Fact, Fable, and Darwin (If you haven't read this already, you should!!!)

I write as neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had produced one, and for many decades every competent evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the experts have kept quiet when true believers have sworn in court and before legislative bodies that Darwin's theory is proven beyond any possible doubt, that's not what reputable biologists, including committed Darwinians, have been saying to one another.

Without question, Charles Darwin would be among the most prominent biologists in history even if he hadn't written The Origin of Species in 1859. But he would not have been deified in the campaign to "enlighten" humanity. The battle over evolution is not an example of how heroic scientists have withstood the relentless persecution of religious fanatics. Rather, from the very start it primarily has been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science.

When a thoroughly ideological Darwinist like Richard Dawkins claims, "The theory is about as much in doubt as that the earth goes round the sun," he does not state a fact, but merely aims to discredit a priori anyone who dares to express reservations about evolution. Indeed, Dawkins has written, "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane...."

That is precisely how "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Huxley, hoped intellectuals would react when he first adopted the tactic of claiming that the only choice is between Darwin and Bible literalism. However, just as one can doubt Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis without thereby declaring for Marxism, so too one may note the serious shortcomings of neo-Darwinism without opting for any rival theory. Modern physics provides a model of how science benefits from being willing to live with open questions rather than embracing obviously flawed conjectures.

What is most clear to me is that the Darwinian Crusade does not prove some basic incompatibility between religion and science. But the even more immediate reality is that Darwin's theory falls noticeably short of explaining the origin of species. Dawkins knows the many serious problems that beset a purely materialistic evolutionary theory, but asserts that no one except true believers in evolution can be allowed into the discussion, which also must be held in secret. Thus he chastises Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, two distinguished fellow Darwinians, for giving "spurious aid and comfort to modern creationists."

Dawkins believes that, regardless of his or her good intentions, "if a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of Darwinian theory, that fact is seized upon and blown up out of proportion." While acknowledging that "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record" is a major embarrassment for Darwinism, Stephen Jay Gould confided that this has been held as a "trade secret of paleontology" and acknowledged that the evolutionary diagrams "that adorn our textbooks" are based on "inference...not the evidence of fossils."

According to Steven Stanley, another distinguished evolutionist, doubts raised by the fossil record were "suppressed" for years. Stanley noted that this too was a tactic begun by Huxley, always careful not to reveal his own serious misgivings in public. Paleontologist Niles Eldridge and his colleagues have said that the history of life demonstrates gradual transformations of species, "all the while really knowing that it does not." This is not how science is conducted; it is how ideological crusades are run.

By Darwin's day it had long been recognized that the fossil evidence showed that there had been a progression in the biological complexity of organisms over an immense period of time. In the oldest strata, only simple organisms are observed. In more recent strata, more complex organisms appear. The biological world is now classified into a set of nested categories. Within each genus (mammals, reptiles, etc.) are species (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.) and within each species are many specific varieties, or breeds (Great Dane, Poodle, Beagle, etc.).

It was well-known that selective breeding can create variations within species. But the boundaries between species are distinct and firm--one species does not simply trail off into another by degrees. As Darwin acknowledged, breeding experiments reveal clear limits to selective breeding beyond which no additional changes can be produced. For example, dogs can be bred to be only so big and no bigger, let alone be selectively bred until they are cats. Hence, the question of where species come from was the real challenge and, despite the title of his famous book and more than a century of hoopla and celebration, Darwin essentially left it unanswered.

After many years spent searching for an adequate explanation of the origin of species, in the end Darwin fell back on natural selection, claiming that it could create new creatures too, if given im-mense periods of time. That is, organisms respond to their environmental circumstances by slowly changing (evolving) in the direction of traits beneficial to survival until, eventually, they are sufficiently changed to constitute a new species. Hence, new species originate very slowly, one tiny change after another, and eventually this can result in lemurs changing to humans via many intervening species.

Darwin fully recognized that a major weakness of this account of the origin of species involved what he and others referred to as the principle of "gradualism in nature." The fossil record was utterly inconsistent with gradualism. As Darwin acknowledged: "...why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

Darwin offered two solutions. Transitional types are quickly replaced and hence would mainly only be observable in the fossil record. As for the lack of transitional types among the fossils, that was, Darwin admitted, "the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

Darwin dealt with this problem by blaming "the extreme imperfection of the geological record." "Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care." But, just wait, Darwin promised, the missing transitions will be found in the expected proportion when more research has been done. Thus began an intensive search for what the popular press soon called the "missing links."

Today, the fossil record is enormous compared to what it was in Darwin's day, but the facts are unchanged. The links are still missing; species appear suddenly and then remain relatively unchanged. As Steven Stanley reported: "The known fossil record...offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."

Indeed, the evidence has grown even more contrary since Darwin's day. "Many of the discontinuities [in the fossil record] tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting," noted the former curator of historical geology at the American Museum of Natural History. The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism, Stephen Jay Gould has acknowledged. The first problem is stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear. The second problem is sudden appearance. Species do not arise gradually by the steady transformation of ancestors, they appear "fully formed."

These are precisely the objections raised by many biologists and geologists in Darwin's time--it was not merely that Darwin's claim that species arise through eons of natural selection was offered without supporting evidence, but that the available evidence was overwhelmingly contrary. Unfortunately, rather than concluding that a theory of the origin of species was yet to be accomplished, many scientists urged that Darwin's claims must be embraced, no matter what.

In keeping with Darwin's views, evolutionists have often explained new species as the result of the accumulation of tiny, favorable random mutations over an immense span of time. But this answer is inconsistent with the fossil record wherein creatures appear "full-blown and raring to go." Consequently, for most of the past century, biologists and geneticists have tried to discover how a huge number of favorable mutations can occur at one time so that a new species would appear without intermediate types.

However, as the eminent and committed Darwinist Ernst Mayr explained,The occurrence of genetic monstrosities by mutation...is well substantiated, but they are such evident freaks that these monsters can only be designated as 'hopeless.' They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination through selection. Giving a thrush the wings of a falcon does not make it a better flyer....To believe that such a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type, capable of occupying a new adaptive zone, is equivalent to believing in miracles.

The word miracle crops up again and again in mathematical assessments of the possibility that even very simple biochemical chains, let alone living organisms, can mutate into being by a process of random trial and error. For generations, Darwinians have regaled their students with the story of the monkey and the typewriter, noting that given an infinite period of time, the monkey sooner or later is bound to produce Macbeth purely by chance, the moral being that infinite time can perform miracles.

However, the monkey of random evolution does not have infinite time. The progression from simple to complex life forms on earth took place within a quite limited time. Moreover, when competent mathematicians considered the matter, they quickly calculated that even if the monkey's task were reduced to coming up with only a few lines of Macbeth, let alone Shakespeare's entire play, the probability is far, far beyond mathematical possibility. The odds of creating even the simplest organism at random are even more remote--Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, celebrated cosmologists, calculated the odds as one in ten to the 40,000th power. (Consider that all atoms in the known universe are estimated to number no more than ten to the 80th power.) In this sense, then, Darwinian theory does rest on truly miraculous assumptions.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the current situation is that while Darwin is treated as a secular saint in the popular media and the theory of evolution is regarded as the invincible challenge to all religious claims, it is taken for granted among the leading biological scientists that the origin of species has yet to be explained. Writing in Nature in 1999, Eörs Szathmay summarizes that, "The origin of species has long fascinated biologists. Although Darwin's major work bears it as a title, it does not provide a solution to the problem." When Julian Huxley claimed that "Darwin's theory is...no longer a theory but a fact," he surely knew better. But, just like his grandfather, Thomas Huxley, he knew that his lie served the greater good of "enlightenment."

When The Origin of Species was published it aroused immense interest, but initially it did not provoke antagonism on religious grounds. Although many criticized Darwin's lack of evidence, none raised religious objections. Instead, the initial response from theologians was favorable. The distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Gray hailed Darwin for having solved the most difficult problem confronting the Design argument--the many imperfections and failures revealed in the fossil record. Acknowledging that Darwin himself "rejects the idea of design," Gray congratulated him for "bringing out the neatest illustrations of it." Gray interpreted Darwin's work as showing that God has created a few original forms and then let evolution proceed within the framework of divine laws.

When religious antagonism finally came it was in response to aggressive claims, like Huxley's, that Newton and Darwin together had evicted God from the cosmos. For the heirs of the Enlightenment, evolution seemed finally to supply the weapon needed to destroy religion. As Richard Dawkins confided, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Atheism was central to the agenda of the Darwinians. Darwin himself once wrote that he could not understand how anyone could even wish that Christianity were true, noting that the doctrine of damnation was itself damnable. Huxley expressed his hostility toward religion often and clearly, writing in 1859: "My screed was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom...both of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is to see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies." According to Oxford historian J. R. Lucas, Huxley was "remarkably resistant to the idea that there were clergymen who accepted evolution, even when actually faced with them." Quite simply, there could be no compromises with faith.

Writing at the same time as Huxley, the leading Darwinian in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, drew this picture:

On one side spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress stand under the bright banner of science; on the other side, under the black flag of hierarchy, stand spiritual slavery and falsehood, irrationality and barbarism, superstition and retrogression.... Evolution is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth. Whole ranks of...sophistries fall together under the chain shot of this...artillery, and the proud and mighty structure of the Roman hierarchy, that powerful stronghold of infallible dogmatism, falls like a house of cards.

These were not the natterings of radical circles and peripheral publications. The author of the huge review of The Origin in the Times of London was none other than Thomas Huxley. He built his lectures on evolution into a popular touring stage show wherein he challenged various potential religious opponents by name. Is it surprising that religious people, scientists as well as clerics, began to respond in the face of unrelenting challenges like these issued in the name of evolution? It was not as if they merely were asked to accept that life had evolved--many theologians had long taken that for granted. What the Darwinians demanded was that religionists agree to the untrue and unscientific claim that Darwin had proved that God played no role in the process.

Among those drawn to respond was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who is widely said to have made an ass of himself in a debate with Huxley during the 1860 meeting of the British Association at Oxford. The relevant account of this confrontation reported: "I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr. Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop arose and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley...arose...and spoke these tremendous words. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous."

This marvelous anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution. In his celebrated Apes, Angels and Victorians, William Irvine used this tale to disparage the bishop's snobbery. In his prize-winning study, James Brix went much farther, describing Wilberforce as "naive and pompous," a man whose "faulty opinions" were those of a "fundamentalist creationist" and who provided Huxley with the opportunity to give evolution "its first major victory over dogmatism and duplicity." Every writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation.

Trouble is, it never happened. The quotation above was the only such report of this story and it appeared in an article titled "A Grandmother's Tales" written by a non-scholar in a popular magazine 38 years after the alleged encounter. No other account of these meetings, and there were many written at the time, made any mention of remarks concerning Huxley's monkey ancestors, or claimed that he made a fool of the bishop. To the contrary, many thought the bishop had the better of it, and even many of the committed Darwinians thought it at most a draw.

Moreover, as all of the scholars present at Oxford knew, prior to the meeting, Bishop Wilberforce had penned a review of The Origin in which he fully acknowledged the principle of natural selection as the source of variations within species. He rejected Darwin's claims concerning the origin of species, however, and some of these criticisms were sufficiently compelling that Darwin immediately wrote his friend the botanist J. D. Hooker that the article "is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." In a subsequent letter to geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin acknowledges that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me." Indeed, several of Wilberforce's comments caused Darwin to make modifications in a later revision of the book.

The tale of the foolish and narrow-minded bishop seems to have thrived as a revealing "truth" about the incompatibility of religion and science simply because many of its tellers wanted to believe that a bishop is wrong by nature. J. R. Lucas, who debunked the bishop myth, has suggested that the "most important reason why the legend grew" is, first, because academics generally "know nothing outside their own special subject" and therefore easily believe that outsiders are necessarily ignorant, and, second, because Huxley encouraged that conclusion. "The quarrel between religion and science was what Huxley wanted; and as Darwin's theory gained supporters, they took over his view of the incident."

Since then the Darwinian Crusade has tried to focus all attention on the most unqualified and most vulnerable opponents, and when no easy targets present themselves it has invented them. Huxley "made straw men of the 'creationists,'" as his biographer Desmond admitted. Even today it is a rare textbook or any popular treatment of evolution and religion that does not reduce "creationism" to the simplest caricatures.

This tradition remains so potent that whenever it is asked that evolution be presented as "only a theory," the requester is ridiculed as a buffoon. Even when the great philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that the standard version of evolution even falls short of being a scientific theory, being instead an untestable tautology, he was subjected to public condemnations and much personal abuse.

Popper's tribulations illustrate an important basis for the victory of Darwinism: A successful appeal for a united front on the part of scientists to oppose religious opposition has had the consequence of silencing dissent within the scientific community. The eminent observer Everett Olson notes that there is "a generally silent group" of biological scientists "who tend to disagree with much of the current thought" about evolution, but who remain silent for fear of censure.

I believe that one day there will be a plausible theory of the origin of species. But, if and when that occurs, there will be nothing in any such theory that makes it impossible to propose that the principles involved were not part of God's great design any more than such a theory will demonstrate the existence of God. But, while we wait, why not lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth?

Rodney Stark was professor of sociology at the University of Washington for many years and is now university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. He is author of For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press) and other acclaimed books on science and religion.

Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, is a preeminent mathematical physicist, and one of the most wide-ranging thinkers and writers in modern science. These observations are drawn from interviews with Monte Davis and Stewart Brand.

QUESTION: How do we understand the universe at all? Do you agree with Carl Sagan that humans find the mathematics of gravitation so simple and elegant because natural selection eliminated the apes who couldn’t understand?

DYSON: Not at all. For apes to come out of the trees, and change in the direction of being able to write down Maxwell’s equations, I don’t think you can explain that by natural selection at all. It’s just a miracle.

QUESTION: You have written that “as we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” Is that a playful suggestion?

QUESTION: Then we seem to be talking about sentiments that most people would consider religious. Are they religious for you?

QUESTION: The dominant tendency in modern science has been to assert that we occupy no privileged place, that the universe does not care, that science and religion don’t mix. Where do you fit into those ideas?

DYSON: The tendency you’re talking about is a modern one, not old. I think it became almost a dogma only with the fight for acceptance of Darwinism, Huxley versus Bishop Wilberforce, and so on. Before the nineteenth century, scientists were not ashamed of being religious, but since Darwin, it’s been taboo.

The biologists are still fighting Wilberforce. If you look now, the view that everything is due to chance and to little bits of molecular clockwork is mostly propounded by biologists, particularly people like Jacques Monod—whereas the physicists have become far more skeptical about that. If you actually look at the way modern physics is going, it’s very far from that. Yes, it’s the biologists who’ve made it so hard to talk about these things.

I was reading recently a magnificent book by Thomas Wright, written about 1750, when these inhibitions didn’t exist at all. Wright was the discoverer of galaxies, you know, and he writes:

“I can never look upon the stars without wondering that the whole world does not become astronomers; and that men, endowed with sense and reason, should neglect a science that must convince them of their immortality.”

QUESTION: There’s a provocative sentence in your book Imagined Worlds: “The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.” What do you mean by that?

DYSON: It’s the numerical accidents that make life possible. I define an interesting universe as one that is friendly to life, and especially one that produces lots of variety.

DYSON: If you look at just the physical building blocks, there’s a famous problem with producing carbon in stars. All the carbon necessary for life has to be produced in stars, and it’s difficult to do. To make carbon, you’ve got to have three helium atoms collide in a triple collision. Helium has an atomic weight of 4, and carbon is 12. Beryllium, at 8, is unstable, therefore you can’t go from helium to beryllium to carbon; you have to make helium into carbon in one jump. This means three atoms colliding together.

DYSON: No. But Fred Hoyle, who discovered this process, came up with one of the most brilliant ideas in the whole of science. He said that in order to make carbon abundant as it should be, there must be an accidental, coincidental resonance. This means that there’s a nuclear state in the carbon nucleus at precisely the right energy level for these three atoms to combine smoothly. The chance of having that resonance in the right place is maybe 1 in 1,000. Hoyle believed it must be there in order to produce the carbon. Of course, the nuclear physicists then looked for this resonance, and found it!

There are other famous cases: The fact that the nuclear force is just strong enough to bind a proton and a neutron to make the heavy isotope hydrogen, but not strong enough to bind two protons to make helium with an atomic weight of 2. Just two protons stuck together is a rather narrow range of strength. So the nuclear force is fine-tuned so that hydrogen doesn’t burn to helium right away. If the two hydrogen nuclei did bind, all the hydrogen would burn to helium in the first five minutes. The universe would then be pure helium and a rather boring place. Whereas, if the force were a little bit weaker, so that the neutron and the proton didn’t bind, you wouldn’t get any heavy elements at all. You’d have nothing but hydrogen. Again, this would make for a boring universe.

Yep, that is our underlying difference on approach. I treat facts as irreformable. I do not accept as fact anything that is on shakey ground. For me to view something as fact, it cannot stand any chance of being disproven or it was not a fact to begin with. I largely come from a mathmatics background. And I view truth as Objective - not subjective. Anything that is true is factual. Anything which is false, subjective or Unreliable is not factual unless proven.

Categorizing information properly is of utmost import. And treating subjectives or suppositionals as factual is fallacious. It risks corrupting data and leading one to false conclusions. When applied to everyday life, doing this would lead to increadibly boneheaded decisions. I would note specifically what has happened in Iraq re intelligence information. Treating subjectives as facts can really burn you. And apparently, I'm to be led to believe that science is as cavalier with what it references as fact as, say, the tinfoil hat nutcases that believe Elvis is alive and well, faked his death and is working for the CIA somewhere. People have largely dumbed down the language to blur lines. I would posit that the lines should never have been allowed to become so clouded. And that perhaps it is high time language was put to proper use and some proper terminology set in place or recognized.

Can you tell me what you think is in conflict between the two?

People using the scientific method, unlike creationists, do not start assuming there is an immutable truth. If there was such a thing then there would be no need for observations or experiments to confirm it because it is known APRIORI that it is the truth. This means there would be no need for science and intellectual pursuit in general. This was the state of affairs in Europe in the Middle (Dark) Ages. The scientific method had not been "invented" yet, so religious dogma ruled supreme.

This is the very reason why many religions (Christianity, Islam, Marxism, etc) are often in conflict with science. They all start with apriori, "immutable truths" about the physical universe. When science refutes these beliefs through experiments and observations, the true believers go to war against science, as the Catholic church did against Galileo and Copernicus, and as today's fundamentalists are doing against evolution, and as Islam has squalched most scientific research (that is why they are in the state they're in).

In my view, any religious belief that does not embrace honest scientific pursuit (or at least coexist with it) is doomed to failure, because it forbids the full use of some of gods most precious gifts to man - awareness, the senses, imagination, curiousity, and our rational brain. This is the real sin against god - and he doesn't take it lightly. Such belief systems are relegated to the dustbin of history.

For me to view something as fact, it cannot stand any chance of being disproven or it was not a fact to begin with.

Do you believe the theory of gravity is a fact, or a supposition?

For me to view something as fact, it cannot stand any chance of being disproven or it was not a fact to begin with.

How do you think something becomes "proven"? Can you point me to the deductive proof of the law of gravity?

I largely come from a mathmatics background. And I view truth as Objective - not subjective. Anything that is true is factual. Anything which is false, subjective or Unreliable is not factual unless proven.

...and how do you know which facts belong in which category? For 200+ years, Newtonian mechanics based on the Newtonian notion of a fixed-frame universe in which time and space were uniform prevailed, was touted as the poster boy of objective reality, and was cited as the premier example of an unassailable fact.

Do you regard the pythagorian theory as proven, since a deductive proof exists? Do you regard the fundamental assumptions of Euclidian geometry, upon which that proof is based, as proven? On what basis? Do you have a proof?

Are you aware of Godel's Proof? How does your thesis square with the proof that there must be truths in a discrete formal system that can't be proved, and falsities that can't be disproved?

Just because you would like for there to be unassailable "facts" in the universe, does not constitute a proof that they, in fact, exist--even if you wish really, really hard. It amuses me that people of your frame of mind about this want to call themselves "objectivists" when, in fact, what you are doing is substituting your desire for the universe to look clearer and more certain than it really is, by assigning more substance to what the evidence suggests, than the evidence itself contains.

And the evidence, most graphically, as far as science is concerned, from the permutations in the law of gravity in the last 100 years, is that what we know, we know provisionally, not as immutable "facts" that are somehow cagegorically distinct from mutable facts.

Whereas, the chemical feedback loops and the cellular architecture in which they operate does not "define" how you will be constructed?

If you have ever coded software, imagine a data file (DNA) being used as a basis for a program. The program will run but only based on the executeable that can process the DNA. Incidentally, Animal biology does not allow Humans to process their dna and vis versa. So the DNA is specific to it's given executeable - that being the human reproductive system in this case and the human defense mechanisms built into the cells.. Getting a little deep; but, essentially the chemical reactions you're talking about may happen as part of the running of the program as it were. It is the input making selections within the application which then draws upon the datafile to produce a result. The reaction is limited to the information available in the DNA with the obvious exception that I believe you would agree with - of a problem in execution: wherever it may derive from.

So, you have functional applications built into the biology of the critter involved that run on base4. Our computer systems are only base2 (0's & 1's). It goes without saying that working an order of magnitude above our best science gives DNA enormous storage capacity. And I would dare say it would tend to make it difficult to understand. I've broken down assembled code without a disassembler and I can vouch for how difficult it is to understand even base2 coding systems if you don't understand the machine their running on and what the code means. You could come across a jmp, mov or int statement equivelant in base 4 and have no idea what you were looking at if you didn't know how the data is processed or on what basis. Does the biology move data in packet sizes similar to a base 2 byte? Considering an 8bit byte in base 4, you then have 4^8 as a max capacity per byte, and now an integer for base 4 is 4^16. Does the biology have registers and an interrupt system? Intriguing possibilities from the standpoint of a puter geek; but, just fleshed out a bit to appreciate the scale.

So, DNA is the data file used for defining the limits for the executable to operate in. The rest is input for the excecutable to work against the data with to produce the output.

I didn't say that. I would say that I reject as factual anything that is supposition. Remember the childhood story of the three little pigs? Highly relevant even if geared toward children. Christianity teaches the same principle but through a parable about sowing seed and one about foundations. Higher math (analytical Geometry, trig, Calc), Physics, Computer programming and basic chemistry all taught me the need for solid data and precision along with the consequence of not having it. It amazes me the cavalier attitude toward the worth of data that I hear expressed here. It is as though the notion of absolutes is wasted on you and the idea of precision is lost.

It is not to say that I don't trust any data science puts out because I do trust aircraft. Been in them all my life.
I trust our technology in general. And I try to keep an awareness of the shortcomings and dangers of them. But, to say I have great confidence in something when a group hands me supposition and calls it fact... Not with my training.
Especially not where something as controversial and full of holes as evolution is concerned. Not on your life would I recognize any of that bloat as fact until proven beyond a doubt.

It's like taking the word of a known liar when you're dealing with controversy. You pick it to death before putting any faith in it. And thus far, my picking has only led me to have confidence in my instinct toward reluctance.
The field has inspired a great deal of useful work and data; but, it has generated just as much that I would readily dismiss on the basis of it's trustworthiness alone. Chiefly - dating methodology. I don't believe that bad information is better than none at all when dealing with some things. History is one of them.

If you can't garauntee your dates any better than the 300 year difference in the israeli and egyptian timelines produced because of carbon and strata dating.. The impact to history has been immense. It is the difference between finding or not finding King Saul in history. Properly attributing Jericho from scripture, the correct gates built by Solomon, and on the other side, establishing an accurate timeline for egypt, a correct line of rule, propper attribution for conquests, etc.. on down the line. Screwing it up just a tiny bit left a 300 year gap that practically disowns Israel from history. An entire people. IMO, that could have been intentional. I will prefer to say it was as much method at the very least. And that's an aweful big gaff to be cavalier about. If you can't be anymore accurate in the near term with the equipment, it would be disturbingly worse and far less reliable on the longer term. So, I'd dump the dating techniques till you guys can get your acts together and present something people can have absolute confidence in without reservation. I don't see that day coming; but, I'd rather have no precise dates than see people screw things up as bad as the example I've given.

Not sure what you mean? Please expand...

I'll assume you are referring to this:

. 1st Law of Thermodynamics... Energy (matter) can neither be created nor destroyed, How does life happen in a closed system?

How do crystals, snowflakes, and weather form?

I am making an assumption that you actually meant the 2nd law of thermodynmics, regarding entropy. I have never heard an argument about the conservation of energy somehow prohibiting life from occuring naturally. In what manner do you think the fact that the net energy in the universe is conserved stops life from happening?--Where that argument wouldn't equally prohibit snowflakes and stalactites. Unless you correct me, and suggest an argument as to why conservation of energy implies life can't happen, I will assume you meant the 2nd law.

...

Crystals, snowflakes and weather form out of what would otherwise be homogeneous systems in fluid suspension, and, like life, change the kinetic energy of random fluid flow into variously symmetric, nonrandom, and heterogenous patterns of stored potential energy--climbing the entropy gradiant to do so, and thereby apparently violating the 2nd law of Thermodynamics (and NOT the 1st, for that matter).

So, my point, which was subsequently made by others here equally well, is that the model you are proposing for the seat of life's genesis is inaccurate. Life did not develop in a closed system, for all practical purposes, it developed in a local anti-entropic gradient where the Sun, and volcanos, gave the earth's surface free energy for a huge amount of time, and the entropic piper will not have to be paid until the sun and earth become undifferentiable dust particles in space.

The second law doesn't say entropy (or randomness) goes up for all time, everywhere. It says the net entropy of a closed system has to go up.

If you can't garauntee your dates any better than the 300 year difference in the israeli and egyptian timelines produced because of carbon and strata dating..

The greek and roman engineers couldn't guarantee a tunnel dug into both sides of a good-sized mountain at once (a common practice to speed things up) would meet anywhere close to the middle. Do you think they were therefore wasting their time trying to triangulate as close as possible to aiming the tunnels at each other? Even very imprecise measures have their uses. This example, more than once, saved cities under siege from surrendering. Science accepts provisional answers and so does engineering. How many pieces of large, totally bug-free software did you ever ship?

Their error on road measurements didn't disown an entire nation from history and make everything in their history suspect for years.

Imprecise measures have their uses in contexts where what's at stake is small in nature. The meeting of two ends of a road is not that big a deal by comparison to what essentially made Israel out to be a pack of liars with regard to their history. I know you want to minimize that; but, it is worse than liberals rewriting history with regard to Vietnam.

Science accepts provisional answers; but, name one time when science has taken responsibility when it has been wrong and it has cost anyone anything. Do you suppose the scientists will apologize to Israel for painting them liars for all this time with their "factual" data that can be "trusted" as provisional? There is a difference between a minor excusable mistake and one that disowns an entire nation of people. I would hope to think that in the face of that one could offer something more hopeful than handwringing.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.