Objective knowledge and historical inferenceScience gets results by observation and experiment upon repeatable phenomena. Its most valued products are general laws that are observed repeatedly which we can confidently call objective knowledge. These general laws may be incomplete or even false, but they are objective in that they are open to testing by others. New information may cause them to be modified or discarded. Meanwhile, this objective knowledge is usually useful in curing disease, improving technology and food production, etc.
But the subject of origins is quite different. It deals with unique sequences of unobservable and unrepeatable past events. No one can develop general laws about unique, unobservable and unrepeatable past events. Our general laws can tell us what might have happened in the past but they cannot tell us what did happen. Nor does anyone have a time machine to go back and observe what actually happened.
The best that science can do is extrapolate backwards in time from present day objective knowledge, using the principle of uniformity. This principle says that the laws of nature remain the same through all of time and space.
Note that this principle is not objective knowledgewe cannot visit all of time and space to verify it, so it is just a convenient but necessary philosophical assumption. Most people do not realize that this principle underlies all of evolutionary theory, nor do they realize that it is potentially an anti-God assumption because it assumes that God has never intervened in history.
Historical inference is thus quite different to objective knowledge. We cannot test it by observation or experiment, so it is only as good as the assumptions it is built upon. If the assumptions are wrong, the knowledge will be faulty.
In the following discussion, the objective knowledge of life is available to all sides. Surprisingly, there is universal agreement on the fact that at present there is no naturalistic explanation for the origin of life. The controversy lies entirely in the historical inferences about what might have happened in the past. The only way we can evaluate these historical inferences is to examine the assumptions used to make those historical inferences and test the logical connections for internal consistency.
EXCELLENT! Thanks for digging that out.