| Subject: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPERATION AND ORIGIN SCIENCE |
Author:
Pahu
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Date Posted: 15:39:16 10/27/08 Mon
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN OPERATION AND ORIGIN SCIENCE
Operation science deals with the way things normally operate. It examines how the world normally works in the present. It studies things that happen over and over again in a regular and repeated way. Operation science seeks answers that are testable by repeating the experiment over and over, and falsifiable if the cause does not always yield the same effect. Its conclusions should allow one to project what will happen in future experiments. Operation science likes things to be very regular and predictable. No changes; no surprises. So the idea of a supernatural being coming around to stir things up occasionally is strongly resisted. Because of this, it usually seeks out natural (secondary) causes for the events it studies.
Origin science is not just another name for giving evidence to support creationism. It is a different kind of science. Origin science studies past singularities, rather than present normalities. It looks at how things began, not how they work. It studies things that only happened once and, by their nature, don't happen again. It is a different type of study that requires a different approach. Rather than being an empirical science like physics or biology, it is more like a forensic science. Remember the TV show about a medical examiner named Quincy? Each week he tried to find out what and/or who caused a past singularity (a person's death) by examining the effect and deciding what kind of thing could have caused that event. That is what origin science seeks to do.
Now origin science works on different principles than operation science does. Since the past events that it studies cannot be repeated today, it uses analogies between the kinds of cause/effect relationships that we see today and the kind of effect that is being studied. Also, origin science does not claim to give definitive answers, but only plausible ones. We did not observe the events of origins, and we cannot repeat them (just as Quincy could not ask the murderer to kill the victim again). So the remaining evidence must be studied and interpretations of it measured by what seems most likely to explain the evidence. And just as operation science recognizes that some events demand an intelligent cause, origin science also admits an intelligent cause when the evidence calls for it.
The first step in the basic argument against evolution. is that It has taken the wrong approach. It has applied the principles of operation science to the study of origins. It is seeking regular and repeated causes for events that occurred only once. It has forced the operations that are presently working in the world to explain how the world got here in the first place. Using this method, it is a foregone conclusion that it originated by a process. Processes are what operation science studies. But it is confusion to assume that unique and singular events, such as the beginning of the universe or first life, should be studied in terms of a regular and repeated process. To understand origins, we must use origin science, not operation science.
[From When Skeptics Ask by Geisler & Brooks]
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