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To: AnalogReigns
Evolution, as a theory of what happened in the (very) distant past, cannot be directly tested by repeatable contemporary experimentation, in the good old here and now.

On the contrary, it can be tested by experiment (I'm not sure what you mean by "directly tested"-- is it one of those impossible hurdles made just for evolution?).

I can dig (today) in cambrian strata looking and predict that I will find no mammalian fossils there. I can examine the DNA of lizards and birds in Africa and South America and predict that in their introns (which have no effect on an animal's form) the African lizards will resemble the South American lizards more than the African birds.

If I find a mammalian fossil in a cambrian stratum or a lizard with more intron-proximity to a nearby bird than to a distant lizard, it will rock the scientific world, it will force us to rethink everything we think we know about evolution and the tree of life. We might have to scrap evolution entirely, or at least demote it to the status of a useful approximation. Evolution is testable and falsifiable.
66 posted on 07/05/2008 9:02:28 AM PDT by xenophiles
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To: xenophiles

You’re talking about indirect evidence. Evolution is a theory about a PROCESS, not the current (testable/falsifiable) DNA in lizards today or fossils deposited in the past. As a process that hypothetically takes millions of years, unless humanity lives for a few more millions of years (and keeps a constant state or progress of civilization, observation, and records), or develops a time machine, one cannot observe the process happening. Do organisms mutate, adapt and change? Of course, no one denies that as it’s testable and falsifiable. But do they change for the better by progressively becoming more complex? In spite of thousands of studies on fruit flies, bacteria and the like, I know of no study that proves that...

This idea is not original to me. Dr. Norman Geisler, a respected conservative philosopher, brought this out: Since both creationist AND evolutionist hypotheses are about the distant and pre-historic past, which as the past is NOT subject to falsifiable experimentation and testing, theories need to be kept more humbly and without dogmatism. The fact is, neither you nor I KNOW what happened millions of years ago—since all we have is bones and layers of dirt—so are ideas are testable only in a most indirect way, and it’s sheer arrogance to profess that we do or even can know any pre-history for certain.

If legitimate historians argue about how Custer lost the Battle of Little Bighorn, a bit over a century ago, in an era of written records, and lots of forensic evidence and even eye witnesses, why do we have such overconfidence to describe events many million more times farther away?

To posit a bottom line that random processes made the Universe, and even more fantastically, that these made the scientifically proven unimaginable complexities of organic life, is, at its core a religious, albeit materialistic, faith. Even some great evolutionary scientists have acknowledged this problem (Jasper and the pan-spermia idea—which merely puts origins somewhere else, not solving the problem). Lacking that time machine, origin issues are, by their very nature religious issues, and scientific knowledge, like religious knowledge, but in different ways, is limited.

I simply don’t have enough faith to believe order “arose” from disorder, especially when a scientifically accepted law (and testable/falsifiable) on energy (2nd Law of Thermodymics) says just the opposite. Order arose from an Orderer...and is that religious? Yes, it is where religion and science meet, as there logically they must.


86 posted on 07/05/2008 10:40:59 AM PDT by AnalogReigns (Philosophies of science have a religious foundation.)
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