Summations Only

Something of relevance to this came up in Topic: Can the creationist model explain the data? Message 66Both University of Michigan and University of Berkley list Abiogenesis and Universal Common Ancestry as foundational assumptions of the Theory of Evolution.While Kerkut says "spontaneous generation occurred only once" others such as Dobzhansky say that "It is also possible that there were several, or even many, origins of life; if so, the progeny of only one of them has survived and inherited the earth" Both result in Universal Common Ancestry.So as far as I can see Kerkut's assumptions are bog standard evolutionist beliefs.Edited by CRR, : Forum reference updated

That's an interesting take, and not one I think I would agree with. What name should we give to an unconfirmed theory or explanation? At some point, Einstein had a bunch of elegant and satisfying math that embodied his thoughts on the equivalence principle. Yet there was very little confirmation. His math did make predictions which could and were tested. So at what point was his work a theory and why was it inappropriate to call it a hypothesis prior to the point of confirmation?A true hypothesis is testable in the sense that it makes predictions that can falsify the hypothesis if the predictions are wrong. An explanation can be formulated from observations and experiments, but ultimately the explanation must explain all relevant observations. Special and General Relativity each met the description of hypothesis prior to performing the actual experiments that confirmed them. They were hypotheses before they were theories.General relativity, in particular, was something even less than a hypothesis for nearly a decade. Einstein took a few ideas, the principle of equivalence, and the invariance of physical laws, and spent about 8 years trying to come up with a mathematical statement that summarized those ideas into a testable hypothesis. Prior to Einstein's finalizing of his equations in late 1916, GR was not even a hypothesis. It was not even testable. When he finalized his tensor equation, he had a hypothesis which has since been confirmed many times.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Engineering owes a lot to mathematics, physics and chemistry. In contrast, biology owes nothing to Darwinism. The Catholic Church claims that her core doctrines and dogmas are infallible and cannot contain error because they are inspired by the power of God Almighty. But this is getting way off-topic. Like any good Darwinist, you like to delude yourself that historical science can be subjected to the same scientific rigour and exacting methodology as operational science ... which is patent nonsense, of course, because claims can be made about what happened thousands or millions or billions of years ago that cannot possibly be tested. Claims that can't be tested are scientifically worthless, as even the village idiot knows. I have little interest in or respect for a "science" whose claims can lie anywhere between fact and pure fantasy. So I will leave such dubious and futile practices to the talkers, egotists, dreamers, space-cadets, charlatans and con-men of the world. When you were on "active duty", did you get wounded in the brain?Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.

Huh?

Huh? That's not a very nice thing to say.

"For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." - 2 Timothy 4:3-4

A Darwinist is someone who accepts that all life on earth evolved from one or more unicellular bugs over millions of years. The moniker was not meant as an insult, but one must wonder about the psychological health of a Darwinist, as it is akin to being a Scientologist or a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon or a Branch Davidian.

Huh? I've learnt that I'd never in my life been called "dishonest ... a liar ... deceitful ...misleading ... disingenuous ... a hypocrite" until I started debating Darwinism cultists online.Edited by Dredge, : No reason given.

Thank you for this information.

Can you give me a Dredge-simple example, please? Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix quote box (I think).

A trivial sermantic misunderstanding like this is hardly going to alter my views about evolution.

No, I did not become a creationist.However, that was when I started studying "creation science". Back in 1970 during the "Jesus Freak" Movement (we were at Ground Zero of that, Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, Calif) was when I first encountered creationist claims where were obviously false (ie, general claims of evidence for Noah's Flood, the one about living fresh-water molluscs carbon-dating as being thousands of years old, and the NASA computer that found "Joshua's Lost Day"). At that time I wrote creationism off as false.Then in 1981 Duane Gish's travelling snake-oil show came to town, which I could not attend because I had duty that evening. But it did get me thinking that, since they're still around, then maybe there might be something to it after all and I should look at their evidence. So I started studying "creation science" and looked for their evidence, only to find that they had no evidence and that their claims were all false, misrepresentations, and even outright fabrications. The further I researched, the more I found creationism to be nothing but lies and deception.More than three decades later, I have yet to encounter a creationist claim that is not false and/or deceptive. And extremely few creationists who are honest.BTW, it was a creationist who clued me in on how the only figure of merit for a creationist claim is that it sounds convincing. He used a lame old creationist claim that had been refuted many times before, so I asked him how he expects to convince any of us with something so lame. His reply: "The only reason you don't find it convincing is because you are not already convinced."That same creationist had to finally admit that a claim he was using was false and that he wouldn't use it anymore. Then a few months later I saw him using that exact same claim on a new-comer.So then do please enlighten us: why do creationists continue to use false claims even when they do know those claims to be false (because they have admitted that they are false)? Why does the fact that their claims are proven to be false means nothing at all to them? So what? Every church makes that same claim while claiming that the others, including the Catholic Church, are wrong.You did not answer the question: When errors creep into religion as they inevitably must, how does religion handle them? It doesn't! Religion has no protocol for testing, error-detection, nor error-correcting.If you disagree and claim that religion does have means to detect and deal with errors, then please present them. IOW, answer the damned question! Stop being so dishonest!

OK, so then you name the Christian deity who, according to Christian doctrine, is served through lies and deception.

I reiterate ... this is way off topic.

I would say that the conclusion becomes part of the theory, the theory of (biological) evolution being the entire collected knowledge of how life came to be as it is. The conclusion is theory, and many smaller theories come together to become a larger theory.The full theory of (biological) evolution is (dare I say) huge.Moose