Science and bias
http://creation.com/jonathan-d-sarfati-physical-chemistry-in-six-days
Many people have the false belief that “science” has proven the earth to be billions of years old, and that every living thing descended from a single cell which itself is the result of chance combination of chemicals. However, science deals with repeatable observations in the present, while evolution/long age ideas are based on assumptions from outside science about the unobservable past. Facts do not speak for themselves—they must be interpreted according to a framework. It is not a case of religion/creation/subjectivity vs. science/evolution/objectivity. Rather, it is the biases of the religions of Christianity and of humanism interpreting the same facts in diametrically opposite ways.
The framework behind the evolutionists’ interpretation is naturalism—things made themselves; no divine intervention has happened; and God, if He even exists, has not revealed to us knowledge about the past. This is precisely what the chief apostle Peter prophesied about the “scoffers” in “the last days”—they claim “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). Peter reveals the huge flaw of the uniformitarian scoffers: they are “willingly ignorant” of special creation by God, and of a cataclysmic globe-covering (and fossil-forming) flood.
Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and leading evolution promoter (and self-proclaimed Marxist). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil 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.
http://creation.com/jonathan-d-sarfati-physical-chemistry-in-six-days
Many people have the false belief that “science” has proven the earth to be billions of years old, and that every living thing descended from a single cell which itself is the result of chance combination of chemicals. However, science deals with repeatable observations in the present, while evolution/long age ideas are based on assumptions from outside science about the unobservable past. Facts do not speak for themselves—they must be interpreted according to a framework. It is not a case of religion/creation/subjectivity vs. science/evolution/objectivity. Rather, it is the biases of the religions of Christianity and of humanism interpreting the same facts in diametrically opposite ways.
The framework behind the evolutionists’ interpretation is naturalism—things made themselves; no divine intervention has happened; and God, if He even exists, has not revealed to us knowledge about the past. This is precisely what the chief apostle Peter prophesied about the “scoffers” in “the last days”—they claim “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Peter 3:4). Peter reveals the huge flaw of the uniformitarian scoffers: they are “willingly ignorant” of special creation by God, and of a cataclysmic globe-covering (and fossil-forming) flood.
Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and leading evolution promoter (and self-proclaimed Marxist). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil 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.
