Really?
/johnny
The crackpot fauna is really thick. Evolution gone horribly wrong.
“Explanations of what happened in the ancient past cannot be verified using experimentation and observation.”
So this is never true? Or is it sometimes true and sometimes not?
That is a too broad statement really, but there is some truth to it. I’d say that we can’t directly observe events in the ancient past in our locality, and we can’t experimentally verify many of the key phenomenon with our present limitations.
For example, if you hypothesize that the proto-Earth was composed of a certain ratio of elements, at a certain temperature, distance from the Sun, etc, and it evolved along a certain path, how can you possibly test that hypothesis? You can make a computer model, which could only model the evolution based on other speculative assumptions that you provide to it, but that is not experimental verification. You can’t simply create a reduced scale experiment, because reduction of scale would affect at least one hugely fundamental experimental variable, namely gravity, in an unacceptable way. If you were lucky enough to find a protoplanet with similar variables, orbiting a similar star, you couldn’t even observe that “pre-made” experiment, because the timescale is unfeasible.
So what is left? Thought experiments? Help me out here.
Perhaps the real question should be - what would be the benefit of proving evolution? What is the likelihood of proving evolution vs. proving a Creator as the source of life? What are the odds of some accidental start to life and then the evolving of all the plants/animals/insects/fish from further accidents? Who benefits from any of it?