Feel free to correct my misunderstanding of your views. Your version describes consequences but leaves out meat and mechanism. Here's my own attempt to capture the essentials of classical Darwinism:
The life we see on Earth is the result of common descent diversifying through variation and natural selection.
The keywords, at any rate, are common descent (which you got), and "variation and natural selection" (the mechanism of diversification, which you omitted.)
But you did far better than most of your brethren do, mostly because it's important for strawmanning purposes to not get it so they don't. Miss the basics, and you're free to misunderstand higher-level properties of evolution, things like:
- Populations evolve. One particular dinosaur does not suddenly one day lay an egg and hatch out a bird.
- Ancestor species are allowed to stay around even if somewhere a descendant species is evolving away from them. The world is a big place and there can be room for both.
- Evolutionary changes are gradual, even in latter-day theories like punctuated equilibrium. A fruit fly will not become a mouse in one experimenter's lifetime.
Your definition of science, "a systematic investigation of nature", is inadequate. I was defining science, I wasn't writing a description of the scientific method.
For every hypothesis, there must be one or more axioms which are ASSUMED to be true.
You're just wiggling back toward hard facts being anything you want them to be because you want to ASSUME true what science keeps finding is untrue. The Earth is not young, sorry. Species do not appear to be separately created in discrete events, sorry.
OK. Maybe you have discussed evolution with 8,000 creationists, and found they were all lacking in a basic understanding of science. So, maybe it was fair to assume the next one you talk to will be the same. Just don't get stuck in that rut, or you'll be as guilty of dogmatism as the ones you are debating.
Try samping 8,000 in a row from a population, getting the same resulte 8,000 times, and not expecting the next one is another one.
I despise evolution being categorized with a true science like physics.
I'm sure you do, but you have a religious horror of evolution. You could have truncated the sentence after three words and it would still have been true. That colors your judgment on the matter.
Let's get down to brass tax.
Those would be tacks. (I know, I know! I'm as bad as anyone.)
What I really want to ask is, "How do you think a person can KNOW anything?"
By not chucking the accumulated efforts of science out the window, but rather learning some of it. If you look about you, we're not huddling in smoke-filled caves roasting bison cuts on a stick. Science converges upon an increasingly accurate description of nature and it works. To keep it up, though, to keep pushing the envelope, we have to accurately digest what the previous generation is trying to hand off to us.
Thanks for correcting the misuse of "tax". "Tacks" does make a lot more sense. Usually I have the reverse problem - mispronouncing words that I have only seen in print.
" You're just wiggling back toward hard facts being anything you want them to be because you want to ASSUME..."
Not really. I am trying to establish a principle. Regardless of our position, we must make ASSUMPTIONS before we begin, as you described, "a systematic investigation of nature". That is why your definition is incomplete even without getting into the method of inquiry. I suppose we could presume "investigation" to broadly include hypothesis, observation, testing, deduction and induction. So I will not press this point any further.
Regarding how anyone can KNOW anything, you responded, "By not chucking the accumulated efforts of science out the window, but rather learning some of it."
You are being too specific to the issue of evolution. I am asking more generally about ANYTHING. For example, how do we KNOW what happened on 9/11? One person in this forum, on your side of the evolution debate, claims he KNOWS what happened scientifically.
But I submit that since we did not directly observe the events in question, we KNOW what happened historically. We can test our assumptions of HOW the events unfolded by using science. But it would be ridiculous to assume we could recreate all the details of the events using scientific testing alone. We know about the details of a particular cell phone call because it was recorded on tape. But details that were not recorded become nothing more than educated guesswork.
"That colors your judgment on the matter."
Yes. It does. That does not make it incorrect.
There are two issues you have not addressed that are the heart of the matter. One, how a person KNOWS anything, philosophically speaking. Two, how that FAITH is a part of theory because we must rely on axioms we ASSUME to be true.
Do you only KNOW something if you personally experience it? Obviously you deny this because, as you pointed out, we learn from the generations before us. But what about today? How much information do you rely on that is provided by others' experiences. Is their experience firsthand, or are they relying on others' experiences also?
ALL scientific theories have axioms. Those axioms must be accepted by FAITH. Do you know what the axioms of evolution are?
A scientific theory can be "true" within the bounds of the theory without being true in the real world. For example, Euclidean geometry is "true" as long as you are discussing points and lines, which are imaginary. These do not correspond directly to reality and are therefore not precisely true. (Though they may be approximately correct.)
Even if the axioms of evolution are correct, the theory itself is not provable the way other scientific theories are. Yes, it may be falsifiable. But that test does not rise to the level which we can apply to a theory like electromagnetism. A big problem with falsifiability is that the theory can simply be modified to fit newly discovered data. For example, if a dinosaur bone fragment was found caught in the throat of a human fossil, and the bone revealed teeth marks that matched the human, evolutionary theory would probably need some adjustments. But be assured, it would not die out. In fact, many evolutionists would insist the finding was a hoax simply because it contradicts their assumptions. Others would begin speculating that maybe a frozen dinosaur had thawed and was eaten many millions of years later.
But a major reason to reject evolution being taught as fact has to do with the process of scientific investigation. Our ability to extrapolate meaning from accumulated data into a model of either past or future events becomes less reliable over time. This is why we can predict weather reasonably well for a few days in advance, but our predictions become less and less accurate as they look further into the future.
But not only does evolution require reliance on axioms which cannot be proved, the extrapolation of historical records far into the past, but we must ASSUME the CAUSE of the supposed historical events.
That animals and humans share similar characteristics is a matter of observation. It is also a fact that we share DNA coding. The question of WHY is the subject of debate.
To conclude that animals and people inherited our DNA from the SAME ancestry is merely hypothetical. This hypothesis has no greater merit on the surface than the idea that the DNA is similar because living things had the same DESIGNER.
Your reply was well-reasoned, but it remains for you to address the two main issues of KNOWLEDGE and FAITH.