Monday, February 18, 2013

"Scientific creationism" is a joke

Well, the title seems to be just a self-evident fact that requires no further explanation. And that it is, of course. However, I'd like to write a few thoughts about why it's a joke.

One of the major problems with so-called "scientific creationism" (which in itself is quite an oxymoron) is that its proponents and "researchers" are complete hypocrites. They are hypocrites because they engage precisely in what they accuse actual scientists to engage in.

You see, these creationists accuse scientists of being completely biased, having preconceived notions of what kind of results they want, and then ignore results that go contrary to them, ignore evidence, interpret data and results in a biased manner to distort it, and even manipulate and outright falsify data, while ignoring and avoiding objections and contrary views and results made by other people.

This is precisely what "creationism scientists" do, and precisely what science goes to extreme lengths to avoid. In other words, this is a complete reversal of the situation.

Science does not start with any preconceived notion that "God does not exist, the universe was not created by any intelligent being, life formed on its own" and then try their hardest to prove this by manipulating evidence and biased interpretation of data. This is exactly what "creation science" does. They start with the notion that God does exist and he created everything, and they try their hardest to manipulate evidence and data to show that. Most of them even outright admit that no matter what the evidence might show, they will never stop believing in creationism. (At least those are being honest in this regard. There are probably some of them who aren't, ie. who claim that they would accept evidence of the contrary if they find it, but deep inside they know they would not.)

Science works like "how does this work? Let's find out. And once we have a working hypothesis, let's put it to the test to see if it's correct." If such tests show that the hypothesis is incorrect or lacking, it's discarded or refined. It doesn't matter which direction the research goes. Science doesn't try to get any preconceived "preferred" result. Science is only interested in knowing how it works and why, regardless of what the answer might be. And more importantly, science is interested in verifying that the answer is actually correct, and a lot of effort and work is put into making as sure as possible of this.

Of course "creation scientists" claim they do to. They might even believe that themselves, at some level.

2 comments:

  1. You are fooling yourself if you don't believe that all scientists are biased. https://explorable.com/verification-error

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    Replies
    1. All scientists are not biased. Some individuals may be, but the scientific community as a whole isn't. That's exactly why they have a peer-reviewing process. That's precisely why results are scrutinized and repeated by independent parties in order to find flaws in them. That's precisely why criticism and questions are presented.
      When, and only when, a scientific hypothesis has passed the rigorous test of peer reviewing, will it gain wider acceptance.

      That's not how "scientific creationism" operates. Instead, it has one goal, and one goal only: Try to find evidence for the existence of a god, and that the universe was created by it. It's not trying to find out; it's only trying to reinforce the notion. In other words, it's biased.

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