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Science and Philosophy (and theology)
Topic Started: May 15 2009, 10:29 AM (235 Views)
ngc1514
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So much of modern (if I should use that word) creationism is based on arguments from ignorance - we can't imagine how the eye was formed (or flagella or the clotting cascade), it must have been an act by an intelligent designer. I have noticed a slackening of support for ID and irreducible complexity since Behe got his ass whupped bad in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area Schools. He ended up looking like a total schlub and seems to have taken a back seat over the last couple years.

Even the best intentioned argument from ignorance can oft go astray. Once of the most famous was by French philosopher Auguste Compte in 1835. In his Cours de la Philosophie Positive he wrote:

Quote:
 
On the subject of stars, all investigations which are not ultimately reducible to simple visual observations are ... necessarily denied to us. While we can conceive of the possibility of determining their shapes, their sizes, and their motions, we shall never be able by any means to study their chemical composition or their mineralogical structure ... Our knowledge concerning their gaseous envelopes is necessarily limited to their existence, size ... and refractive power, we shall not at all be able to determine their chemical composition or even their density... I regard any notion concerning the true mean temperature of the various stars as forever denied to us.


From http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/comte.html

Quote:
 
Here, Comte is assuming that the determination of composition, density, temperature, etc., would require one to obtain physical samples of the stars---obviously, a very difficult proposition even today.

However, only 14 years later, the physicist Kirchhoff discovered that the chemical composition of a gas could be deduced from its electromagnetic spectrum viewed from an arbitrary distance. This method was extended to astronomical bodies by Huggins in 1864, who first used a spectrograph attached to a telescope. Not only have we learned how to determine the chemical composition of the stars and nebulae, but the element helium (the second most abundant in the universe) was first identified in the spectrum of the Sun, rather than in an earthbound laboratory.

Today we use spectroscopy to measure chemical abundances, temperatures, velocities, rotations, ionization states, magnetic fields, pressure, turbulence, density, and many other properties of distant planets, stars, and galaxies. Some objects studied this way are over 10 billion light years away. Spectroscopy is the richest source of information about the universe. In its laboratory setting, spectroscopy provided the experimental basis for quantum mechanics.

Two lessons: nature usually outstrips the human imagination. And philosophers often get science wrong.


And the lesson for the creationists is that the gaps they keep cramming god into get smaller and smaller and smaller and the concept of god keeps shrinking with those ever smaller gaps. Keep it up and poof... he's just gonna disappear.
Edited by ngc1514, May 15 2009, 10:30 AM.
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