Yes, but having a scientific background of my own I do not genuflect to the Great God Science. People who teach science of do scientific research still put their pants on one leg at a time and subscribe to any number of crackpot ideas. I don’t let people pull rank. And I don’t accept “trust me, I’m an expert.” I work in the Jack Grubman era.
”The real issue, when it comes to defending evolution, is not that the creationists object to the theory, but that they ignore the evidence. You would see exactly the same reaction by scientists if a significant number of Americans believed that the Earth was flat.”
The real issue when it comes to evolution is that its proponents are not willing to admit its flaws and shortcomings. It is an elegant theory and many pieces of evidence have been assembled to support it, but it is not totally persuasive. The reference to a flat earth is off the mark. I am sure that many learned people of long ago believed in a flat earth. They have been conclusively proved wrong for millennia and now with pictures from space and direct observation. The same cannot be claimed for evolution.
”Of course it's testable. The Genesis account says that the universe and the Earth are a few thousand years old; several independent methods date them as being of order 15 billion years old and 4.5 billion years old, respectively. The Genesis account says that the Earth was covered by a flood a few thousand years ago. This would have led to gross geological effects that have been shown not to exist. The Genesis account says that trees and grasses existed prior to the sun; the fossil record reveals a long history of life on Earth before the existence of grasses and trees, which could not have occurred without the sun.”
First the Genesis account says nothing about the age of the earth. Second, using a literal interpretation of Genesis (a “day” is a modern 24 hours) is a straw man. Intelligent Design does not require belief in a God of the Christian Bible. Don’t let prejudices force you to jump to conclusions. Intelligent Design allows for both religious and non-religious assumptions.
”The universe is the way it is, and not how we would wish it to be.”
That’s true. And the puzzle we’re creating may not correspond to the picture on the box, no matter how much we may be wedded to making it so.
” It will take billions of years to confirm our prediction that the sun will become a red giant; does that mean the standard solar model is not science? Scientific theories are required to be falsifiable, not necessarily conveniently falsifiable.”
Sometimes a scientific theory is conveniently unfalsifiable … until the theorizer is long dead.
”As a matter of curiosity, what does the evolution of man theorize we will be in another million years?[me]"
[you]Different, or more likely, extinct.
We can't predict what the weather will be for more than a few days. Does that mean that we have no scientific understanding of our atmosphere?"
Here you have a problem. You have an elaborate theory with claims of millions of years of data to draw on. You claim to be able to use fossil records to demonstrate the transformation of species (mental image of the “ascent of man”) and your predictive power is … zero, nada, nothing. There is a huge gap between different and extinct. Why didn’t you cover all the bases and say “the same to different to extinct.”
Weather prediction now is another interesting issue isn’t it. We have the issue of local weather and the bigger issue of climate change. I am old enough to remember the Holy Scientific Community predicting Global Cooling … now. having moved 180 degrees to predicting Global Warming … all within a few decades. Does this mean we have no scientific understanding of our atmosphere?
Ah, the vagaries of certainties in science. It should teach one humility.
Try this for a mental image:
Documentaries typically show australopithines or some similar "human ancestor" coming down from trees to live in the savannas. All such productions ignore the fact that there are real reasons why apes and monkeys live in trees: they are too slow on the ground and they make too much noise to survive very long other than in trees.
The most major difference between human infants and baby deer, for instance, is that baby deer have the sense not to attract attention to themselves. Picture some group of "proto humans" out on the savanna for the first time with thousand pound carnivores walking around all over the place, and picture some human infant screaming his head off the first time something displeased him. Kind of like somebody ringing a dinner bell...
That's fair, but we're not talking about some obscure technical point. We're talking about one of the basics of how I do my job. It's like asking a carpenter which way a screw turns, and then not accepting his answer without a published reference. But if I did give you a reference, why should you accept it any better than what I told you? The qualifications of the author are probably comparable to my own. I might have written the reference myself, for that matter.
They have been conclusively proved wrong for millennia and now with pictures from space and direct observation. The same cannot be claimed for evolution.
You illustrate my point.
You claim to be able to use fossil records to demonstrate the transformation of species (mental image of the “ascent of man”) and your predictive power is … zero, nada, nothing.
So let me get this straight. The fact that we can't predict supernovae means that the study of supernovae isn't scientific? The fact that we can't predict when an atomic nucleus can decay means there's no such thing as nuclear science? The fact that we can't predict an animal's behavior means that it can't be studied by science? The fact that we can't predict how a protein will fold means that biochemistry is not science? What does archeology predict for our civilization? What are the predictions of computer science?