Comment by qboltz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qboltz | Hacker News Reader

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"Why stop there? Why not say we even know that there are billions of years? Why not thousands?"

My questions above are only to point out what I think is the conclusion to your line of questioning. Only the ignorant would suggest that we know exactly what happened in the past. Let me emphasize, that's not the aim of science.

Regardless, we can argue limitations on what is possible in the past from surrounding evidence, which you're surely aware of based off your questioning. You definitely sound like you would be willing to defend some kind of supernatural intervention in the past at least as a possibility, which at least in theory I have no problems with. The issue is your reasoning would at a minimum ask you to posit what you think is actually defensible about the past, and how you would reach that position. Ultimately we have to use inductive tools, and the natural surroundings are the only things we have to measure against. Your position sounds as though there are things that are worth defending about the past, they just don't align with commonly accepted mechanisms.

Speed of light, river erosion, uranium-lead dating, etc. are very sound in describing what we see around us, you'd need to explain why they don't suggest sound limitations on the past.

It's not that scientists can be incorrect in concluding ages from these tools, but what you posit should be more predictive if we're to conclude your position is the sound one.

> Regardless, we can argue limitations on what is possible in the past from surrounding evidence

We can, but none of that is verifiable. We can come up with hypotheses and test them. We can look at literature which observed things in the past or make truth claims and evaluate them based on evidence.

> Speed of light, river erosion, uranium-lead dating, etc. are very sound in describing what we see around us, you'd need to explain why they don't suggest sound limitations on the past.

I am not aware of any particular claims which argue the veracity of relative measurements (say, maybe river erosion, since I'm not familiar with that).

> It's not that scientists can be incorrect in concluding ages from these tools,

My issue really has more to do with the scientists which demand you accept their theories and laugh off "supernatural intervention" when at the end of the day the vast majority of what they believe is based not on fact but on conjecture (blind faith?). They laugh off one religion and replace it with another.

> We can, but none of that is verifiable. We can come up with hypotheses and test them. We can look at literature which observed things in the past or make truth claims and evaluate them based on evidence.

Verifiability isn't really the goal of those suggesting limitations of the past based on scientific analysis of the present, as like I said, it's impossible, and scientists that would suggest otherwise should in fact be laughed out of the room. Science is in fact based on verifiability, or at least we can take it as an axiom for this conversation, but the suggestion that we should take evidence of something that is a testimony of the supernatural, when all we have is the natural to see around us, is where I get confused. The point isn't that scientists have to be correct about the past, but they at least can show their reasoning based on something that we can see, their "faith as you call it" is in fact not blind, because the processes behave consistently right in front of their eyes in the lab or in the field. The evidence you mention is well established for most studies as to the age of the earth, what isn't established is any kind of visible evidence to an alternative. Literature is certainly an observation, but if we're suggesting that the supernatural claims made in that literature have evidence, it needs to be substantiated, and I'm ignorant of any major work showing evidence of the supernatural. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it certainly hasn't crossed my desk, and I actively search for it.

> I am not aware of any particular claims which argue the veracity of relative measurements (say, maybe river erosion, since I'm not familiar with that).

I'm not sure what relative means here, would you mean something akin to river erosion in a given setting is something that would in fact be subject to change depending on environmental factors?

> My issue really has more to do with the scientists which demand you accept their theories and laugh off "supernatural intervention" when at the end of the day the vast majority of what they believe is based not on fact but on conjecture (blind faith?). They laugh off one religion and replace it with another.

I think to call it religion is a touch dubious, as they aren't creating a focus of worship. Historically the supernatural is intended when using the word religion, I think ideology or philosophy would be more accurate, and that's only those making positive claims as opposed to pragmatists. It is conjecture, just conjecture that is founded upon evidence that is readily demonstrable, rather than accounts of the supernatural that don't seem to be replicable.

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