I am responding here to a post made by RAZD
in another thread. Well CTD, you keep missing the point.
Nonsense. Suppose a dead man is found with a suicide note. The note can be interpreted as a message from the dead man, or as a ruse. Until the truth is discovered, both interpretations are valid.`
The point is that both cannot be true, and that the way you differentiate the truth from the many possible false interpretations is by testing, by investigating until the truth is discovered.
And when investigating the past, history is the science we use. History consists of discovery, verification, and reconciliation. Upon discovery of the note there is no simply "true" hypothesis. The existence of the note is a fact, and for those present it's pretty well beyond dispute. But anyone drawing conclusions prior to verification & reconciliation is not properly investigating history.
Many people, Creationists included, seem to think having an alternative is good enough, that they do not need to test their concept for validity.
Having a valid alternative is a good enough reason to reject premature conclusions which are not the result of verification and reconciliation.
Science is based on one truth being possible and then investigating to determine that truth, and not resting on comfortable "alternative explanations" no matter uncomfortable the truth may be.
So why should we accept evolutionism without investigating to see if the story is actually true? We should not. Things need to be verified and reconciled, and neither of these has ever been done.
Thus we come back, again, to the founding interpretation that there is one truth -- even you make this interpretation when you say "until the truth is discovered" -- and that we can uncover that truth by further investigation.
It is valid to conclude that there is one truth. It is not valid to assume it can be discovered in all cases. We don't possess evidence of every event which has ever taken place. If we did, we could approach omniscience.
Wrong. Assumptions are not interpretations. And neither of these are observations , so you needn't bother to falsely equate them either.
But interpretations are assumptions, they are possibilities that can be used as working hypothesis to test against reality for validity. The better the interpretation is the better it explains the evidence.
Interpretations can become assumptions, but not all interpretations become assumptions for further reasoning.
To employ a statement as a working hypothesis is to concede that it may be false. This is not consistent with what you maintained earlier: that there is only ever one interpretation and anyone who acknowledges others is denying reality or pursuing fantasy. You coined the term "basic interpretation" and said all others must be false.
We can interpret the evidence of the world around us to consist of one reality that is true, that is objective, or we can interpret it to consist of mystery and magic. The problem with the mystery and magic interpretation is that it cannot be tested, whereas the the one objective reality interpretation is testable.
Some aspects of mystery and magic can be tested, and they can be investigated historically as well. History often deals with events which aren't testable and repeatable. Death is one example. It is reasonable to conclude Abe Lincoln is dead, but one cannot kill Abe Lincoln in a lab in order to confirm this.
Your dead man with a suicide note could have been done by mystery and magic: can you provide evidence that will validate or invalidate that claim?
As the man is hypothetical, I cannot. But hypothetically I could. It could be that a demon was summoned to kill the individual, or a voodoo spell was involved, any number of things. A proper historical investigation would stand a chance of discovering these things, but an investigation which assumes they are impossible could not discover them.
Every last one of these things you call "facts" is a conclusion. There are no exceptions, not even one!
Every one is a statement of fact. It's like saying "there is a table in my room" when there is a table in my room.
Is it an accident that you compare a present-time observation to conclusions about the past? Is this the best you can do?
The fact of the table actually existing in my room does not rest on my concluding that the table is there, it rests on the fact that it is there.
But we cannot say the table has always been there. Or the room for that matter. We cannot say what the table has been used for in the past. We can only say the table exists.
This is the facts from the evidence, facts that anyone can look at the table in the room evidence and see, no conclusion, no interpretation needed.
Present-time observations work like that, as a general rule.
So you credit Jeanie with writing Genesis? I think we have some pretty good evidence that this is not the case.
And still you dodge the issue. The truth must be uncomfortable to you that you avoid it so.
Dodge the issue? Some of what Jeanie said was a matter of recorded history, and some of it was an hypothesis based upon this history and consistent with both the history itself and present-day scientific knowledge. It was fairly clear which was which.
From history we know that there was no rain in the Garden of Eden. The first record of rain is at the time of the flood. One may employ the working hypothesis that it did not rain during the interval without doing harm to history or empirical science.
The issue is to provide actual evidence that supports in any way Jeanie's assertion that "things were different" and that there were "giants" and a period of time that had no rain, that her "interpretation" of her faith was in any way credible and could be true. So far you have provided zilch, which leaves me with the distinct impression that you do not have any.
So you're saying there's a burden of proof involved?
But in circular fashion, you cite antihistorical conclusions based upon the assumption that there was no flood.
No, I look beyond the suicide note, beyond the comfortable explanation, to determine the truth. The evidence shows that rain has in fact occurred throughout the natural history of the planet.
You turn right around and do it again! You offer conclusions and interpretations as evidence, and these are based on the assumption that there was no flood. This is circular. If you assume no flood, this assumption be reflected in your conclusion. But this is not a valid way to demonstrate that there was no flood.
The evidence shows that sedimentary deposits world wide are inconsistent with a biblical flood.
Um, well, actually worldwide sedimentary deposits are pretty consistent with a worldwide flood if you think about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History History is the study of the past, particularly the written record of the human race, but more generally including scientific and archaeological discoveries about the past. Recently, there has been an increased interest in oral history, passed down from generation to generation. New technology, such as photography, sound recording, and motion pictures, now complement the written word in the historical record.
The word history derives from the Greek (historia), "learning by inquiry" and that from (historeo), "to examine, to observe, to inquire", in turn from (histor), "a wise man, and one who knows right, a judge".[1][2] Academically, history is the field of research producing a continuous narrative and a systematic analysis of past events of importance to the human race.[3] Those who study history as a profession are called historians.
We again come around to there being one reality, that we can investigate with objective evidence to determine which concepts are valid and which are invalid.
The
City of Troy was once considered an element of mythology, of mystery and magic, but then they found the city using information in the Greek stories. This demonstrates that Troy was in fact a part of history, but I don't see anyone claiming that this means that Achilles was real.
A good example of what happens when people advance assumptions as proven conclusions. Things need to be done properly. Discover, verify, reconcile. Troy was discovered in the literature, and someone decided they didn't want there to have been any Troys. But they didn't do a good job of verifying this. This has happened more times than you can shake a stick at. The entire Hittite Empire was said not to exist, and there was some antihistory about the Assyrians also, but I forget the details just now.
