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To: Wallace T.
It is difficult for scientific observation to come to an irrefutable conclusion.

It's damn near impossible for any sort of inductive process to come to an irrefutable conclusion, but I'd bet good money that you don't let that stop you from employing the process in other parts of your life. You can put your hand on a hot stove and get burned 10,000 times in a row, and it's still not irrefutable proof that you'll get burned on the 10,001'st try - you never know for sure, really. But I bet you only had to do it once to take a single experience as proof enough and modify your behavior appropriately.

Forget science - you don't get certitude anywhere in real life, and yet you surely believe in all sorts of things that are fundamentally uncertain. You can certainly object to the nature or the amount of evidence, but if you object to it on grounds of a lack of certitude, then you also have no legitimate right to believe almost anything you currently believe to be true. You don't know for an irrefutable fact that your house is still going to be there when you leave work tomorrow, but I suspect you believe it will be there anyway, based on the evidence available to you.

511 posted on 12/20/2004 1:10:26 PM PST by general_re ("What's plausible to you is unimportant." - D'man)
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To: general_re
That my home will exist when I return from work is a reasonable assumption, but not an irrefutable one. One may not be burned by a hot stove so long as you take the precaution of a oven mitt or hot pad. Most scientific hypotheses are reasonable and may be used with a high degree of confidence. The conclusion that a hot stove will burn an unprotected hand contradicts no proposition of conservative Christianity or any other faith.

The problem with macroevolution and even perhaps the old universe is that the hypotheses of mainstream science spill over into metaphysics. The statement that the various species of life developed over a period of hundreds of millions of years through a series of evolutionary events, unguided by a superior intelligence is contradictory to the Biblical statement that in the beginning God created those species by fiat. Contradictions cannot exist. A person has four alternatives: to accept the hypotheses of mainstream science and reject the concept of a divine creator, to accept the claims of the Bible in spite of the evidence of the scientific mainstream, to try to synthesize or harmonize the two positions, or to come up with another hypothesis.

551 posted on 12/20/2004 2:01:57 PM PST by Wallace T.
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