AlphaOmegakid writes:
And they must be observable and repeatable. That my friend is science. Observable and repeatable.
So, nothing should be taught about the expansion of the universe, the formation of the solar system, or the planet, or the Rocky mountains, the oceans and many other things which are now taught. We could teach about the formation of volcanic islands in general, because the phenomenon can actually be witnessed, but not about the past formation of a particular one, because that would not be observable and repeatable. Interesting. Historical science is not science, to you then. To scientists, of course, it is.
Why, I wonder, do natural explanations for natural phenomena require faith or some grand philosophy? As they are the only type of explanations that have ever turned out to be correct, and as we have no evidence of the existence of the non-natural, then they would seem to fit the description of common sense built on experience.
In the same way that a small child, jumping repeatedly off a small chair and continually landing on the floor will come to the conclusion that landing on the floor appears to be the norm, and if flying through the window to reach the sky does happen, it must be a rare exception. The more jumping done, the rarer the possible exception appears to be, and the less likely the child is to spend time and energy seriously considering the "reaching the sky" alternative.
We've done a lot more jumping off chairs since Huxley's time, and we do not need a philosophy to tell us that, faced with any natural phenomenon, a natural explanation is statistically by far the most likely. That's built on observation. He also could not know that he was not in a steady state universe, in which case, eternal life would have been a plausible alternative to abiogenesis, abiogenesis being a logical conclusion in a universe in which life would have once been impossible.
In Huxley's time, it arguably required faith to firmly believe that the sun could burn for billions of years, as no-one could conceive of a kind of combustion that would make that possible. Some old-earthers concluded that God must be responsible, but hindsight tells us that such conclusions are unwise, Alpha.