Replies

I fear that "God made it that way", when invoked in what ought to be a scientific context, serves the same function.

I really think that scientists have to be prepared to acknowledge that explanation at the lowest level, but still treat every question as if it has not yet necessarily been decomposed down to that root level.

In other words, I agree that there are some questions that can only be answered "because." - but a scientist should always be looking to see if there is further knowledge to be gleaned before the final "because."

Indeed, that was the point I was making.

It would be a mistake to have recourse to the hands-in-the-air, I-give-up option before rational inquiry has exhausted itself. We're only at the beginning of understanding how things stand in our little corner of the cosmos.

Look the subject cannot be adequately discussed in this type forum. And many folks have little background in what is involved. But I would just bring out one thing.

And that is this:
Starting "loosely" if one wants to accept the geo-column as really being as "uniform" as many books would have one believe, I assure you it is not...............

Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian.......upward from this Paleozoic period into the Messozioc, then Cenozoic periods.....(remember I am being very very general here to try to make a point).............

Where are the required hundreds of thousands of transitionary forms in the fossil record?
For instance, lets take the Cambrian period (570 million years ago..........LOOK I AM VERY AWARE IT DEPENDS ON WHO'S FRIGEN TABLE YOU WANT TO LOOK AT............what year in what text book etc....
But read carefully any modern text book on in-vertebrae paleontology, and find any reference to where the perhaps
hundreds of thousands of transitory forms within a given species are found.
Put another way. World wide in museums and hold areas associated with those that collect and study fossil remains have many BILLIONS OF FOSSILS of in-verterbrates from the above mentioned epochs. Often huge slabs of lets say limestone are carefully broken up, layer by layer etc., to extract all the hundreds of thousands of lets say trilobites, brachiopods and other sea creatures in the slab.
Now show me gentle reader one book or museum display that shows a transitionary form between any of those species and sub species present.
Every honest palentologiest over the last half century has been at least honest in stating that no one has found any intermediatory forms that represent the tens of thousands of known final forms of any given type. Now. This is the case as we move up in what they love to call "complexity of form and design", etc..
If evolution took place, should we not expect in the fossil record to see hundreds of thousands of well defined transiant forms? Remember, we could be looking at lets say a ten foot thick twenty by twenty foot piece of limestone say from the Cambrian period, that could supposedly represent millions of years of continuity. And perhaps the slab might contain a hundred thousand speciment,
everyone, being fully formed and classified as a given species, based on the accepted and practiced rules of taxomity, etc..

Now I do not intend to be trying to answer rebuttals. Because the obviouse is known to me. But perhaps this can be viewed as food for thought.

In other words, I agree that there are some questions that can only be answered "because." - but a scientist should always be looking to see if there is further knowledge to be gleaned before the final "because."

He has created an awesome universe in which we can satiate our curiosity.