epistemology, science, kinds of knowledge, methodology
The key to explaining everything in a domain is to project the data onto an explanatory space that is intuitively clear. So evolutionists project all life onto an axis defined by the extremes of law and chance. If they are presented with evidence of design, they just analyze it onto law and chance and say …
People often fail to distinguish different types of creation. Primary creation is creation from nothing. It requires not only a supernatural ability but a transcendent being — one who is beyond creation. Secondary creation is creation from something but that requires supernatural abilities such as super-strength or super-intelligence. Tertiary creation is one that happens via …
The confusion and disagreements about creation models shows the need to have accurate terminology. Accordingly, I suggest some standard terminology such as the following to distinguish types of Christian teaching on creation: The Creation Chronicles (CC) are the actions and events explicitly recorded in the Bible regarding the beginning and earliest years of the created …
A quarter note in music is classically known as a quaver. A sixteenth note is half of a quaver, which is called a semiquaver. For a thirty-second note the prefix “demi” is used instead of a second “semi” to make a demisemiquaver. Similarly, a sixty-fourth note is a hemidemisemiquaver. As we shall see, these prefixes …
Different kinds of explanation may be distinguished by how they project phenomena onto ranges over pairs of opposites. For example, an explanation may focus on natural laws but acknowledge measurement error or noise as well. A combination of law and error/noise is one kind of explanation. Other kinds of explanations combine created and fallen aspects, gradual and …
Data-driven (DD) science is focused on the collection and use of a diverse archive of observations. Data analysis discovers generalizations in the archive, which are inductively extrapolated to the world. This leads to a search for empirical consequences and their corroborating (or not) data via field observations and experiments. New results are added to the archive …
There are different sources of knowledge: historical, scientific, engineering, business, philosophical, theological, etc. They work best when they work together. For example, even the best business could not construct a very good bridge if they ignored engineering knowledge. This also applies to the sciences. The natural sciences need to consider knowledge from history and engineering …
Some creationists emphasize the difference in religious/metaphysical assumptions of creationism vs. evolutionism as if this explains almost all their differences. But if that were true, creationists should focus on defending their religious/metaphysical assumptions instead of criticizing evolution. Since they do spend much time criticizing evolution, they are at least implicitly saying they have enough in common with …
In broad Aristotelian terms, this is how it happened: Aristotle articulated four types of causes — material, efficient (mechanism), formal (design), and final (purpose) — with the final cause as the most important. His biology tried to find these causes but he had to speculate about final causes and his biology failed. Fast-forward to Francil …
For Lakatos, what we think of as a ‘theory’ may actually be a succession of slightly different theories and experimental techniques developed over time, that share some common idea, or what Lakatos called their ‘hard core’. Lakatos called such changing collections ‘Research Programmes’. (1) Here is a description of three research programmes concerned mainly with …
