Posted: Feb 20, 2016 12:49 pm
Rumraket wrote:Hobbes Choice wrote:Fenrir wrote:Uniformitarianism is not an assumption. Tis a conclusion.
We might have had the arrogance to conclude it, but is remains an assumption.
And when Charles Lyell asserted it as a doctrine is was not obvious in any sense. On a godly world, and in a superlunary universe, in which God can assert any change or cause by divine will, the adoption of uniformitarianism was somewhat controversial, denying god is power and enclosing his will in the natural and deterministic world of the necessity of cause and effect.
All it would take to falsify the hypothesis of uniformitarianism is for god to actually intervene in the world.
For example, god could make the Mt Everest suddenly stand somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with every square-centimeter of it's surface covered in biblical passages and the clouds form images of Jesus on the cross while a loud booming voice was simultaneously heard everywhere in the world informing us that it was the christian god speaking and that he'd moved the Mt. Everest into the Atlantic.
You can falsify uniformitarianism without ANY reference to God.
All you need is ONE inexplicable phenomenon, to cause you to doubt it.
In fact, since UFMTRNISM is a statement about an eternal and timeless assertion, it can only EVER be held as an assumption, since the future is not available to our evidence.