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To: general_re
A lens, an optic nerve, and a brain must all evolve at the same time, as well as many other necessary mechanisms. You just can't construct a photomorph progression of believable, functional intermediates--putting together a list of eyes in ascending order of complexity does NOT prove that natural selection is what has caused the progression. Your position is non-scientific because it is nonfalsifiable. Despite its extreme implausibility (which you have essentially admitted at times on this thread--for example, that ridiculous digression into introns), you cling to it. I agree with you a belief in God can survive an orthodox Darwinism. That is because theism is also nonfalsifiable--it is not science either, but then it never claimed to be. Imagine that human spacefarers land on Alpha Centauri and are greeted by highly complex sentient robots whose workings consist of gears and levers and microchips of the most sophisticated kind, and a self-replicating mechanism. The robots believe in a Robot Darwin, who teaches that the robots are the product of evolution by natural selection. In fact, the archaeology of the planet indicates that older generations of robots included more primitive forms, and that one can trace a kind of "evolution" of robot forms. We, having created our own much more primitive robots on the same principles, suspect that the robots were created, and did not arise spontaneously. But the robots get very mad when we delicately suggest that creation is a possibility, and that the "evolution" visible in the archaeological record makes perfectly good sense, since the creator race refined their technology over time, and built on previous designs the way that all good engineers do. How could we disprove the robots, assuming there was no archaeological record of the creator race? To every objection about the plausibility of robots evolving by the mutation (bit flips) and natural selection, they offer the same arguments you do.
548 posted on 03/27/2002 7:33:18 PM PST by maro
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To: maro
A lens, an optic nerve, and a brain must all evolve at the same time, as well as many other necessary mechanisms.

Again, insects have eyes, without having anything that resembles a central nervous system. At best, they have a decentralized nervous system.

You just can't construct a photomorph progression of believable, functional intermediates--putting together a list of eyes in ascending order of complexity does NOT prove that natural selection is what has caused the progression.

Of course it doesn't "prove" it. And it is very likely that nothing ever will. That is the difference between an inductive and a deductive argument. If you find inductive arguments to be prima facie invalid, I think that you will find that there is precious little outside the realm of pure mathematics that you can believe in. I can put together a very compelling inductive argument for the non-existence of Santa Claus, but I very much doubt that I can "prove" it, by any reasonably stringent definition of the word "prove". But something tells me you probably don't believe in Santa anyway, despite the lack of proof for his non-existence.

Nevertheless, even if it doesn't "prove" the validity of natural selection, it is evidence in its favor. It is evidence of a chronological progression of increasing functionality, specialization of traits, and diversity of taxonomy, which is what natural selection predicts should happen. It is therefore evidence supporting the validity of the theory of evolution via natural selection.

Your position is non-scientific because it is nonfalsifiable.

Of course it is. Find a fossil of a creature with complex mammalian-type eyes in some early rock layer, where the theory of evolution predicts that it should not be. Find that fossil in early Cambrian or pre-Cambrian strata, and you'll have blown a great big hole in all of evolutionary theory.

Despite its extreme implausibility (which you have essentially admitted at times on this thread--for example, that ridiculous digression into introns), you cling to it.

I wonder. One of us is blind, to be sure.

But the robots get very mad when we delicately suggest that creation is a possibility, and that the "evolution" visible in the archaeological record makes perfectly good sense, since the creator race refined their technology over time, and built on previous designs the way that all good engineers do. How could we disprove the robots, assuming there was no archaeological record of the creator race?

I like this one, although probably not for the same reasons you do. ;)

Okay, I'll bite - the short answer is, you can't disprove them, based on that particular line of argumentation. They have some evidence of their naturalistic evolution, no matter how weak we might think it is. And, by definition, we have no evidence for a creator race other than a remarkably feeble argument-by-analogy of our own. So, we can't disprove their evolution by proving the existence of a creator.

Of course, that's equally true of our evolution, as well. You cannot disprove the validity of evolution by proving the existence of a Creator, since you cannot prove the existence of a Creator. So if you want to disprove their evolution, and ours, you need to find some other way to go about it, as that's a dead end. What this is supposed to demonstrate escapes me, but there you are.

Of course, we might suppose that since they are presumably rational and logical beings, they might very well admit that their "creation" was a possibility. And so do I. Of course, they would also (being the rational and logical beings that they are) likely suggest that the probability of such a creation, especially in light of the available evidence, was vanishingly small. And so do I. ;)

549 posted on 03/27/2002 9:12:54 PM PST by general_re
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