* been scientifically proven, by Thor Heyerdahl.
Where in the Blue Lick was a Steg found? Was it accessable by Native Tribes that used to live in the area? My guess is...not likely.
“Primitive peoples” can be pretty sophisticated. When I lived among the Hmong we whites used to scoff at their tall tales of a Hmong kingdom and Caucasian ancestors… golly, they ended up being right on both counts.
After all your cultural superiority complex displayed in this thread alone, you're gonna try to throw this one my way? Nice try. Seems to me you could have learned a tad bit more from them...like cultural sensitivity.
Point eight: if you look up Mayor or the published work on the Tianyu collections you will find that some, admittedly not all, archeologists know full well that tales of dragons and neades from early civilizations are taken seriously. But scientists do have biases: Leakey was made fun of when he began looking at non-flint “tools” (in Europe and the Americas all tools were flint or flint-like), and the 20,000 year myths of the Hopi were openly ridiculed (see Al Goodyear’s work that takes that to 50,000 years ago). It just takes awhile for all of a discipline to reach a consensus and even longer for the disciplines to inter-relate to each other.
So...Clovis...or Solutrean?
Point nine: Nothing you say shakes the Scientific Order. You just have to know that the process is and do a little research. Nothing new here.
Likewise...nothing said in the name of science shakes the reality of what is. None of us...not even scientists...know the mind of G-d. It would serve *all* of us to bear that in mind, always.
