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To: metmom
You can’t falsify the truth.

That completely misses the point. 'Truth' is meaningless unless it can be tested or falsified.

For example, how meaningful is the 'Truth' that Despator (Celtic God of Creation) and I are good friends and that he is going to burn up the world because he is pissed that we don't worship him anymore?

How is that 'Truth' any different from the God Allah telling his people to cut off hands for stealing, or the God Jehovah telling people to eat his flesh?

Scientific 'truth' is testable, it makes predictions that can be falsified. If the predictions fail, the 'truth' was wrong.

57 posted on 03/21/2010 11:18:34 AM PDT by LeGrande (The government wants to make a new Government program (Health Care) to fix Medicare and Medicaid.)
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To: LeGrande
That completely misses the point. 'Truth' is meaningless unless it can be tested or falsified.

Right. She totally misses the point. To say something can be "falsified" simply means: Is there any test whereby we might be able to determine whether it is true or false?

We can observe whether the processes that produce changes in species are taking place. Granted, it's not easy, since these take place over long periods of time. But still, it's possible.

It is our observation of what is actually happening that leads us to modify our understanding. In this case, scientists were able to test the theory that genetic makeup is fixed at birth, and that the sole mechanism that produces different genetics in the next and following generations is caused by "natural selection."

While natural selection obviously plays a part, they also discovered that there is a previously-unrecognized mechanism at work: life experiences also produce genetic changes that can be passed down to succeeding generations.

This is not a rejection of the concept of evolution. It's a more clear understanding of how it works.

Yet every time we discover that our ideas about one of the details of evolution was incorrect, that it works differently than we thought, we have a chorus of people who will stand up and yell, "See! See! That means the whole theory is wrong!"

As I noted earlier, this is rather like people going around proclaiming "Henry Ford was WRONG! The Wright brothers were WRONG!" - simply because we know now better ways to build cars and airplanes than they were able to come up with.

Anyway, this more clear understanding has come about because evolution is a TESTABLE idea. The Genesis account of origins may very well convey an essential truth. But it's not something that can be directly observed or duplicated. Our only doorways into determining whether or not we believe it are: Do we believe the historical account? Do we feel these ancient writings are historically accurate? Do we trust the writer and the scribes who passed the account down through history? And do we, if we choose to make our decisions by subjective means, trust our own feelings which may tell us to believe that God made the world?

59 posted on 03/21/2010 11:50:07 AM PDT by john in springfield
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To: LeGrande
That completely misses the point. 'Truth' is meaningless unless it can be tested or falsified.

Here you make a 'truth' claim. So I ask you, is your statement true? If yes, how do we test your truth claim?

60 posted on 03/21/2010 12:04:15 PM PDT by Texas Songwriter
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To: LeGrande

No, science is too small to gain full understanding of truth.

But God isn’t.

Science can’t for instance test or falsify love.

Re-read my tagline.


74 posted on 03/22/2010 4:36:12 PM PDT by tpanther (Science was, is and will forever be a small subset of God's creation.)
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