The Nature of Scientific Inquiry - Contrasted with Creation "Science"

My wife is an invertebrate biology graduate student and she described that claim just now as "really stupid." So I guess it would be nice if you could substantiate that claim.Its a fact that the coral ecosystem, by virtue of its mutualistic symbiosis with a certain algae, cannot live at depths beyond about 30m or so. (So the idea of coral surviving a massive flood immersion is refuted yet again.) Now, certainly, there are coral atolls thicker than 30m - going as deep as thousands of feet. The explanation for these deep reefs was realized by none other than Darwin himself - he realized that the coral began its growth in the shallow seas around a volcanic island. As the islands slowly sank beneath the sea, the rate of growth of the coral proceeded apace with the rate of the sinking, leaving thousands of feet of reef with the living coral still no deeper than 30m. (Animal Diversity, Second Edition; Hickman, Roberts, and Larson, 2000.)There's no way that the existence of massive coral reefs, like Australia's Great Barrier Reef, can be coherent with a global flood. These reefs are evidence of slowly rising sea levels (or slowly sinking seafloors), not a global flood scenario.

Ok, but you're talking about two entirely different things. The rate of growth of these calcite formations is directly linked to the amount of water flowing through the area, so while it's true probably that most of the really spectacular formations took ages to form (judging from the rate of water flow over the formation), there's probably no reason why, under the right circumstances, you couldn't form one quickly. (Like icicles.)Coral reefs are immeasurably more complicated than that. First off the coral polyp is itself several organisms combined in mutualistic symbiosis. Moreover the polyp is very fragile; even slight changes in temperature, oxygen content, light level, salinity, or slit density can spell doom for a coral reef.So any condition you might propose that would "speed up" coral growth would probably actually destroy the reef. Moreover the active part of the reef has very strict limits about where it can grow; it can't live deeper than 30 meters and it can't grow any taller than the sea level at low tide. So any extreme rate of coral growth would kill the coral, again, unless the sea floor it was growing on was sinking at exactly the same prodigious rate.

Ok, well, prove it. Show me where it says in any textbook being used in schools that "evolution is proven true beyond any doubt." True, but society is wrong. Right. The laws of gravity are as tentative as any other scientific theory. Hence, their total revision by Einstein in the 50's. Prove it.How can you say they're being taught as "truth" when everyone knows Newton's "Laws" were replaced by Einstein's theory?

You've reminded me of something that we evolutionists might lose sight of; it's possible to be a scientific anti-evolutionist.It's just not easy. There's a vast weight of evidence to explain, no better theories to explain it, and a total lack of truly disconfirming evidence for evolution.But it is possible to oppose evolution as a scientist. Such a person would not be a creationist. They would essentially have to hold the position "evolution is currently the most accurate theory that explains the history of life on Earth; however, I'm going to be the guy that comes up with the more accurate theory."There's nothing unscientific about that; in fact that's a goal I think you'll find many of us are already behind.

Nonsense. If God participates in the natural world, he becomes part of it, and amienable to scientific investigation. By definition, the supernatural cannot cause action in the natural world.If you disagree, we need to pin down what "supernatural" means. I made a thread to do just that (in the Is It Science area) but so far nobody's participated. I'd love to have your input, though. Presuming for a moment that it happened that way, how would you propose to prove it? There's no other way to substantiate the occurance of events except via the scientific method; all other methods are indistinguishable from falsehood.

I am. I'm working on my reply in that thread now. Because of the scientific method, or, at least, a generalized version of the same methodological naturalism that underpins it - the existence of a real man named "Julius Caesar" is the simplest explanation for a series of unrelated documents that mention him by name.

By definition, though, a hypothesis/conjecture that includes God isn't the simplest explanation. In fact including God is the textbook example of violating the principle of parsimony.I guess I have to say that if you believe creationism is the "simplest" explanation, then you don't truly understand what "simplest" means, or what sort of untestable baggage "God" brings to the table.

Then look up "parsimony" and we'll discuss it. But the world outside the lake is not fundamentally inaccssable to the them. After building a "dry-suit", they might easily discover a race of fishermen preying on their most gullible. And God brings the most baggage of all, by definition.

Yes, perfectly.God, being an essentially infinite entity, is the largest possible violation of that principle of parsimony.When you bring in God, which you never have to do, you've needlessly multiplied entites by infinity. By definition of God. Any time you're bringing in an infinite entity to solve a finite problem, you've violated parsimony to the greatest degree possible.

It must be, however. Even if we grant for a moment that natural phenomenon cannot account for whatever you're expecting God to account for, why can't it be accounted for by additional natural laws? Or supernatural laws? Or even a lesser divine being? Or even the supreme God of another religion?There's nothing in the least needful about the Judeo-Christian God. That's considerably surplus to requirements. Well, for one thing, simply because there is no naturalistic explanation that you know of doesn't mean that a supernatural explanation is required. If you believe that no naturalistic explanation can ever explain it, that's a proof I'd like to see.But, more importantly, there's perhaps an infinite number of simpler supernatural explanations as well. For instance, supernatural physics.

I'm not convinced that things can happen in the universe that couldn't be described by natural models.I don't know that that's the case, however. So, potentially, the circumstances could exist, maybe. (Let's just say I'm "tentative." ) Well, I think you're betting on the wrong horse. Even if all our current naturalistic models are insufficient or inaccurate (and I'm not at all granting this to be the case, because I'm convinced that evolution is as accurate a model as the evidence allows), the historical odds suggest that the accurate explanation is going to be the naturalistic model. It always has been, so far.So betting that a supernatural explanation is going to turn out to be right isn't a good bet. So far nobody who's made that bet has won. Laws operating in a higher or superior order to the natural universe.

Well, that's hardly my problem. I'm not one of the ones going around stating that the supernatural exists and is the only way to explain certain things.And here's the more important question - if a natural model is accurate and predictive, and we can never know if it's right or not (not being able to know if reality is "real" being a fundamental limitation of knowledge about the universe), does it matter?In other words does it matter if the supernatural explanation is the "right" one if we can never know which is right, and the natural (but "wrong") explanation is just as predictive and useful, if not more so?

Nobody does believe it. That's the essence of scientific tentativity.

I think it does, though.You're on a mission to prove that the theory of evolution is not "true", but nobody who supports the theory believes that it is "true", because truth cannot be known. For all we know, evolution merely describes the behavior not of real things, but of software in the Matrix or whatever. (Thank god for a movie that summed up Cartesian Doubt in one little word. )In other words, you're overreaching in trying to know something you can't. The rest of us are going to stick with what we can know; which theory provides the most accurate and parsimonious explanation/predictions of data.That's the theory of evolution. If you disagree, that's fine, but it'd be nice if you could support your position.

You understand correctly, and as long as that's your goal, that's fine.But falsifiying evolution doesn't falsify all possible naturalistic explanations, nor does it prove creationism or the existence of God.I'm not saying you think that, though. Where it applies is, if the origin of life is not naturalistic, then it's not knowable. I did see that, and while it's not a thread I have the expertise to participate in, I do look forward to watching it unfold.