Nuntar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 4592
Registered: 02-20-2007
IP: Logged
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Re: NO ESCALATORS (+1)
Aww, don't tell me I missed the best part of an evolution debate? I guess I'll have to go back and reply to one point at a time.
(1) "The only other theory of how the world as we know it came to be (evolution) has so many little flaws." All scientific theories have little flaws; that's why they get refined over time into better ones that get gradually closer to the truth. There's still much left to discover in evolution as in all other fields of science, but unless you can find some big flaws, the theory isn't likely to be replaced by something completely different.
(2) "Creationism explains exactly what it's supposed to: the origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Of course it doesn't predict anything, it's a theory of the origin of life." Then in what sense can it explain anything? A theory with no predictive power is like Calvin's dad explaining that wind is caused by trees sneezing. Might be true, might not, and if true then it does give a picture of the causation underlying observed events -- but it's not clear what part of any of this deserves to be called an explanation. An explanation should be something that makes parts of a picture fall into place so that you can see something simpler underlying them and bringing them together.
(3) "Everything (or at least a lot) of the things in the Bible that can be proven have, so it follows logically that that which cannot be proven is also correct." That's not logic, it's induction -- the same principle that underlies the discovery of scientific truths. But in this case it's faulty induction. If 999 randomly chosen statements from a book all turn out to be true, you can be pretty sure that the thousandth is probably also true. But if a book has sections on history and sections on theology, and the historical sections turn out to be true, that doesn't guarantee anything about the theology. They're such different fields that even if the book was written by one writer, it would be entirely plausible that he knew lots about history and nothing about theology.
(4) "Evolutionists are the same way about Evolution. They say that Creation is not a viable scientific theory (neither is Evolution, by the way), but then make arguments against Creation as if it proves Evolution." I'm not responsible for what any particular evolutionist has said, but even if some of them have used this faulty reasoning, that doesn't disprove evolution. The fact is, evolutionists are keen to make arguments against creationism because many people are convinced of the truth of creationism and need to be unconvinced before they will look at the evidence for evolution with an open mind. But the evidence is there; there are a lot more reasons why I believe in evolution than just because I don't believe in creationism.
(5) As for evolution "not being a viable scientific theory", I'd like to know why you think that -- as the only thing you've said so far that really carries bite, it deserved a little more respect than being confined to a parenthetical comment. If your main argument here is that we can't get into a time machine and observe the evolution of the giraffe, I wonder whether for the same reason you would say that geology is not scientific, or astronomy, or even the reconstruction of unrecorded proto-languages in linguistics. All the knowledge we have comes from observing the present state of the world, but in all these cases we can make hypotheses about what the past must have been like for the present to be the way it is, use these hypotheses to make predictions about as-yet unknown aspects of the present state of things, and test these predictions. Sounds pretty scientific to me.
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50th Skywatcher
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