Posted by AF [AF] on November 24, 1999 at 23:37:25 {BlpRHB6gpc1EwaxRomAMdaOt1gg/Zk}:
In Reply to: Evolution Test posted by Amazing on November 24, 1999 at 20:08:09:
The four tests you mention are certainly applicable to the experimental sciences, but not the historical sciences. History never repeats and cannot be tested by experimental means. That does not mean that historical science is of no value. It has other criteria which establish probabilities that some theory may be true. Your comments on "correlative evidence" show that you understand these things.
We must keep in mind that all theories, from experimental or historical sciences, are probabilistic in nature and can never be proved in an absolute sense. Stephen Jay Gould comments nicely on this:
. . . "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Of course, this is a rather subjective notion, but it shows that "fact" can be used in several senses. Unclear thinkers often muddy the waters of discussion by neglecting this fact.
The evolution of life is most certainly a fact in the sense that a huge amount of data shows that life has gradually become more complex, with millions of species coming and going over several billion years. The mechanism that caused this evolution is an entirely different question, one that is not solved and is open to any number of scientific, philosophical and religious interpretations. It's the same with gravity: we know that something we call "gravity" holds planets in their orbits and influences the large scale motion of everything in the known universe. However, physicists have no idea what gravity actually is or how it works.
For many, the idea of completely undirected evolution is difficult to accept. How can such wonderful complexity and apparent "design" arise without an intelligent director? However the same can be posed about intelligent directors as far up the scale as you want to go. One old lady is supposed to have held that the world is supported on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what the turtle was standing on she winked and said, "Hey! It's turtles all the way down."
For others the notion of Bible oriented theistic evolution is hard to accept. How can the loving God described in the New Testament be reconciled with a God who created a world in which predation and killing has existed for hundreds of millions of years? How can the Biblical stories such as that about Adam and Eve be reconciled with the fact that humanlike creatures have gradually evolved over several million years?
As science progresses in knowledge and understanding, many old notions must be discarded. Religion must ultimately be based on facts, or it will become completely disconnected from the real world. Within a few years the human genome will be completely decoded, and so will that of many other animals. This will allow geneticists to see clearly what the evolutionary relationships between various species are, and even roughly when speciation events took place. As this occurs, evolution will be accepted by most Christians just as surely as geocentrism was gradually abandoned after Galileo's discoveries about the solar system. Christians will eventually reconcile their ideas of the Bible with evolution just as they did with their ideas of geocentrism.
As for "calculating the probability that life could arise by chance", this is a ridiculous notion to anyone versed in the mathematics of probability. One can calculate probabilities only if one knows a good deal about the subject at hand. For example, you can calculate the probability that life could arise by chance only if you knew all of the ways that life could exist, and all of the ways that life could not exist in our material universe. Since no one knows these things, no one can calculate the probabilities.
People who think they know what they're talking about, but really don't, usually go catatonic when they understand the above. The probability that you exist, based on a priori probabilities that the precise comination of genes that uniquely determines you might form, is on the order of one in 1040,000. Yet here you are. What gives?
The same goes for those who use probability to discount evolution. They simply have no idea what they're talking about. Most are not even able to understand what I've said above, which for anyone with a bit of college math and biology is trivial.
An interesting bit of news for me was the recent discoveries of very late Neanderthal remains in Europe. For a long time it was thought that Neanderthals lived between about 200,000 years and 35,000 years ago, and then mysteriously disappeared. Modern man has existed for at least 100,000 years, and somewhere around 35,000 years ago was thought to have become dominant in Europe at the same time the Neanderthals disappeared. Theories have abounded as to what happened. Did modern (Cro-Magnon) man kill off the Neanderthals? Did they just die out? A recent discovery of a cave in Croatia containing Neanderthal cultural remains has been dated to 25,000 years ago. Another recent discovery of the buried skeleton of a 4-year-old child indicates inbreeding among Neanderthals and modern humans. The skeleton had features previously found only in Neanderthals and only in modern humans -- in other words it was a sort of hybrid. This makes sense to me since I've observed that some people of European descent have distinctly Neanderthalish skulls (please, no jokes).
So I agree with you that this field of origins is fascinating. No one has good answers yet, but that's the nature of this science.
AF