Again, to paraphrase, he said that the more a theory survives attempts to falsify it, the more confident we can be in the theory. We cannot be confident in theories which cannot be falsified.
In my view, so-called "theories" in the historical sciences - e.g. evolution biology, archeology, anthropology, Egyptology - are more akin to paradigms. Or if you prefer a blueprint into which new evidence is fit.
But unlike the hard sciences (e.g. physics) where falsification of the theory causes the theory to be discarded - if the evidence will not fit the historical science paradigm, then it is explained away with a "just-so" amendment to the story.
betty boop has mentioned the Cambrian explosion not fitting the evolution theory of gradual change over time. The response was the "punctuated equilibrium" amendment - a "just so" story.
More examples of things that do not fit the paradigm:
Dr. Schroeder points to the thirty plus body plans that seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the Cambrian explosion - and despite subsequent near complete extinctions - no new body plans arose in the fossil record.
Amoeba, for instance, do not die of old age - so what is the selection advantage to programmed cell death? Likewise, there is a temporal non-locality of cells achieving maintenance and repair before the need.
All of this without even mentioning the impossibility of the information content (DNA) arising by unguided natural phenomena. Crick, after all, did not embrace panspermia (alien seeding) without cause. Ditto for Dawkins.
And then there is the rise of autonomy, syntax and semiosis and more. Jeepers, even the question "what is life v. non-life/death in nature" - which is vital to the hard sciences asked to explain the rise of complexity in biological systems - is of almost no interest at all in the historical sciences.
Truly, the difference between the disciplines - hard sciences v historical sciences - cannot be easily reconciled:
Many biologists consider physical laws, artificial life, robotics, and even theoretical biology as largely irrelevant for their research. In the 1970s, a prominent molecular geneticist asked me, "Why do we need theory when we have all the facts?" At the time I dismissed the question as silly, as most physicists would. However, it is not as silly as the converse question, Why do we need facts when we have all the theories? These are actually interesting philosophical questions that show why trying to relate biology to physics is seldom of interest to biologists, even though it is of great interest to physicists. Questioning the importance of theory sounds eccentric to physicists for whom general theories is what physics is all about. Consequently, physicists, like the skeptics I mentioned above, are concerned when they learn facts of life that their theories do not appear capable of addressing. On the other hand, biologists, when they have the facts, need not worry about physical theories that neither address nor alter their facts. Ernst Mayr (1997) believes this difference is severe enough to separate physical and biological models: "Yes, biology is, like physics and chemistry, a science. But biology is not a science like physics and chemistry; it is rather an autonomous science on a par with the equally autonomous physical sciences."
There are fundamental reasons why physics and biology require different levels of models, the most obvious one is that physical theory is described by rate-dependent dynamical laws that have no memory, while evolution depends, at least to some degree, on control of dynamics by rate-independent memory structures. A less obvious reason is that Pearson's "corpuscles" are now described by quantum theory while biological subjects require classical description in so far as they function as observers. This fact remains a fundamental problem for interpreting quantum measurement, and as I mention below, this may still turn out to be essential in distinguishing real life from macroscopic classical simulacra. I agree with Mayr that physics and biology require different models, but I do not agree that they are autonomous models. Physical systems require many levels of models, some formally irreducible to one another, but we must still understand how the levels are related. Evolution also produces hierarchies of organization from cells to societies, each level requiring different models, but the higher levels of the hierarchy must have emerged from lower levels. Life must have emerged from the physical world. This emergence must be understood if our knowledge is not to degenerate (more than it has already) into a collection of disjoint specialized disciplines.
The big thinkers come from theology, philosophy, physics and mathematics - they do not arise from the historical sciences.
In my view, when the Theory of Evolution falls - it will not be because of Biologists - and it will not be because of Creationists, Philosophers and Theologians - it will fall because of the Mathematicians and Physicists who were invited by the Biologists to their table.
The hard sciences do not bow to paradigms.
These remarks deserve deep consideration, dearest sister in Christ!
It seems exDemMom rephrased Popper's statement, quote: "Popper stated that all theories must withstand attempts at falsification," when he didn't say that at all. What he said (in effect) was: "keep on trying to falsify your theories; the more they can survive falsification tests, the more confidence we can have that our theories are correct, thus reliable."
This is precisely what the historical sciences, most notably including Darwinist theory, refuse to do. They don't try to falsify their theory. Rather, they select evidence on the basis of what can validate their theory and ignore all the rest — anything to uphold the "just-so story," even though it is increasingly difficult to do that.
You gave Stephen Jay Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory as an example of an attempt to circumvent what the fossil record shows (or rather doesn't show). Gould was evidently well aware that contemporary paleontologists were not so much discovering evidence of evolutionary "change" as evidence of stasis — lack of change in species over vast periods of time. (So much for Darwinian "gradualism.")
No wonder paleontologists shied away from evolution for so long. It seems never to happen. Assiduous collecting up cliff faces yields zigzags, minor oscillations, and the very occasional slight accumulation of change over millions of years, at a rate too slow to really account for the prodigious change that has occurred in evolutionary history. — Niles Eldredge, Reinventing Darwin: The Great Evolutionary Debate, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996Yet as Gould explained:
Every paleontologist knows that most species don't change. That's bothersome... brings terrible distress.... They may get a little bigger or bumpier. But they remain the same species and that's not due to imperfection and gaps but stasis. And yet this remarkable stasis has generally been ignored as "no data." If they don't change, it's not evolution so you don't talk about it. — Stephen Jay Gould, Lecture at Hobart and William Smith College, 1980And that takes care of that!
Dearest sister in Christ, you mentioned "a temporal nonlocality of cells achieving maintenance and repair before the need." Which smacks of a non-local final cause at work. Of course, all consideration of "final cause" has been banished from science ever since Sir Francis Bacon first propounded the Scientific Method.... Final causes always speak to purposes and goals that the other three causes (formal, material, efficient) "serve."
Though systematically "banished" from science, I do not know how it is possible to explain biological function without respect to the purpose the function serves. And this would be a final cause.
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your superb, fascinating essay/post! And thank you for the link to Pattee — his observations are well worth our deep consideration.
Restating an idea in different terms does not make the restatement a false statement.
In my view, so-called "theories" in the historical sciences - e.g. evolution biology, archeology, anthropology, Egyptology - are more akin to paradigms. Or if you prefer a blueprint into which new evidence is fit.
But unlike the hard sciences (e.g. physics) where falsification of the theory causes the theory to be discarded - if the evidence will not fit the historical science paradigm, then it is explained away with a "just-so" amendment to the story.
Again, you are making a false dichotomy between supposed "historical" sciences (e.g. biology) and "hard" sciences (e.g. physics).
I'm not even going to try to imagine how you think biologists do their work, but doesn't it raise the slightest bit of doubt in your mind that, in 170+ years, no one has falsified the ToE? Do you really think no one has tested the theory? Since the GIGO paradigm (garbage in, garbage out) applies to biology and every other science as much as it applies to computer programming, doesn't the fact that the last 170 years have seen great medical and biological advances make you hesitate even the slightest in dismissing out-of-hand the unifying theory of biology that allowed for those advances?
Not that I expect any literal creationist to actually want to learn anything about genuine science, but if you are going to claim that we life scientists do not test our theories, you have to provide evidence. Cherry-picked quotes from literal creationist websites don't count. One place to start looking for that evidence would be www.pubmed.org. Other places would be the various scientific societies: AAAS, ASM, ACS, etc.
I fully understand why literal creationists invest so much effort into criticizing science and the scientific method. Unfortunately, no matter how much you criticize scientists for not doing so, they cannot provide evidence that Genesis is a literal account. I suggest that if you feel your faith troubled by the lack of concrete evidence, you need to meditate and learn to accept it.