In our first article we talked about theory, fact, and evidence. The next word we need to explore is perception. The dictionary describes perception as an attitude or understanding based on what is observed or thought. This week I sat in on an eighth grade science class for the purpose of observing prior to becoming a substitute teacher. Interestingly enough they were discussing sight and the ability to observe. The teacher had them do an experiment. She placed in front of each student and myself a stack of cards. On the first card was a green square. The experiment was based around the ability of the eye to detect color. Now, what is color?
If we use the color green as the teacher did we will see a wavelength of light roughly in the 520-570 nm wave length. Green is considered to be one of the additive primary colors. On the HSV Color Wheel, the complement of green is magenta; that is a color corresponding to an equal mixture of red and blue light which is one of the purples. On a color wheel based on traditional color theory, the complementary color to green is considered to be red.
Try this. Take a green magic marker and make a rectangle about one inch by three inches and color it. Then stare intently at the green square for sixty seconds. As you stare at it you’ll see a pink glow around the edges. When you see the glow, take a white sheet of paper and stare at it. What you will see is not a green square but a pink one. Now you ask the question, what does that have to do with what we’ve been discussing?”
In this experiment the teacher used different color cards. As the experiment progressed and the students wrote down what they saw it became evident that some saw different shades than others. One student’s perception of color was different than some of the other students, and according to Doctor Jeremy Walter science is the human enterprise of seeking to describe accurately and quantitatively the nature and process of our universe through observation, hypothesis, and experimental validation.
How many times have you been with a group of people and all of you observed the same event but came away with different conclusions?
Science says that the earth is billions of years old. How did they come to that conclusion? The essence of this so called scientific evidence is based on what we would call feasibility studies. Simply put, its evidence compiled to support one particular model of earths history. Now, how do I back that statement up?
There is a law called, the law of causality, or cause and effect. This law states that one cause can have many effects, but no effect can be quantitatively greater or qualitatively superior to its cause. So what does that mean? The definition of cause states,
A person or thing that makes something happen or exist or is responsible for something that happens.
The effect means, a change or changed state occurring as a direct result of action by somebody or something else.
Now, according to Wikipedia the law is stated as such.
Causality or causation denotes the relationship between one event called cause and another event called effect which is the consequence or result of the first.
This informal understanding suffices in everyday usage, however the philosophical analysis of causality or causation has proved exceedingly difficult. The work of philosophers to understand causality and how best to characterize it extends over a millennia of time. In the western philosophical tradition explicit discussion stretches back at least as far as Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy journals. Though cause and effect are most often held to relate events, other candidates include processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of afairs; which of these comprise the correct causal relationship, and how best to characterize the nature of the relationship between them, has as yet no universally accepted answer, and remains under discussion.
According to Sowa (2000), up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:
The first being that, "Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect.
The second, "Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect. (which in my mind eliminates theistic evolution)
And three, "Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000) (This in my mind eliminates evolution in general)
However, according to Sowa (2000), "relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience."
So another words these laws apply to us as humans but not at the level of creation, after all relativity and quantum mechanics are the sciences used to determine the basic building blocks of creation and the big bang theory. With this statement a question arises in my mind and here again its my belief that evolutionists have had to change their line of thinking.
But I think what is more important for the common person is not so much this law but the word observation. Observation always relates to the present. As much as science would like to observe the past though technology there’s a flaw which takes us back to the experiment done in an eighth grade classroom. Just as different students saw different shades of color, observation made in a controlled environment can be flawed because of a misinterpretation by the brain because of preconception. If that can happen in a controlled environment, think about observations made where we don’t know what the outcome will be. Now, if we can observe a situation in a controlled environment and make mistakes in the here and now, what kind of mistakes will be made the further removed from the time the event took place.
So where did science come up with the age of the earth since we have no human records available. Here again its through observation. The problem with observation when there is no documented evidence we sometimes ignore evidence that is contradictory to the theory or hypothesis we’re attempting to prove because of preconceived ideas. Lets take for example the light from stars. Light travels at 186,000 mps. Using that fact which is real they calculate the time it took for the light from the star to reach earth. The math is ok, unless we figure in what it says in Genesis 1:14
And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
However, with a preconceived idea that Genesis is a myth and God doesn’t exist you have to establish a great age to develop your theory. Evolutionists theorize that places like the Grand Canyon and other geologic formations took millions of years to form and the great flood of Genesis was only a myth. After looking at all the data surrounding the eruption of Mount St. Helens it was demonstrated that a cataclysmic event could produce the same effect in a much shorter time period and the dating processes used by evolutionist require us to re-examine science as it is being taught.
So is the earth millions of years old as Darwinian evolution would have you believe, or is it about ten thousand years as the creationist believe? The only answer I can come up with is, nobody really knows. But I would ask you this. If God is who he said he is, then He is timeless. If God is who He said is and was and is to be, then he has always been in the mode of creating, and in my opinion our universe may just be a small part of an endless creation in the making.
If we use the color green as the teacher did we will see a wavelength of light roughly in the 520-570 nm wave length. Green is considered to be one of the additive primary colors. On the HSV Color Wheel, the complement of green is magenta; that is a color corresponding to an equal mixture of red and blue light which is one of the purples. On a color wheel based on traditional color theory, the complementary color to green is considered to be red.
Try this. Take a green magic marker and make a rectangle about one inch by three inches and color it. Then stare intently at the green square for sixty seconds. As you stare at it you’ll see a pink glow around the edges. When you see the glow, take a white sheet of paper and stare at it. What you will see is not a green square but a pink one. Now you ask the question, what does that have to do with what we’ve been discussing?”
In this experiment the teacher used different color cards. As the experiment progressed and the students wrote down what they saw it became evident that some saw different shades than others. One student’s perception of color was different than some of the other students, and according to Doctor Jeremy Walter science is the human enterprise of seeking to describe accurately and quantitatively the nature and process of our universe through observation, hypothesis, and experimental validation.
How many times have you been with a group of people and all of you observed the same event but came away with different conclusions?
Science says that the earth is billions of years old. How did they come to that conclusion? The essence of this so called scientific evidence is based on what we would call feasibility studies. Simply put, its evidence compiled to support one particular model of earths history. Now, how do I back that statement up?
There is a law called, the law of causality, or cause and effect. This law states that one cause can have many effects, but no effect can be quantitatively greater or qualitatively superior to its cause. So what does that mean? The definition of cause states,
A person or thing that makes something happen or exist or is responsible for something that happens.
The effect means, a change or changed state occurring as a direct result of action by somebody or something else.
Now, according to Wikipedia the law is stated as such.
Causality or causation denotes the relationship between one event called cause and another event called effect which is the consequence or result of the first.
This informal understanding suffices in everyday usage, however the philosophical analysis of causality or causation has proved exceedingly difficult. The work of philosophers to understand causality and how best to characterize it extends over a millennia of time. In the western philosophical tradition explicit discussion stretches back at least as far as Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy journals. Though cause and effect are most often held to relate events, other candidates include processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of afairs; which of these comprise the correct causal relationship, and how best to characterize the nature of the relationship between them, has as yet no universally accepted answer, and remains under discussion.
According to Sowa (2000), up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:
The first being that, "Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect.
The second, "Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect. (which in my mind eliminates theistic evolution)
And three, "Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000) (This in my mind eliminates evolution in general)
However, according to Sowa (2000), "relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience."
So another words these laws apply to us as humans but not at the level of creation, after all relativity and quantum mechanics are the sciences used to determine the basic building blocks of creation and the big bang theory. With this statement a question arises in my mind and here again its my belief that evolutionists have had to change their line of thinking.
But I think what is more important for the common person is not so much this law but the word observation. Observation always relates to the present. As much as science would like to observe the past though technology there’s a flaw which takes us back to the experiment done in an eighth grade classroom. Just as different students saw different shades of color, observation made in a controlled environment can be flawed because of a misinterpretation by the brain because of preconception. If that can happen in a controlled environment, think about observations made where we don’t know what the outcome will be. Now, if we can observe a situation in a controlled environment and make mistakes in the here and now, what kind of mistakes will be made the further removed from the time the event took place.
So where did science come up with the age of the earth since we have no human records available. Here again its through observation. The problem with observation when there is no documented evidence we sometimes ignore evidence that is contradictory to the theory or hypothesis we’re attempting to prove because of preconceived ideas. Lets take for example the light from stars. Light travels at 186,000 mps. Using that fact which is real they calculate the time it took for the light from the star to reach earth. The math is ok, unless we figure in what it says in Genesis 1:14
And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
However, with a preconceived idea that Genesis is a myth and God doesn’t exist you have to establish a great age to develop your theory. Evolutionists theorize that places like the Grand Canyon and other geologic formations took millions of years to form and the great flood of Genesis was only a myth. After looking at all the data surrounding the eruption of Mount St. Helens it was demonstrated that a cataclysmic event could produce the same effect in a much shorter time period and the dating processes used by evolutionist require us to re-examine science as it is being taught.
So is the earth millions of years old as Darwinian evolution would have you believe, or is it about ten thousand years as the creationist believe? The only answer I can come up with is, nobody really knows. But I would ask you this. If God is who he said he is, then He is timeless. If God is who He said is and was and is to be, then he has always been in the mode of creating, and in my opinion our universe may just be a small part of an endless creation in the making.
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