You need to demonstrate more civility if you want me to put into effort into this. You’ve made an argument for intelligent design and repeated “you can’t prove it” a few times. Do you disagree? I don’t believe that you don’t know what I’m referring to.
When it comes to something like proving the universe is not 6,000 years old and somehow appears to be older, there are so many possible things you might be thinking, that if I were to respond, I’d first have to guess what you are thinking. Not gonna do that. Here’s a list of 101 evidences for a young universe. Are these what you’re thinking?
I am definitely a cause of some of the incivility here.
I get too frustrated when someone says things that make me pretty darn sure they are close-minded and who try to push their misunderstanding of things as ‘proof’. Sherlock is using very outdated and debunked talking points as though they are solid support for his position, and my assumption was that he wasn’t going to give a moment’s thought to what anyone says about his talking points.
I usually don’t enjoy being wrong, but in instances like this, being wrong makes me happy. So, if I’m wrong, I will send a hand-written apology via snail-mail to Sherlock to make up for my unfair judgement.
I’m just going to try to move on here, without discussing tone, since that is going nowhere.
I’m not going to go through an exercise of proving something is extremely unlikely (that the universe is not 6,000 years old). Essentially it’s “proving a negative”, which is a logic problem. You’ve asked for that a few times and I’ve tried to explain why I won’t do that. My doing that or not doing that proves nothing about anything. We could talk about what “proof” is, but I’m not going to write up something that you can google and find a variety of opinions about.
Maybe if you had some specific John Lennox point to discuss, that might be interesting.
If you want an example of civil discourse, you can’t do much better than these guys. I don’t have time right now to find them addressing the specific issues raised in this thread, but I promise you, Justin Schieber is very willing allow for the philosophical arguments in favor of god and engage them with respect.
For the universe to be 6000 years old, practically everything in science would have to be wrong. Calling the idea"extremely unlikely" is more understatement than exaggeration.
If there’s no conflict with science and religion, why are you asking for scientific answers to religiously based logically impossible scenarios, then crapping all over those who show you the obvious conflict?
Maybe take this topic in the philosophy section, where you can play with words to promote your very personal version of logic.
Sherlock Holmes: "The question I put to you is: can you prove that the earth was not created 6,000 years ago with an in built appearance of age or can’t you?"
We all agree that this is impossible. That makes it useless. There is no value in asking it. It is illogical to pose an impossible question and think that an inability to answer it is useful data.
You are asking the question as though our inability to answer is supports your position that there is no conflict between religion and science. You are mistaken. (If I’m mistaken and that’s not why you asked it, please explain the purpose of the question.)
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According to https://explorable.com/falsifiability: “Falsifiability is the assertion that for any hypothesis to have credence, it must be inherently disprovable before it can become accepted as a scientific hypothesis or theory.”
So you could therefore say that there is no conflict between religion and science if and only if religion never makes any truth statements that are related to anything science does or can investigate. Thus, if a religion says the universe is 6000 years old, it is instantly in conflict with science. (The impossibility of the question makes it illogical on top of that.)
I have a job, so I’m trying to balance giving you some amount of respect and keeping my current employment. I still don’t believe you that it’s not clear what I’m referring to. I said I wasn’t going to show you my personal proof of the age of the universe, then you say “tell me how you established that”. If you want that, go to a physics forum. You’re only “proof” has been “you can’t prove I’m wrong” or “my assumptions are different”. That’s not a discussion.
“This is why I do not and never have considered “Science vs God” as relevant because it is an entirely illogical thing to use one to challenge the other.
I think we’ve established that we are coming from different places. Not sure where you’re going with this.
“It is the axioms could be wrong not the science per-se.
I don’t think you are using this word correctly. Axioms, i.e. nature’s laws are consistent, have been around for a long time. They’ve stood up to every test I know of. I don’t know what tests you are using to demonstrate some “God”.
"The claim that a God “created the universe 6,000 years ago with characteristics that give the impression it is much older” is in no way in conflict with any observations."
Being a religious-based position on something that science takes a different position on, shows that there is conflict between science and religion. Being unfalsifiable makes it useless to anyone for any purpose.
As for the link to the post that prompted your the age of the universe question, I am not sure where the connection is. I did say:
"If religion says something about:
the age of the earth,
our origins,
the reality of miracles,
the value of certain genders or ‘historically and genetically related groups of people’ [some folks might use the word ‘race’],
or any other topic that is investigated by science, there can be conflict."
If that's the connection, I still don't see it. Please clarify the purpose of the age of the universe question (I'm not being intentionally obtuse with this- I honestly don't know why the question is relevant to your position, because it seems to contradict your position and have no point at all.)
I had to look up “Munchausen’s trilemma”. It looks like an excuse to spout word-salad in an attempt to sound smart (“feigned erudition” is the term used by some of those very people.)
As fun as philosophizing might be, it will lose any battle in which it conflicts with reality. We may not be able to “prove” that we know anything, but the application of scientific knowledge works when applied in reality, so we go with it. Just because someone can use words, in grammatically correct sentences, to contradicts the idea that we know stuff, doesn’t change the fact that we do.
Then we are all in agreement on that. The only thing we disagree on is how relevant that is. I think it’s interesting to think about, but irrelevant to more than 99.99% of how humans live their lives.
It’s like a child asking ‘why?’ to every answer, forcing you to get more and more fundamental, and after a while you reach the limit of where the question is applicable.
You and I agree anyway 3pt. Sherlock probably has another trick up his sleeve, or something he’s sure blows everything else out of the water. We’ll see.
Good morning Sherlock. Player may be asking something else. My question is, how do you choose your axioms? You say “freely chosen”, so what does that mean? I freely choose to not jump off a building, but what life experience and biology led me to make that choice? We can say a lot about that choice, just like we can say a lot about choosing between materialism and whatever it is you are talking about.
It’s a free country, so I don’t deny your right to make your choice. I’m freely choosing to ask you to explain it.
I like Munchausen’s trilemma. I reduce it to a dilemma though: every challenge to a claim eventually goes back to a circular answer or an infinite regress. Axiomatic statements are circular to me. They’re just assumed to be true. I think it’s possible to be a logically consistent theistic scientist if you just add God to the existing body of scientific knowledge and reject any religious claim that contradicts an area of science.