The Nature of Scientific Inquiry; Is Evolution Science?

A nice example there, and whilst reading it a thought occurred to me. On the one hand advocates of ID say "hey, scientists do design detection already, look at archaeology, and forensics - how is ID any less valid?"On the other hand, a lot of them are arguing that historical sciences are somehow less valid than lab-based ones. Historical sciences like - archaeology, and forensics....Hmmmm.

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A large number of people believing something does not make it true, false, likely to be true, likely to be false.

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Of course.I am not claiming that the Theory is true because so many scientists accept it.But for someone to say that this many scientists over 150 years have been completely wrong about something utterly fundamental and basic to their entire profession, seems unreasonable.In fact, it is unreasonable.It is similar to the reaction to the Creationist argument, "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes around?"This is often said with such conviction as if it is such an obvious truth, but if the evidence really showed that evolution worked this way, if it was so incredibly obvious, wouldn't at least one scientist in the last 150 years have noticed this to be the case? Isn't the only logical reason none of them would have noticed this is because all several hundred thousand of them are dull knuckleheads?

You are right, of course, but I don't think that was what Schraf was saying. I read Schraf's post as saying that if we start with the premise that ToE is not a scientific theory then the logical conclusion is that those who believed and believe that it was and is a scientific theory are dunderheads. Faith, however, claims that those people are not necessarily dunderheads and calling the ToE non-scientific does not imply dunderheadedness.If my reading is correct then I agree with Schraf; claiming that the ToE is not a scientific theory is implicitly calling a lot of people dunderheads.

Ah, that is exactly what I was trying to explain to Ben, but you did it so much better, thanks.

Still, I sense a problem here, Schraf. You said:

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for someone to say that this many scientists over 150 years have been completely wrong about something utterly fundamental and basic to their entire profession, seems unreasonable.

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What if we replace the word 'scientists' with 'priests' and extend the period to 2000 years? Then what?Sorry to be the Devil's advocate, but it seems a legitimate objection a creationist could hurl right back at you.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

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What if we replace the word 'scientists' with 'priests' and extend the period to 2000 years? Then what?

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The equivalent claim is that the Bible is not a religious book -- it's actually a cookbook. And that priests and theologians for the past 2000 years have not noticed this fact because of their specialization and presuppositions.

Well the question we are concerned about is whether evolution is or is not science. And it seems to me that scientists are a valid authority on that question (indeed, given the "demarcation problem" it is reasonable to argue that the judgement of a clear majority of mainstream scientists is a valid criterion - perhaps the only valid criterion).What would constitute a similar question for priests ? Presumably it would be on matters of doctrine, and I think that if a large church of priests over a long period of time agree that their church holds to a particular doctrine then it would indeed be valid to agree that their church did indeed hold that doctrine.Note that neither question deals with the truth of either a scientific theory or of a religious doctrine.

Schraf,Sorry, I couldn't really get your point from what you wrote. But you said you're saying the same thing that JonF explained in his post, and I understood what he said well.Thanks for the replies. I understand better now.

Yeah, I didn't express myself very well in that post, sorry.It was good you and others wrote because clearly I was, well, unclear.

Hi Faith,Would it be possible to respond to at least the first four paragraphs in post 12, please?Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

Sorry, I keep forgetting this thread is here. But now it's so late it will have to be tomorrow.

Yes, you can prove/disprove some things for the recent past, but what you have for a starting point is something you KNOW happened in the past that you are investigating, the rape murder -- you must have a witness or clear known event from the past for this method to work.In the case of the ToE and the Geo Timeframe, absolutely NOTHING is known in advance about the past, and the entire aim of the theory and the scientific processes is to find out what happened. This is the situation in which there is no possible testable falsifiable theory.EXCEPT I started thinking today about the frozen mammoths and other creatures where it may be possible to get DNA and I began wondering if it might eventually be possible to figure out from their genome how long ago they died -- such as how many generations from their modern relatives they are or something like that. That would be very interesting and the ONLY way I think something very definite about the past might be discoverable and replicable.

Faith, I'm sorry, Faith, but this is pure nonsense. The "must have a witness" rule is clearly a device invoked so that you can ignore evidence of things unpalateable to you.A hypothetical scenario.The facts. A womans dead body is found in a wood, she has multiple deep lacerations over her naked body that match the size of the bloody axe laying next to her. She has other cuts & lacerations as well. The axe is covered with person X's fingerprints. The woman has person X's semen inside her, & person X's skin is under her fingernails & in the smaller lacerations on her body. There are no witnesses.Clearly a case of death by natural causes, right? The inferences; a woman was raped, there was a struggle, & she was murdered with an axe. She fought person X, which is how she got his skin under her fingernails & in her cuts, she was raped by person X, which is how she got his semen inside here, & person X killed here with the axe, which is why it has his fingerprints on it.Eyewitness evidence is the very worst, most unreliable evidence it is possible to have. Hard, physical evidence is preferable every time. It is obviously a reasonable inference that the woman was murdered by X. We did that with no witness. The inference that the woman was 1/ murdered, & 2/ was murdered by X, was not a "clear known event", it was inferred purely from physical evidence.Mark

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

Yes, we know a rape/murder happened in the past, but that is not what we are trying to falsify, that would be silly. We have a raped corpse, after all. What we do not know in the example is whether or not suspect A commited the crime. We hypothesize that he did, perform a test using the available evidence, and find that our hypothesis is falsified.To translate this to your example of the frozen mammoth: we know a mammoth died in the past, we just don't know when. We can form a hypothesis about that, perform a test and have it falsified, or not as the case may be. (Translating this back to the murder case: the test might confirm the suspect's guilt.)

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Do we know that the earth exits?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion