Darwinism the root of the culture of death: expert

"How you can assume that something is present despite no evidence of it is beyond me."

No, the point was that you claim to be able to 'test' something that may not be there because you claim to be able to 'quantitate' from 'evidence' when what you are really doing is extrapolating based on a philosophy.

"And simply rejecting the huge body of evidence supporting "macro" evolution because you think that evolution is proof-positive that God does not exist and you don't want to believe that God doesn't exist is not a valid argument."

So now you claim to know that I "think that evolution is proof-positive that God does not exist and you don't want to believe that God doesn't exist is not a valid argument." Not even an original strawman but entirely fallacious nonetheless.

"If you want to address the actual evidence, and you can offer a scientifically-sound, hypothesis-driven alternate theory, by all means, feel free to do so."

Again... the 'evidence' is simply philosophy masquerading as 'science'.

"I should also point out that just because a science is primarily observation based, and not controlled-experiment based, does not make the science invalid. I already discussed this."

And I already pointed out that extrapolating observations into unobservable, assumed events is not science but philosophy.

"As far as extrapolating goes, that is a perfectly valid method of advancing science. In order to extrapolate, one must make certain assumptions which one believes are supported by the data. Those assumptions can be tested."

So how does one test extrapolations made back into unobserved time and unobservable assumed events?

"Starting with the fact that I'm a real scientist, and I did make that claim, as I believe most real scientists that I know would also claim, that rather shows your last statement was disproved before you even typed it."

Can you not see that you simply 'begged the question' as to whether you and your stated belief that 'most real scientists you know' (fallacy of appeal to popular opinion noted) are, in fact, real scientists? A scientist relies on observation and testing. There is simply no way to scientifically observe and test the claim that 'evolution resultd in sapient and sentient species'. You pile fallacy on top of fallacy on top of fallacy and claim it is 'science'. It is not. That is purely a philosophical position, not a scientific one.

"You may choose to believe that sapient and sentient species do not exist."

Another strawman fallacy where you try to imply what I may believe. As I said, fallacy on top of fallacy on top of fallacy.

"As I've said, I really don't get into all of that existentialist nonsense aka philosophy."

The fact is that philosophy and logical fallacy are the bulk of your position.

There is no religion of "Darwinism." Ditto for the imaginary religions of "Scientism", "Materialism", "Naturalism", or whatever "-ism" you want to attribute to scientists. Science is an academic pursuit. It is not a religion, nor are we scientists its worshippers.

From Dictionary.com:

re·li·gion
^{/rɪˈlɪdʒən/ Show Spelled[ri-lij-uhn] Show IPA
noun 1. a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

2. a specific fundamental set of beliefs and practices generally agreed upon by a number of persons or sects: the Christian religion; the Buddhist religion.

3. the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices: a world council of religions.

4. the life or state of a monk, nun, etc.: to enter religion.

5. the practice of religious beliefs; ritual observance of faith.}

A person's "religion" is the system of beliefs by which they live their life. It may or it may not be what they CLAIM it is (e.g. plenty of claim to be Christians, but they are actually atheists, secularists or Darwinists).

You can try all you want to say that there are no worshipers of Darwinism, but that doesn't make you correct.

Thank you for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!

Interestingly, Marx loathed philosophy and insisted his theories were science, not philosophy:

Marxism: Science or Philosophy?

“We recognize only one single science, the science of history. You can view it from two sides, and divide it into the history of nature and the history of people... . In direct opposition to German philosophy which came down from heaven to earth, we here intend to rise from earth to heaven — that is we will not start from what people say, imagine, represent to themselves, nor from thought-of, represented or imagined people, in order to arrive afterward at bodily people; we will start from really acting people, and try to deduce from their actual life-process the development of these ideological images and reflections of that life-process. For these misty formations in the brains of people are necessary sublimations of their material, empirically ascertained life-process, which is bound up with material conditions. In this way morals, religion, metaphysics, and other forms of ideology, lose their apparent independence. They have no history, they have no development; only people, developing their material production and their material relations, change also in the course of this activity their thinking and the products of their thinking... .

“Thus where speculation stops, that is, at the threshold of real life, a real positive science begins, a representation of the activity, the practical process of the development of people. Phrases about consciousness disappear, their place to be occupied by real knowledge. When you begin to describe reality, then an independent philosophy loses its reason for being. In its place may be found, at the most, a summary of the general results abstracted from an investigation of the historical development of man... .

Sir Karl Popper addressed that claim in his speech (linked earlier) and of course found the claim wanting.

The use of the term "historical sciences" is, as far as I can tell, meant to denigrate the pursuit of knowledge where a body of evidence was formed in the past. To my knowledge, real scientists do not use this terminology.

Google the term and you will discover people on both sides of the creation/evolution debate objecting to the term as helpful to the other side.

I use it to describe a real difference between science disciplines. And I am not alone. From the evolution side of the debate:

This is Science!

Empirical and Historical Science

The sciences are not all the same either. Although the process of science remains the same, the nature of the observations may differ. These observations can be either non-historical (time independent) or historical (time-dependent) (Simpson, 1963). Sciences like physics, chemistry and much of molecular biology are largely non-historical, although they may rely on historical observations in particular instances. They deal with observations that are not expected to change with time — they are time independent. An experiment done today should produce the same results as one done 10 years ago or 10 years in the future. For example, water should always flow downhill because the effect of gravity does not change with time, whether it be a billion years ago, yesterday, or today. We can expect that gravity will not change in another billion years. Sciences like astronomy, anthropology, much of biology, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology are largely historical, although each uses experiments commonly.

Historical sciences rely on observations or evidence (results) of phenomena that happened in the past. These results arose through a series of events, the history, and each event was contingent on previous ones. Historical scientists can only infer the causes from the results, since the results happened in the past...

Historical science has a greater margin of error most of the time than non-historical, experimental science because scientists cannot repeat each event and must view only the results of those events through a filter of time. That margin should not, however, be mistaken for a lack of knowledge. We understand the formation of the Grand Canyon in all aspects, but not in every detail. In evolutionary biology, so-called missing links are details, not evidence that destroys the theory. Just because you may not have any information about your great great grandmother does not invalidate her existence nor that she is a part of your history. Paleontology and evolutionary biology are largely historical sciences that reveal the broad patterns, and very commonly even the detailed patterns, of evolutionary history. Gaps do exist in that record, just as there are likely to be gaps in your own family's historical record, but that does not invalidate or make the science less substantive.

As I mentioned earlier at post 509, Henry Gee, Editor of "Nature" was not so kind. He said:

“For example, the evolution of Man is said to have been driven by improvements in posture, brain size, and the coordination between hand and eye, which led to technological achievements such as fire, the manufacture of tools, and the use of language. But such scenarios are subjective. They can never be tested by experiment, and so they are unscientific. They rely for their currency, not on a scientific test, but on assertion and authority of their presentation.”

Evidently you have no use for Philosophers of Science like Sir Karl Popper and Carol Cleland - both of whom I've linked earlier in this thread.

Likewise, I have no use for "just so" stories which constitute much of the hypotheses offered by the historical sciences, e.g. anthropology, archeology, Egyptology, evolution biology.

That we are able to observe adaptation of wildlife in the field or evolution of bacteria in the laboratory does not make "just so" stories any less the fabrications that they are.

In my view, the historical record is simply too spotty for historical sciences to be taken as seriously as the hard sciences, e.g. physics.

Mathematics, to a large extent, was invented to conceptualize physical phenomena.

We are polar opposites here as well. For instance, I would say that the geometry (e.g. circle) exists, and the mathematician came along and discovered it.

Again, scientists cannot test what isn't there. If you have a way to test, examine, or quantitate something of which there is no evidence, please share it.

Obviously they cannot test what is not there. It is equally ridiculous to say that there can only be one explanation for evidence in the historical record.

As Cleland put it, paraphrased, the inability to perform tests should be offset by proliferating alternative explanations and then searching for a smoking gun to discriminate between them.

Failure to do that makes the only explanation offered smack of religious dogma as well as a "just so" story.

from wagglebee: a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies

Spirited: In the context of religion there has always been a “religion of Darwinism,” though not in the exact form it has taken today.

When searching for a natural (Godless) mechanism to explain biological evolution Darwin enthroned “randomness and chance,” thereby reviving the very ancient idea of Chaos, the watery void, the “one substance” that was believed (i.e., Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks) to be the first thing in existence from which the god (i.e., Ra) and/or gods and goddesses created themselves and then mankind, and all else.

Since all things are of Chaos, and Chaos is the antithesis of order, absolutes, universal truth-claims, enduring principles, history, etc., there is no logical source for true science. Magic replaces true science, myth replaces history and moral relativism replaces universal truth-claims.

With Darwinism “nothingness, randomness, and chance” are Chaos and rather than the gods, “matter” spontaneously generated (created) itself from “nothing” (Chaos). And the first things generated by matter? The earth (the Goddess Gaia) and a “watery pond” teeming with primordial life.

And of course, because there is no logical source for universal truth-claims, America and the West have naturally fallen into myth, magic, and moral relativism.

This is a brief sketch your religion, exDemMom.

What remarkable advance could not have been made without belief in evolution?

PubMed is the largest and most widely used medical/biological research database in existence. It also contains a wide variety of articles from other disciplines.

A search with the keyword "evolution" returns 311,652 hits. Keeping in mind that "evolution" has other meanings unrelated to the theory, I read the titles of the articles on the first two pages of hits. Out of those, 26/40, or 65% were studies directly examining evolutionary principles. Of the remaining, the relation of 6 (15%) to evolutionary principles was unclear, and another 7 (17.5%)were clearly not related to the theory of evolution. The remaining article was, in fact, a letter to the editor about one of the evolutionary articles, so I did not categorize it.

Since discussion of the theory of evolution involves a fairly specialized vocabulary, I also did a search of "phylogeny", a method of examining evolutionary relationships. This resulted in 106,145 hits, all of which discuss evolutionary research, since phylogeny has no alternate meanings.

This is by no means an exhaustive listing of research related to evolution: many people base their research in evolutionary principles without ever using the terminology. Any time animals are used in a study as proxies for human disease, evolutionary principles are being applied. The testing of prototype drugs starts on simple organisms, and works its way up through organisms that are more and more closely related to humans, until the last stage before human testing is in non-human primates--this whole testing scheme becomes totally meaningless if one tries to pretend that nothing has an evolutionary relationship to anything else.

The field of microbiology uses the theory of evolution extensively. Microorganisms evolve constantly, which puts selective pressure on us to evolve, which puts pressure on them, etc., in a kind of biological arms-race.

Whether you choose to accept the scientific evidence, or you continue to deny its existence because you feel that acknowledging it is equivalent to admitting that there is no basis for religious faith is up to you. As long as people with your attitude don't have the ability to direct that religion be taught in science classes, or to withhold research funding for evolutionary research, I really don't care. Personally, I have not bought into this ridiculous belief that God can't possibly exist if the Genesis creation story isn't literal.

Obviously, you have absolutely no understanding of how the scientific method works, and no desire to learn how it works. I included a link to an explanation of it, even though I think that trying to describe it to you is a waste of time.

All anti-scientists have a motivation. That is the only motivation that makes sense within the context of creationism-based anti-science. If you didn't feel that scientific fact is a threat to your religion, you wouldn't be arguing so strenuously against it.

And I already pointed out that extrapolating observations into unobservable, assumed events is not science but philosophy.

If logical deductions are not a valid part of scientific method, then not only must we throw away science, but we should ditch criminal law, as well. People make extrapolations about the most likely sequence of events all the time, without direct observation. Fact of life: we cannot observe every process at all times. Logical deduction =/= philosophy.

So how does one test extrapolations made back into unobserved time and unobservable assumed events?

You mean, like testing the supposition that events outlined in Genesis actually took place as described--that circa 6000 years ago, God spoke and the entire universe sprang into existence? That God spoke again, and all of the plants and animals sprang fully formed from the soil? That God took a bit more of the soil and formed a man, and took a rib from that man to make his nearly identical twin sister? Please, you tell me, because I have no idea.

"Out of those, 26/40, or 65% were studies directly examining evolutionary principles."

Unfortunately, 'examining evolutionary principles' simply begs the question that evolution exists in the first place. Again we see the use of logical fallacy as 'argument' for evolution.

You said, "...remarkable advances in the biological and medical sciences which wouldn't have been possible without that theoretical framework" and have failed to name a single one. Lots of hand-waving but couldn't name a single 'remarkable advance'.

I'm trying to understand what 'remarkable advance' you think couldn't have been made without an evolutionary framework? Should be easy for you to name one so that we could discuss it.

"The field of microbiology uses the theory of evolution extensively. Microorganisms evolve constantly, which puts selective pressure on us to evolve, which puts pressure on them, etc., in a kind of biological arms-race."

And how would that differ from a biology that was created with a broad ability to adapt? Unless you contend that certain unique evidences are supportive only of evolution, you are engaging in a philosophical choice, not reaching an empirical conclusion.

"Whether you choose to accept the scientific evidence, or you continue to deny its existence because you feel that acknowledging it is equivalent to admitting that there is no basis for religious faith is up to you."

Ah, again with implying that you can understand my beliefs and motivations. You couldn't be more wrong. But I understand that you need to misrepresent me before you respond to my points.

So, to reiterate...

What scientific evidence have I denied?

What 'remarkable advance' could only have been made using an evolutionary framework?

And how does one test extrapolations made back into unobserved time and unobservable assumed events?

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