Naturalism and Materialism: Cherry Picking the Data

The Rapid City Journal today has a feature on the creation science seminar coming up this weekend.

One of the disciples of evolution, however, doesn't like the idea of allowing any blasphemy against her religion in the classroom:

Maribeth Price, chair of the geology department at Tech, said the science and technology school teaches science, not religion.

“We teach the science as it is published and as it is known,” Price said. She finds the creation scientists’ conflict between faith and evolution overblown. “We can talk about intelligent design, but we don’t call it science,” Price said. “The earth could have been designed to work the way it does, but science can’t address the issue of design. I don’t think science can answer that question. That’s a religious question that involves a person’s belief, not science.”

Science will never address all the questions of design, since as finite beings we can't fully grasp the infinite genius God used in creating the earth, but science can and already has helped us to understand a lot about how God created and ordered the universe. (Is she forgetting the multitude of scientists who believed in creation such as Mendel, Newton, Pascal, da Vinci, Pasteur, Kepler and others?)

She also attempts to explain away the criticism of one of key supports of their fantastic theories:

Skepticism about radiometric dating methods, which measure the presence of various elements in rock, do not prove a young earth, she said. Neither does evidence of rapid sediment accumulation from volcanic eruptions such as Mount St. Helens.

“It is true that some things affect the accuracy of radiometric dating,” Price said, but those problems arise from the condition of the rock tested, not the method itself. Typically, those problems are from an inappropriate sample.

So if the sample has a reading that we know through observation is incorrect (such as the Mt Saint Helens lava dome that formed less than 30 years ago but has been dated at something like 2.8 million years), then it's a "bad sample."

But if the sample was formed beyond the range of human observation, then we can somehow "trust" that a reading of millions or billions of years is "correct."

And if the geological deposits and formations laid down rapidly at Mt. Saint Helens about 30 years ago happen to look a LOT like those at the Grand Canyon (that vast-agers claim took millions of years to form), that's just a "coincidence."

Very convenient. But it isn't science.

By the way, I often refer to naturalism, materialism and evolution as a "religion" because it meets all the criteria for being a religion: a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; scrupulous conformity; a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.

The main thing required to believe the unscientific claims of evolution is a lot of FAITH.