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Author | Topic: The Nature of Scientific Inquiry; Is Evolution Science? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
As this post demonstrates:
http://EvC Forum: Splintering our Education System based on FAITH -->EvC Forum: Splintering our Education System based on FAITH Faith starts with religious dogma nad assuems that the evidence must conform to it. Science starts with the evidence and works to conclusions.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
You missed the point. The point is that you must have SOMETHING in the past that is known, which includes witnesses if there are any. In a crime scene in recent time you are STARTING from knowns: you have the dead body and can figure out when it happened, and there's other evidence to work from to get at what may have happened. Try to follow the argument here. Are you going to send a man up for murder on nothing but your inferences from the physical evidence? Now, I'll agree that DNA is pretty definitive if you have it, depending on where it is found and whatever is known about a possible relationship between the deceased and the suspect, but the rest could have been planted. In any case you have MUCH evidence of many kinds that may eventually solve the crime for you. And witnesses would be a BIG help. The victim was seen in the company of the suspect at such and such a time etc. etc. Ideally you want a believable confession from your suspect.
In the case of the Geo Timetable the thinking processes are similar but you have very few known facts from the scene of the crime to guide you. You have layers of sediment that have turned to rock. You have to construct methods to guess their age and there is no way to verify your guesses as there is no KNOWN age of a particular rock to guide you back past actual observations -- all ages are assigned from inferences built on inferences, even if they are dated by radiometry, because that too is not verifiable before whatever is actually KNOWN in the past which isn't anything older than a few thousand years or less. You have fossils in the rocks. They've been studied so you know how they were formed, but you don't know their age either, and again you have methods for guessing at it but there is no way to verify the guesses as there is no KNOWN age of a fossil to work from. You can't extrapolate from observable processes because they may only hold up for short periods and you can't find out if they hold up for longer because there's no way to set up an experiment in the past. For the ToE, however, I think the genetic evidence points toward variation within a species only, natural limitations to processes of evolution within the species -- the fact that genetic variability or "plasticity" as one creationist calls it, is reduced by selection processes that isolate populations, and this reduction is increased with each further such selection until you have a new "species" which is really a genetically severely limited variation on the species it was isolated from, that is, it has the most severely limited genetic capacity for further change and adaptibility, in other words the exact opposite of what the ToE predicts. Maybe eventually this kind of evidence will become definitive. The ToE is based on unsubstantiated conjecture only at this point.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
No, Mr. K., I start from the only actual witness account of events in the past that we have. This gives Biblical YEC's an advantage, far from the opposite. You dismiss it as "religious dogma" but that's just your unsubstantiated assumption, really nothing but glorifed namecalling. It is in fact witness evidence which is a LOT more than evolutionists have for ANY of their wild speculations about the past.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1495 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Try to follow the argument here. Are you going to send a man up for murder on nothing but your inferences from the physical evidence? Yes. Yes we are, and can, and have. So we might as well open the jails, right? If we can't "know anything about the past", then we certainly can't know that anyone is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, right? Unless, maybe, your doubts about our ability to reconstruct the past simply aren't reasonable?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17828 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Time to show that you can support your claims.
Where's your evidence that the Bible is an eyewitness account of the creation of the Earth and it's history up to the supposed Flood ? If you can't produce that then all you've got is a religious dogma and a closed mind. And I've got one BIG piece of evidence that what you have is religious dogma - your posts. The way you make lame excuses - for instance trying to deny the point that the appearance of birds in the fossil record is a change towards the pattern of life we see now by talking about what you imagine birds would do during the Flood. And the way you dismiss the evidence for evolution without even caring to know about it - or even denying that it could exist (e.g. island species aren't REAL species because that would be inconvenient for you).
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pink sasquatch Member (Idle past 6051 days) Posts: 1567 Joined: |
Are you going to send a man up for murder on nothing but your inferences from the physical evidence? Physical evidence is more reliable than eye witness accounts. Of course you should already know that from participating in the Reliability of Eyewitness Accounts thread. Truely, you point out this fact with your statement:
Ideally you want a believable confession from your suspect. If you can't always trust a confession, how can you eye-witness accounts any more?
- the fact that genetic variability or "plasticity" as one creationist calls it, is reduced by selection processes that isolate populations, and this reduction is increased with each further such selection until you have a new "species" which is really a genetically severely limited variation on the species it was isolated from, that is, it has the most severely limited genetic capacity for further change and adaptibility, in other words the exact opposite of what the ToE predicts. Your ramblings on genetics here are riddled with misunderstanding - again, much of which I believe was explained to you in the first thread you participated in on your return here. It has been well-established that small founder/bottleneck populations show increases in genetic diversity much greater than that of large parental populations. Your attempt to intuitively logic your way through the issue gave you a result quite the opposite of what is observed in reality, I'm afraid.
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5224 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
Faith,
You missed the point. The point is that you must have SOMETHING in the past that is known, which includes witnesses if there are any. And my point is that you don't. We have a body with deep cuts all over it that couldn't have been self inflicted. We don't know in advance that there was a murder, we infer it from the evidence; that there were signs of a struggle, & fatal wounds that the victim could not possibly of inflicted on herself. Ergo, we infer a murder occurred without a witness. What do you think was the most likely explanation? What hypothesis does the data best explain?
In a crime scene in recent time you are STARTING from knowns: you have the dead body and can figure out when it happened, and there's other evidence to work from to get at what may have happened. Try to follow the argument here. Are you going to send a man up for murder on nothing but your inferences from the physical evidence? Yes, I am going to send a man up for murder on inferences from physical evidence, & it happens all the time. I AM figuring out what happened, it is you that refuse to send a murderer to prison, not I. If you think there is mitigating evidence, then you need to show it. Otherwise the evidence easily supports the hypothesis that X murdered the victim. Are you seriously suggesting that we cannot 1/ determine a murder occurred, & 2/ determine that X committed the murder?
Now, I'll agree that DNA is pretty definitive if you have it, depending on where it is found and whatever is known about a possible relationship between the deceased and the suspect, but the rest could have been planted. Yeah, but without an eyewitness you can't infer that evidence was planted, right? Seriously, you can hypothesise that the evidence was planted (I'd love to know how you think X's spunk got inside the witness, how his fingerprints got on the murder weapon, & how bits of X's skin got under the fingernails of the victim without him realising he was being set up), but unless your hypothesis has evidence in its support, it must be rejected.
In any case you have MUCH evidence of many kinds that may eventually solve the crime for you. And witnesses would be a BIG help. Not necessarily, they may be lying, mistaken, &/or have alterior motives of their own. This is why eyewitness evidence is so inferior. Physical evidence does not lie. What, based on the evidence, is the most likely explanation of the facts? A response message 12 would be appreciated, thanks. Mark There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't
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mick Member (Idle past 5015 days) Posts: 913 Joined: |
mark,
After lightly chopping herself a few times, the woman killed herself with the axe. A man came across the body while he was walking in the woods, quite innocently. He grabbed the axe in horror and surprise, getting his fingerprints on it. Then his carnal desires took over. He stripped off his clothes. He grabbed the dead womans hands and raked them over his body for purposes of sexual gratification. He then made love to her corpse. After his exertions, the man relaxed by planting a few fossils obtained from a triassic rock layer into a rock layer he knew to originate in the jurassic, and loosening the screws on the tripods of some astronomer's telescopes so that they mistakenly saw a red shift when they looked into the night sky. Then the police arrested him and he went to jail. This happens all the time, it's a tragedy. mick
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Nighttrain Member (Idle past 4022 days) Posts: 1512 From: brisbane,australia Joined: |
We had a classic here a while back. The naked body of a woman was found in a river with her hands and legs tied behind her back. the headline read 'Police suspect murder'.
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5224 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
No, death by natural causes, maybe suicide, without a witness, you can't infer murder, remember!
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mark24 Member (Idle past 5224 days) Posts: 3857 From: UK Joined: |
bump
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Loudmouth Inactive Member |
quote: There are people on death row who are there on the weight of physical evidence alone. Yes it could be planted, but eyewitnesses could be bought as well. I know it is fiction, but do you remember the book "To Kill a Mockingbird"? The weight of the prosecutions case was the eyewitness testimony of the victim and the father of the victim, both, as it turned out, were lying. Eyewitness accounts are actually less reliable than physical evidence. When the physical evidence makes the eyewintess acounts impossible the physical evidence wins. As to Genesis, the creation account is not written in the first person. At best, it is a second hand account. At worst, it is wholly fiction. How do we tell which one of these it is? The physical evidence. None of the evidence supports a 6,000 year old earth, or a global flood for that matter. The physical evidence wins.
quote: False. We can positively date historic lava flows using Ar/Ar dating. We can do exactly what you claim we can't. We can also corroborate carbon dating with lake varves, ice cores, and tree rings. Age Correlations and an Old Earth: Part II quote: We do know their ages beyond a reasonable doubt. Plus, we also know that certain fossils are never found in the same layers, which also lends credence to the theory of evolution. Just because you refuse to accept it doesn't make it untrue.
quote: We do know their ages beyond a reasonable doubt. Plus, we also know that certain fossils are never found in the same layers, which also lends credence to the theory of evolution. Just because you refuse to accept it doesn't make it untrue.
quote: You use extrapolation all of the time. When you get on an airplane do you extrapolate the laws of fluid dynamics into the future? Or do you think that your airplane will suddenly fall out of the skies because the laws of physics are fickle? The characteristics of atoms, including radioactive half lives, are as much a constant as the laws of fluid dynamics. Why is it wrong to extrapolate the laws of physics when you find no problem doing the same in your day to day life? This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 04-05-2005 05:20 PM This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 04-05-2005 05:21 PM This message has been edited by Loudmouth, 04-05-2005 05:22 PM
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
quote: You cannot falsify (or prove) that the fossil record is a record of evolution from one species to another. There's no way to test this and there's no way to set up an experiment to replicate any facet of it that I can think of except the chemical processes of fossilization itself perhaps, but that isn't going to tell you anything about the theory of its evolution. This is because it is a theory about the past about which nothing at all is independently known. It is based only on a plausible inference from the appearance of the fossil record, and only part of the fossil record at that. I would have said that you can't falsify (or prove) or test or replicate anything about any part of the theory of descent of species from other species, but the test sfs suggested about setting up an experiment to determine a certain kind of genetic connection between species that is already KNOWN to reflect that particular relationship would be a good one. I have yet to get to his answer to my post, when I'll see what is known about this if anything. You cannot falsify (or prove) the age of any rock or fossil find. You can test its age with radiometric methods but you can't falsify or test the validity of those methods themselves, you can only assume that radioactive decay always does what it appears to do within measurable/historical time frames. For the recent past, the historical past, you may have independent evidence, but for the prehistoric past, nada.
quote: Great. I'm glad you agree that you can't PROVE anything about the past. That's the point I'm making. And if it can't be proved that means it's not falsifiable and there are no tests that can prove it and no way to replicate it.
quote: No, of course not. Within historical time there are many more possibilities of independent verification, including witness reports, but also forensic evidence. I should probably change my definition to reflect this difference somehow. It is simply possible to KNOW a great deal more about events in recent time, and yet when it comes to PROOF of what actually happened, you can only get more or less good reasons to believe this or that, not actual proof.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1473 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I'm only talking about extrapolations about the past, and these are not falsifiable
quote: I said that it's the THEORY of evolution that can't be tested, falsified or replicated, but that of course you can do these things with given observations or events like a volcano. Yes, of course you can make such inferences, yes, I certainly haven't denied that, but my point is that that is ALL you can do. In some cases you can come up with excellent ideas about what happened, but all you have is more or less plausible ideas.
I agree, that's a scientifically formulated question and it should have scientific proof one way or another, as both human and chimpanzee DNA is available for study and there's every reason to suppose genetics always operates by predictable knowable laws, even if they aren't all known yet
quote: That is the ONLY test I've ever heard of that seems to me to actually hold some promise of determining something true about past evolution, an actual test, something replicable, therefore falsifiable, and that's why I'm curious about it. But if all you have is inference and speculation, you don't have testability or falsifiability, and that is the case in general for all events in the past. Some inferences hardly require it, such as the inference from the position of the trees in the path of the lava, but some, such as the descent of one kind of creature from another as shown in the fossil record certainly do, and there's no way to come up with such a test for that. Genetics, however, DNA, yes, I can see potentials there for something better than mere inference.
quote: But there's no way to test/verify/falsify that the rate of decay is constant for all spans of time and all conditions and the only way this could be verified is with a sample whose date is known. YOu are in the position of simply trusting that it holds up, but you can't know that.
quote: yes, I'm no scientist but I don't have any problem fitting all of it into a YEC scenario. There's nothing in any observation that requires long ages, and nothing that requires descent of one species from another. I don't know what the problem would be. And I'm still curious about what sort of genetic factors you would expect to see between species you think are genetically related.
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Adminnemooseus Administrator Posts: 3976 Joined: |
The The lack of emperical evidence for the theory of evolution, according to Faith. topic was recently closed, due to bad behaviour by various members (and I'm not at all trying to pick on Faith here). In my opinion, the topic was badly flawed from the beginning - I would not have advanced it from the "Proposed New Topics" forum.
I strongly encourage all to be very careful with this (The Nature of Scientific Inquiry; Is Evolution Science?) topic. If I (and the other admins?) find it going the ways of the above cited, I (we?) might just have to take some harsh actions against some members (suspensions). Please be focused, be nice, or don't post messages in this topic. Wish to respond to this message? Please take such to the "General discussion..." topic, link below. Adminnemooseus New Members should start HERE to get an understanding of what makes great posts.
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