Is the TOE falsifiable and if it was, would it advance Biblical Creationism

sure it would, something found that it says wouldn't be there would challenge it.
creationism doesn't challege ToE as a whole, it isn't even in the same room with the ToE, you can't challenge something you can't understand, all you can do is make a strawman to fight and claim you win.as per the topic: the fact that if the ToE was falsafied, creationism would still remain irrelevent to science, creationism can't even come up with one unified answer to anything.
ID is built on the assuption that Evolution is defaulted to the realm of the impossible from the start, even the leaders of the ID movement say soas for YEC itself, if you can't even be bothered to read how floods work and how sediment is layed down and how limestone is formed, anyone who knows anything about these things will take the YEC belief as nothing more than hokumEdited by ReverendDG, : more OT stuffEdited by ReverendDG, : No reason given.Edited by ReverendDG, : No reason given.

What makes the Bible any more reliable than, say, the Aeneid?

i can answer that for you, she believes the bible, she doesn't believe the aenid. thats pretty much itread back on any posts were anyone points out that the stories in the bible are pretty much just like any other mythology, every creationist anyone points this out to ignores it, purely on the fact that they believe the bibleEdited by ReverendDG, : No reason given.

Evolutionary claims have not been validated by genome mapping? You're kidding, right? Given the knowledge that DNA was a carrier of genetic material, the prediction of ToE was automatically that closely related species should have DNA more similar than two more distantly related species should (ie if A and B are closely related and C is distantly related to both A and B, A and B should have DNA more similar to eachother than would A to C). This prediction has so far held true. This has validated "Evolutionary claims".But you are right about one thing. Creationist claims were not validated.

RickJB asks: I've been browsing a bit. The catch is that these predictions come from a (barely) pre-Internet age. Articles would have been in print and would have to be transferred to digital media. And there's the usual problem of documenting a failed prophecy. People bury that stuff. No creationist organization is going to re-publish an article containing predictions that blew up in their faces. You have to count on someone else picking it up.I was speaking from personal experience. As a college student in the early to mid-1980s I regularly heard this prediction made by evangelicals on our campus--especially those studying or working in scientific fields.You have an entire generation of evangelicals who were science majors then and who took the apologetics they read very much to heart. They belonged to Campus Crusade for Christ and had read The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb & Morris. The press called them part of the Religious Right--an emerging force in American politics. And they were psyched. They were in the vanguard of a new Golden Age of Bible-based science that would emerge in their lifetimes.I had conversations with them. In scenes typical on college campuses at the time, they made these predictions with confidence. The newly emerging field of genetics would invalidate the theory of evolution once and for all. Geneticists would discover each species was unique: no possibility of crossover, no no-one-species-related-to-another-species nonsense. The biblical idea of 'kinds' would be upheld and genetics would even give us the categories.You have to respect it. Young evangelicals had a creationist belief that as young scientists they really treated like a theory. They used it to make falsifiable predictions about what they would find.Interesting thing about falsification. It works.They made other predictions as well. 'No one will ever observe evolution in progress.' That one fell off the charts, too. But other predictions are easier to document because they remain in circulation. You can see them at EvC: 'One day someone will find a human and a sauropod in the same stratum.'Failed prophecies may not be repeated, but they are often recycled. Evidence for the failed predictions appears most readily in the reincarnations you can read right here at EvC. 'OK, scientists do observe evolution, but it's not good evolution.' 'Reproduction by kinds was only apparently falsified in the late twentieth century. Genetics will still find something--just you wait!--that proves it true. Maybe it's somewhere in that junk DNA...'(One valuable service EvC provides to future generations: it records the canards while they are still quacking. Very useful.)I should probably look some people up--alumni directories, resources like that. A number of those people who still work in the sciences today are not likely to have remained creationists. They would remember these predictions and might be willing to share.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Clarified detail.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Corrected typo.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Corrected detail.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Still tinkering. This is it, I promise. ; )

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Archer

really off topic--it sounds like you went to an american university.Are you from the US, and currently live in Taiwan,
or are you Taiwanese, who studied abroad in the US?

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

Off topic. kuresu asks: Born in America, live in Taiwan. (My mother is native Taiwanese.)When you live in Asia you can't miss what a provincial phenomenon creationism is. Here the line about 'teaching the controversy' prompts laughter. What controversy?Everyone knows the controversy is a product of American culture--and that it rages within churches, not science.

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Archer

That is one of the few truly embarrassing things about the US. In a nation with the best higher education in the world, we are arguably the sole country in the world who has a sizable portion who still believes in literal creation. It is really sad that the rest of the world can see this and laugh at us. I'm not to happy about that.

Faith, you are seriously confused about what science is. Falsifiablility has nothing to do with whether a theory describes an event that was in the past, the present or the future. Being falsifiable means that it is possible to show that a theory is wrong. ToE IS falsifiable because new observations and theories are able to falsify it. It can even be fully discarded provided you supply a better scientific theory.As to the other topic of this thread (ie would a falsification of ToE lead to the advancement of biblical creationism), the answer is NO, for two reasons. (1) In science, a theory "advances" as you provide positive evidence in support of it. Merely "poking holes" in a current theory will not mean that your alternative is somehow magically accepted. (2) The existence of an omnipotent supernatural magical being creating everything we see is unfalsifiable, making the whole concept unscientific.(PS. I'm sure I posted something like this a bit earlier. It seems to have magically disappeared.)

I'm not at all confused. That's the definition I'm using. The whole ToE appears to me to be nothing but imaginative constructions of the past that cannot be verified or falsified, meaning shown to be wrong. Particular points may be falsifiable but not the theory itself. Example is that if a dinosaur and human were found together that wouldn't be taken as proof the ToE is wrong, despite what jar is claiming; that is, it wouldn't be taken as falsification of the idea that all living things descended from different living things. All that would happen is that the current ideas about the particular timing of dinosaurs and humans would shift. Well, maybe. But so far that is only an assertion. Come up with an example that can't be rationalized away; one that really does undermine the theory itself. Maybe it's been done but I simply haven't seen it. I just know this one about dinosaurs and humans isn't going to do it.

If we can prove that there is a genetic stopping point to speciation that would do it.

You can make that assertion, but it is simply false. The example given would overturn the TOE and a whole new paradigm and model would be needed.The only thing known for sure is that the new model won't be YEC or ID or Biblical Creationism.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

or, better yet, you can show how the semi-conservative model of DNA replication is completely wrong.That is, in sexually reproducing organisms, half come from one and half from the other.or, still better, you can show how variation and natural selection do not produce the diversity of life that we see. because that is the core foundation of ToE.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This is accepted science by creationists. It doesn't favor the ToE. This would be accomplished by showing that there is a genetic stopping point to speciation. However, both variation and natural selection are accepted science by creationists, just not the idea that they are an open-ended process.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Another falsification would be if human beings were found in the lower strata. The Jurassic isn't far enough back to be completely free from the possibility of rationalization that preserves the basic ToE, but the Carboniferous is. Dinosaurs in modern time could easily enough be rationalized away.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.