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To: Dante Alighieri
I said: "To embrace one interpretation over another requires belief."

You said: No, it isn't.

Interesting. So what would you call embracing one interpretation over another?

By your logic, accepting genetics over pangenesis is a belief, accepting the Big Bang theory over steady-state theory is a belief, and accepting the Alvarez theory over gradualistic extinction is a belief.

Of course.

they're simply theories with the most evidence and the most accurate explanation for the current data.

And there are varying theories depending on one's interpretation of the data. So you choose to either believe one interpretation of the data, or you choose to believe another. It is belief.

I realize that for evols, that's a terrifying word, so they avoid it like the plague. Seems quite irrational to me.

335 posted on 08/24/2006 2:13:22 PM PDT by MEGoody (Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.)
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To: MEGoody

"So what would you call embracing one interpretation over another?"

Provided that the hypothetical situation in which you propose, wherein an interpretation A explains a data set C and an interpretation B similarly explains a data set C, except with greater evidence and confirmed predictions, I would call it accepting the evidence and the interpretation provisonally.

"Of course."

And how precisely are these beliefs? Pangenesis, for example, is horribly wrong; of course we accept genetics. You're fallaciously claiming that each interpretation is equally valid when they are not.

"And there are varying theories depending on one's interpretation of the data. So you choose to either believe one interpretation of the data, or you choose to believe another. It is belief."

Wrong. Scientists accept theories provisionally based on the evidence supporting theories, studying contradictions, and studying confirmations of predictions. If this process is a belief, then you've given a strawman version of belief. A belief is the conviction in the truth of a proposition, usually with little to no evidence. Since science, by the principles of tentativity and falsifiability, expressly prohibits conviction in a proposition as irrefutably true, the process of accepting theories is not a belief.


336 posted on 08/24/2006 2:41:34 PM PDT by Dante Alighieri
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