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At the risk of debating something you think is meaningless to participate in... Having axioms is not a problem if the parties are prepared to reconsider them.

At the risk of debating something you think is meaningless to participate in... Having axioms is not a problem if the parties are prepared to reconsider them. At the time Omphalos was published, there were people who were genuinely prepared to change their minds -- Darwin himself started as a creationist (interestingly, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, an influential scholar in his own right, was an evolutionist, and drew the analogy between domestication and evolution that was helpful for Charles) -- and the fact that Gosse was ridiculed by creationists suggests that the debate had not ossified. These days, all the arguments have been made, and the only sensible course would be to agree to differ. I think most evolutionists, aside from Dawkins and a few others, would be happy to leave it at that, if it were not for the repeated attempts by creationists to subvert education. More specifically, “Earth came to be naturally billions of years after the Big Bang” is not an axiom, it is a conclusion drawn from evidence, and the axiom is more like "physical evidence never lies (even if it can be misconstrued)." The creationist axiom is more like "This book never lies", and “Earth came to be last Thursday” appears to be a tongue-in-cheek and apparently counterfactual claim made to trigger debate.

AmericanChopper 7y ago
Being prepared to change ones mind about the axioms you put your faith in is not related to this contention. A scientific argument for why a religious idea is wrong is equally as irrelevant as a theological argument for why a scientific idea is wrong. If you want to challenge a scientific axiom, you do it using the scientific method, if you want to challenge a religious axiom, then you do it using the relevant theological framework. The idea that one set of axioms is better than another though is quite easily falsifiable. Axioms are the unprovable assumptions on which all domains of knowledge are built, and all unprovable assumptions are equal in their unprovable-ness. > These days, all the arguments have been made, and the only sensible course would be to agree to differ. Perhaps, but I’d say we just understand enough today to know when different ideas are trying to answer different questions. If you generalise science to be a method of explaining the nature of the universe, as we observe it, then I don’t think it’s a contentious point to say that religion generally attempts to answer a completely different set of questions, ones that cannot be explained with science. A religious answer to a scientific questions is equally as irrelevant as a scientific answer to a religious one, and even when they’re in contention, the contention is really only superficial. If you believed the universe was created last Thursday, that wouldn’t necessarily have any impact at all on the nature of the universe we observe today.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Being prepared to change ones mind about the axioms you put your faith in is not related to this contention. A scientific argument for why a religious idea is wrong is equally as irrelevant as a theological argument for why a scientific idea is wrong. If you want to challenge a scientific axiom, you do it using the scientific method, if you want to challenge a religious axiom, then you do it using the relevant theological framework. The idea that one set of axioms is better than another though is quite easily falsifiable. Axioms are the unprovable assumptions on which all domains of knowledge are built, and all unprovable assumptions are equal in their unprovable-ness. > These days, all the arguments have been made, and the only sensible course would be to agree to differ. Perhaps, but I’d say we just understand enough today to know when different ideas are trying to answer different questions. If you generalise science to be a method of explaining the nature of the universe, as we observe it, then I don’t think it’s a contentious point to say that religion generally attempts to answer a completely different set of questions, ones that cannot be explained with science. A religious answer to a scientific questions is equally as irrelevant as a scientific answer to a religious one, and even when they’re in contention, the contention is really only superficial. If you believed the universe was created last Thursday, that wouldn’t necessarily have any impact at all on the nature of the universe we observe today.