Relevant Expert?

Are Claims Evidence? · Why Wouldn't Every Claim be Sufficient Evidence? · Visual Experience is Prima Facie Evidence · Relevant Expert?

I totally rely on the testimony of those who have studied the Krebs cycle about the Krebs cycle. (47:15 into the video)

But "testimony of relevant expert" depends a bit.

The citric acid cycle—also known as the Krebs cycle, Szent–Györgyi–Krebs cycle, or TCA cycle (tricarboxylic acid cycle)—is a series of biochemical reactions that release the energy stored in nutrients through acetyl-CoA oxidation. The energy released is available in the form of ATP.

I have no chemical equipment or equipment of biological extraction to study it, so, I rely on Albert Szent-Györgyi and Sir Hans Adolf Krebs.

No problem.

Why don't I extend the exact same confidence to a shrink, to a carbon dater or to a Heliocentric, when they are experts?

Some observations in psychiatry can be arranged by deliberate bullying. If hebephrenia leads to paranoia, that may have more to do with bullying than with hebephrenia or its underlying causes. Sleeplessness can be arranged with sleep privation. Intrusive tampering with someone's situation may not leave that person where he was before the tampering, so what you see may be what you came to see. And wouldn't have needed to.

The carbon dater and I cannot directly observe what the atmospheric content of carbon 14 was around the trees which gave charcoal to Göbekli Tepe. He will presume the original content in the sample, and the content in the atmosphere, was c. 100 pmC (the Hallstatt plateau, which we agree on, involves the atmosphere in 750 BC carbon dating to 200 years into the future, which translates to 102.449 pmC, and in 450 BC carbon dating 100 years into the past, which translates to 98.798 pmC. That's why a sample from 750 or 450 BC, or any time in between, typically carbon dates to 550 BC).

But I will allow the Biblical history (which has a higher epistemic value, simply as history, than indirect science) to infer that carbon 14 rose in the atmosphere and sometimes came from a lower initial value. 9500 BC isn't a date. 2608 BC is. In 2608 BC, 350 years after the Flood, when Babel / Göbekli Tepe started*, the atmosphere was at c. 43 pmC. Which also matches what in 2608 BC a sample originating from 100 pmC in 9500 BC would have had. He and I agree that in 2608 BC that sample had c. 43 pmC. But he interprets this as decay after the sample was sealed off, I interpret it as initial condition of the sample.

Neither the Heliocentric nor I can view Sun and Earth from a fixed point outside Earth. He'll presume the 0.76 arc seconds** about α Centauri being due to Earth moving, I'll presume they'll be due to the star moving. AND, I will presume the c. 20 arc second all stars move, "aberration" is also not due to earth, but to the stars. That's the background against which the parallax is measured. He will find this forms a triangle including the 2 Astronomic Units between two positions of the Earth. I'll not presume the star has the exact same pace as the Sun, so I'll not presume the distance between two positions of the star, parallax or aberration, are 2 Astronomic Units like two positions of the Sun are.

That we have different presuppositions leads to us having different conclusions. No need, on this level, to assume he's dishonest, but also no need to accept an "expert testimony" in a paradigm I have reasons to see as false. I think an actual scientist sharing my presuppositions would do a better job than me, but we would both do, and I'm the one actually doing a better job (on a level) than the scientist who has false presuppositions, before he tests the remaining carbon 14 level*** before he observes the star and perhaps not least, barring fatigue on my part, before he judges the man.

Again, a historian is a relevant expert on history. However, he's not the primary source of testimonial evidence.

In the example about the scientist, F is the fact the scientist studies, but F* is his testimony. But in history, you have F as the fact a historic person observed or reported observations of, F* is his report of own or someone else's observation, and the modern historian is in his turn giving only F**, his testimony of his evaluation of F* as relating to F. In a case where I have or the historian provides access to F*, I thereby have as good an access as he to the actual fact F.

Mutatis mutandis, in some cases he really has accessed very many F* (old chronicles) which I haven't. But in some cases, there only is one old chronicle for a fact. A grammar example is "Caesar fecit pontem ad lacum Genavam" and I'm afraid it could be just a grammar example, that an actual quote from Bellum Gallicum would be more like "Caesar ruit pontem ad lacum Genavam" (Caesar destroyed a bridge at Lake Geneva, rather than built one°) but either way, the only way we know of the events in c. 50 BC at Lake Geneva is what Caesar wrote. We have no independent confirming evidence.

One source from back then actually is enough.

Now, in some cases, we have sources that are not even contemporary. Any source for Alexander conquering Persia from Greece is centuries after the fact. The earliest narrative is in 1 Maccabees. Arrian is later.

This obviously gives me a certain perspective on the kind of "historians" who deal with the New Testament, not as Church Historians, but as Biblical Scholars, evaluating if NT events really happened. They have a tendency to use arguments that either aren't used or weren't usually used previously, on events in extra-Biblical events.

The other day I compared two views of the epistemology of Babel / Göbekli Tepe, between what I think went on as a Young Earth Creationist, and what a tradition would have looked like if Catalog number AO-6018 had been about what a video purported it to be about. It seems the video°° is wrong or deliberately planted to be misleading, but the principle remains that oral tradition over few centuries to millennia with Biblical patriarcal lifespans is better attested than one over many more millennia with modern lifespans.

Oral traditions are a valid transmission, unless the number of minimally overlapping generations are too many. As they would be between Göbekli Tepe if it were actually from 8000 BC and Sumeria, for a depiction like Madeleine Daines' tablet, or a description like the one spuriously attributed to Catalog number AO-6018. As they weren't between even Genesis 2 and 3 and Abraham, let alone between Babel and Abraham, if the patriarcal lifespans hold.

Now, I do think the patriarcal lifespans do hold, and I would NOT believe someone claiming today to be 900 years old, the next persons we'll meet who lived way beyond normal lifespans of today will be Henoch and Elijah. But I do believe lifespans were shortened. The expert who believes they weren't true in the first place isn't giving testimony to an actual observation, he's giving testimony to his prejudice. Again, the prejudice may be very honest, the expert may be very honest, but the prejudice would still be misleading him and misleading those who trust him.

Ultimately, my reply to someone who wanted me to trust expert evidence more than I do would get the reply that I don't think he'd trust an astrologer. And mind you, I'm not saying the astrologer is a charlatan either, he's just a believer in his, false, system.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra

PS, Joe is off on this one:

and then they learned that basically every single relevant competent expert accepts anthropogenic climate change and evolution that should that clearly should boost their credence in the proposition.

So, Georgia Purdom, who is a geneticist is not a single person, is not competent, or is not relevant for evolution being genetically impossible? Come on. But Joe does some hedging:

• "basically" = not literally, there are exceptions, but I don't care
• "relevant" = if a petrol searcher steps in to do Flood geology, I don't care, since evolutionary geology wasn't his main field
• "competent" = no one can step in, not just from a side discipline, but also not from amateurs ...

The only thing he should have added to make his alibi for believing evolution complete is "that I've heard of" ... supposing he genuinely is ignorant of the competence of experts in Creation Ministries International or Answers in Genesis./HGL

PPS, he gave examples "like the ice core data" which Tas Walker has looked on, or "like the fossils" which I have looked on from the site "palaeocritti" before it shut down. Parts of it, I could salvage on the salvage blog Palaeocritti Blog. While making it, I could read through sufficiently of the original site, done by experts, to know the fossil configurations of Algeria, Antarctica, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Niger, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, United Kingdom and just part of the United States, namely Arizona. I specially concentrated on land fossils, and no, you do not in these places find two layers of land fossils from different eras on top of each other. Especially not in Karoo, South Africa, which is where I started looking. A Capitanian fossil like Hipposaurus boonstrai isn't below a Wuchiapingian fossil like Gorgonops, just because Wuchiapingian is Upper and Capitanian Middle Permian. Instead you find Gorgonops in Tropidostoma assemblage zone and Hipposaurus in Tapinocephalus assemblage zone. These are side by side (contiguously or not, not sure) in the landscape, not different levels in a single dig./HGL

* On my reasons for Babel being roughly between 350 and 401 after the Flood, between Noah's death and Peleg's birth, and on Göbekli Tepe being Babel, elsewhere.

** One arc second is like the angle in the centre of Earth to two points on the surface 30.86 meters apart, so 0.76 arc seconds is like to two points 23.46 meters apart.

*** For a typical sample from Göbekli Tepe, it would be by now c. 25 pmC.

2608 + 2026 = 4634 years. 0.5^(4634 / 5730) = 0.5708857658404267,
43 * 0.5708857658404267 = 24.548 pmC.
2557 + 2026 = 4583 years. 0.5^(4583 / 5730) = 0.57441865962648,
51 * 0.57441865962648 = 29.295 pmC.

5730 * log(0.24548)/log(0.5) - 2026 AD = 9585 BC
5730 * log(0.29295)/log(0.5) - 2026 AD = 8123 BC

° Who can hear of Lac Leman / Lake Geneva without imagining a kidnapping of Professor Calculus? As to the grammar example, it illustrates that Caesar need not have built or destroyed with his own hands, a good translation would be "had a bridge built" or "had a bridge destroyed" rather than "built" or "destroyed" since he obviously gave the orders, but many others collaborated to execute them.

°° The Last Sumerian Who Remembered Göbekli Tepe — What He Wrote Before Dying (2900 BCE), which I cited. It seems Catalog number AO-6018 had a very different content, which can be gathered from the wiki article Tirigan, the tablet is the Utu-hengal victory stele. But the principle is valid for other Sumerian artefacts that seem to recall Göbekli Tepe, like the tablet found by Madeleine Daines and commented on by Graham Hancock.