What is truth
What is truth?
What is truth:
As a Professor Person, I value Truth a lot and I don’t like to see the concept perverted.
Of course the world isn’t flat, popular book title notwithstanding. The evidence is overwhelming that it is very nearly a sphere. But the Flat Earth Society claims it is and summarily rejects the evidence to the contrary. I could attach a url to their homepage, but they don’t deserve the visibility. Very simply: Their beliefs are wrong. I’m not making a moral judgment – they might be very fine people, perhaps even qualified to run for VP on the GOP ticket – and they are entitled to believe anything they want. But it is a fact that what they believe is not correct. They are wrong, mistaken, in error. Their beliefs do not correspond to the Truth. As a person, I grant each of them the right to believe any hare-brained absurdity. I don’t grant any of them the ability to make it true. I can’t grant that, since I don’t control the Truth. Truth is.
Truth is.
Truth is that the Theory of Evolution explains how biology works and is brilliant Science. It predicts the results of experiments and we use it all the time to make sound medical and financial decisions (like which hybrids to plant).
Truth is that the universe is about fifteen billion years olde (Very Olde!) and expanding and cooling. This is based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which has been validated by experiment and observation thousands of times, and the Red Shift and detection of the remnants of the Big Bang. And by the way “Theory” in these sentences does not mean “guess.”
A smart guy named Alfred Tarski defined Truth in 1933 in Polish. The essence of that one hundred plus pages of carefully reasoned logic is that a statement like “Snow is white” is Capital-T True if and only if real-live snow is real-live white.
The point: You don’t get to choose what is True. The universe determines Truth.
So you can believe the Moon is made of green cheese, humans and apes were created as is 6000 years ago, the world is flat and sits on the back of a big damned elephant, or π = 3. Believin’ don’t make it so.
Dear Oldeprofphart,
While certainly I agree with you that the world is not flat and that the moon is not made of green cheese, and that the world does not sit on the back of a “big damned elephant”, I would most certainly disagree with you that the earth is billions of years of age.
About now your brain is going to shut off and you are going to stop reading. But I would like you to hear me out.
First off, I am not going to debate with you on the idea of Creationism vs. Evolution. I’m not going to disagree with you on your argument on truth. I happen to agree with you on the concept that there are absolute truths in this world. What I am going to argue is that the entire issue comes down to perception of world view and that your statement comes down to discrimination against a whole group of people simply because they do not believe thee way that you do.
So how is evolution V Creationism a clash of thee world views?
I would say that the entire thing comes down to bias. Scientist in popular culture have been portrayed as great harbingers of free will and thought whilst those darn religious people are portrayed as close minded apes who will stop at nothing to crush enlightened thinking when nothing could be further from the truth. We just have different ways of interpreting evidence.
Origin scientists are basically historical scientists. As such they can not observe the origins of life in a lab, since they can not recreate the beginning of life in a lab. In a similar way that a forensic Scientist can not observe a murder in a lab as these are historical and unrepeatable events. All one can do is look at the evidence and come up with their own conclusions based on that evidence.
Evolutionists come from a point of view that the Universe was created billions of years ago by a cosmic accident and are looking for evidence to support this claim. Creationists are coming from the standpoint that the earth and the universe was created by a loving creator 6000 years ago, and are actively looking for evidence to prove themselves correct. Both turn to the fossil record to prove themselves with evolutionists pointing to the record as a geological time line of evolution and creationist saying it is proof of the global flood of Genesis. An evolutionist will point and laugh at thee idea, while holding up fragments of bone, an incomplete skeleton, as the missing link between humans and apes, and all creationists will see is a fossilized ape.
However, both sides have the same problem. The evidence is old. Millions to billions of years old if you are an evolutionist, and six thousand years (give or take a thousand) if you are a creationist. This means that our geological “crime scene” is a huge cold case. No one is actively hunting down Jack the Ripper, even though his case is by far warmer. With no witnesses, only the writings of two old men with rather epic beards, I am want to say that neither side will be vindicated.
So since this is simply a battle of worldviews, your belittling of mine is tant amount to discrimination. So by comparing me to people that believe in some rather crazy claims, you have singled me and people like me, out for ridicule. I am to be called stupid and ignorant and you are to be raised on a pedestal of higher learning and academic freedom. Sad really that in a post Dr. King society we have to deal with this.
Sincerely,
Creationstudent
PS: The Idea that the world was flat, Center of the universe, and on the back of something were all leading scientific theories of the day and ideas that you certainly don’t find in the Bible. FYI.