Replies

"That's easy; science is facts-and-theories. Facts by themselves don't mean much. A good theory organizes them into far greater usefulness."

Theories do not organize facts. Facts are facts, theories are not facts. Facts describe what we do know, theories describe what we do not know.

"A powerful theory includes existing facts and accommodates newly discovered facts, and also allows you to make testable predictions."

You've just made a definition of a theory that excluded the Theory of Evolution.

Theories are only as strong as their weakest link.

You can say that the fossil record has been used to test the Theory of Evolution, but you would be misleading yourself.

The theory of evolution says that species evolved from other species through random mutation directed by natural selection.

So how do you test if the "mutations" are truly random? We're talking about nearly an infinite number or random events over a nearly infinite period of time.

Natural selection is part of the theory because without it the theory of evolution would violate the second law of thermodynamics. However the strong don't always survive. Nature isn't a gentle guiding force, and random chance doesn't give you much confidence that things will progress in a positive direction.

So what if I take the "theory" of evolution, and replace the part about random mutations with mutations that are part of a design that includes diversity.

So why is random chance more credible than ID?

Either both are theories or neither is a theory.

Since the origin of this discussion is the battle over what should be taught in schools, why should evolution be taught and not ID?

If we're going to exclude both because they're not "science" then we're falling into the trap of the Luddite. If we exclude one and teach the other we are saying that one is more credible than the other, and that is simply untrue despite what some evolutionists would like you to believe.

The dirty little secret of the theory of evolution is that it doesn't meet the the standards for theories that some "scientists" like to use to try and exclude ID.

If the ACLU doesn't want ID to be taught as science, then they should be working to have the theory of evolution renamed as the philosophy of evolution. However, you won't see that happen, because the ACLU is an intellectually dishonest organizations that pushes for an agenda not for the truth.

"This is the first place ID has problems. What are the facts? What I see on these threads is more like, "Its too complex, so God did it." or "Its too complex for me to figure out, so it must have been designed." There are no facts there, just assumptions. Not even a good working hypothesis, as it cannot be tested against data."

Replace "God did it", with "it's random" and you're describing the issues with the theory of evolution.

"Evolution is a theory based on facts. The facts include hundreds of thousands of fossils, millions of existing plant and animal species, DNA, geological layers, and on and on and on."

That just takes us back to the weakest link of the theory of evolution.

How about this theory? Critters evolved from other critters as part of God's glorious plan.

All your wonderful evidence supports that theory just as well as it supports the theory of evolution. So why does my theory get scoffed at in "scientific" circles while the theory of evolution gets treated as fact?

You want the facts that ID is based on? Let me give it a try.

We don't know how the universe came to exist. We don't know why the laws of physics work like they do. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe can't have created itself, nor can it be self sustaining. The universe could simply be increasing continuously in entropy from an initial state, but how did that initial state of higher energy come to exist in the first place.

There's two general schools of thought about how our universe works. One is that there is no intelligent design and everything is a series of random events. The other is ID.

Evolution is a theory about how life evolved, however if you go back far enough in time and try and stick with the idea that everything is random, you violate the second law of thermodynamics.

What's the evolutionist's answer to that? They narrow the scope of the discussion. They say that evolution does cover how life began, just how it changed after it's point of origin. Basically they retreat to the point where the theory can no longer be disproved. However, their theory could basically be phrased as the miracle happened, then evolution started.

"In answer to your specific question, "If we start restricting science to things we understand, we become Ludditites." That is where theory comes in--you build a theory from the facts you do have, spin off some nice hypotheses and test them. If they are falsified, throw them out and start over. No Luddites there. That's how science works."

Agreed!

"And that's why ID doesn't fit into science."

Huh? Your's statements do not support your conclusion. What if your tests don't falsify your hypotheses? What then? You're left with a theory.

"Imagine a scientific conference. You present a paper saying, "God did it." I present a paper saying, "Old Man Coyote did it." What are we going to use for data to distinguish between these two hypotheses?"

What exactly is your point? If the hypothesis are the same, as in both are perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful beings, then it's already been proved by Saint Thomas Aquinas that they are the same being in his logical proof of the holy trinity 1200s.

Not a very useful proof if you discard the chance of their being a all-powerful, all-knowing being, but that's kind of beside the point since we can't prove or disprove the existence of such a being.

Whoever, to contrast your made up little conference, around 10 years ago there was a scientific fad over randomness and chaos theory. I would skeptically sum it up as a bunch of scientists starting with the assumption that everything we don't understand is random, and then looking for trends on a larger scale to be able to predict accurately events that they categorically insisted were random.

Don't get me wrong, there was good scientific research done under the guise of chaos theory. If was just the insistence on calling it chaos theory that was amusing.

The key thing you seem to be missing is that ID is a theory. We haven't been able to prove it, but we have been able to disprove some competing theories.

I'm not suggesting scientists should accept ID as fact. However, if they cannot disprove it, they have to consider it to be a possibility. If they can't figure out any new ways to try and prove it, then I guess they should spend their time trying to prove other theories, maybe even theories that contradict ID.

Remember, I'm not suggesting that we teach ID as fact in our schools, I'm suggesting that not teaching it as a theory is foolishness, and teaching the theory of evolution by itself is intellectual dishonesty.

"That's right, but you work on refining the theory by reference to data! What are the facts, and to how many decimal points."

Data, logical arguments, and references to scientific laws are all nice ways to attempt to prove or disprove theories.

So what data do you have to prove or disprove that the evidence we have shows that species have evolved due to RANDOM mutation? The key there is random.

You're using different criteria to judge two different theories. Use the same criteria to judge both.

Explain why one is better. I had lot of people tell me I don't know what I'm talking about, and others who debate the issue more politely such as yourself, but I still haven't had someone logically show me why the theory of evolution is a more scientific theory.

Maybe someone will do so, then I guess I'll learn something.

I like learning things. I try to do it every day.

Theories do not organize facts. Facts are facts, theories are not facts. Facts describe what we do know, theories describe what we do not know.

Sigh. Time for the Facts/Laws/Theories post again. Don't know who posted it originally:

From an NSF abstract:

“As with all scientific knowledge, a theory can be refined or even replaced by an alternative theory in light of new and compelling evidence. The geocentric theory that the sun revolves around the earth was replaced by the heliocentric theory of the earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. However, ideas are not referred to as "theories" in science unless they are supported by bodies of evidence that make their subsequent abandonment very unlikely. When a theory is supported by as much evidence as evolution, it is held with a very high degree of confidence.

In science, the word "hypothesis" conveys the tentativeness inherent in the common use of the word "theory.' A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world. Through experiment and observation, hypotheses can be supported or rejected. At the earliest level of understanding, hypotheses can be used to construct more complex inferences and explanations. Like "theory," the word "fact" has a different meaning in science than it does in common usage. A scientific fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. However, observations are gathered by our senses, which can never be trusted entirely. Observations also can change with better technologies or with better ways of looking at data. For example, it was held as a scientific fact for many years that human cells have 24 pairs of chromosomes, until improved techniques of microscopy revealed that they actually have 23. Ironically, facts in science often are more susceptible to change than theories, which is one reason why the word "fact" is not much used in science.

Finally, "laws" in science are typically descriptions of how the physical world behaves under certain circumstances. For example, the laws of motion describe how objects move when subjected to certain forces. These laws can be very useful in supporting hypotheses and theories, but like all elements of science they can be altered with new information and observations.

Those who oppose the teaching of evolution often say that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact." This statement confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have. Here is another nice page of what a theory is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory

"In common usage a theory is often viewed as little more than a guess or a hypothesis. But in science and generally in academic usage, a theory is much more than that. A theory is an established paradigm that explains all or many of the data we have and offers valid predictions that can be tested. In science, a theory can never be proven true, because we can never assume we know all there is to know. Instead, theories remain standing until they are disproven, at which point they are thrown out altogether or modified slightly.

Theories start out with empirical observations such as “sometimes water turns into ice.” At some point, there is a need or curiosity to find out why this is, which leads to a theoretical/scientific phase. In scientific theories, this then leads to research, in combination with auxiliary and other hypotheses (see scientific method), which may then eventually lead to a theory. Some scientific theories (such as the theory of gravity) are so widely accepted that they are often seen as laws. This, however, rests on a mistaken assumption of what theories and laws are. Theories and laws are not rungs in a ladder of truth, but different sets of data. A law is a general statement based on observations."

For Laws:

"A well-known example is that of Newton's law of gravity: while it describes the world accurately for most pertinent observations, such as of the movements of astronomical objects in the solar system, it was found to be inaccurate when applied to extremely large masses or velocities. Einstein's theory of general relativity, however, accurately handles gravitational interactions at those extreme conditions, in addition to the range covered by Newton's law. Newton's formula for gravity is still used in most circumstances, as an easier-to-calculate approximation of gravitational law. A similar relationship exists between Maxwell's equations and the theory of quantum electrodynamics; there are several such cases. This suggests the (unanswered) question of whether there are any ultimately true physical laws, or whether they are all just cases where our sensory and rational apparatus have generated mathematically simple approximations, valid within the range of normal human experience, to unobtainable true formulas."