Re: RustySites offers an interesting post which demonstrates critical

T Pagano wrote:
On Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:44:19 -0700, Rusty Sites
<SpameYouToo@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

T Pagano wrote:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:03:25 -0700 (PDT), Switch89
<Ryansarcade@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Science is about following the evidence wherever it leads.
1. This is highly misleading. The label "evidence" is a conclusion.
It is applied to raw observations which can be interpreted in the
light of some theory. If the theory cannot interpret the raw
observations then they are labeled "discordant."
Please list observations concerning evolution that are labeled discordant. Of course you won't.

1. The most glaring discordant observation is the complete absence of
genuine transitional fossil forms in the fossil record. Darwinism and
neoDarwinism predict transitional forms to be the norm in prehistory
not the exception. However, the norm of the fossil record is
"stasis" and not the obiquitous transformism explained by darwinism.

Darwinism doesn't expect ubiquitous transformism. Even Darwin realized that the times when populations were undergoing transformation must be few compared to times of no change. And of course there are many transitional forms in the fossil record. Archaeopteryx is the most famous, and it's quite a good one. Tony doesn't even know what "stasis" means.

2. The next discordant set of observations are the conservative
mechanisms (genome copying mechanisms and the conservative effects of
natural selection, for example) which highly attenuate any biological
change. Not only do these conservative mechanisms attenuate change
from parents to offspring but they result collectively in Haldane's
Dilemma. This is an unsolved road block which Darwin did not
anticipate since he was ignorant of the complexity of the cell and the
conservative genomic copying mechanisms.

This is just plain silly. Genome copying mechanisms don't attenuate change, unless he means proofreading mechanisms. Without proofreading the mutation rate would be many times what we observe. But what we observe is sufficient. Natural selection is conservative *if* the current majority phenotype has higher fitness than the mutant phenotype. It's wildly unconservative if the mutant has higher fitness. Haldane's dilemma has nothing to do with selection being conservative, and it's not a dilemma. None of this is a problem for evolution.

3. Darwin honestly reported in his magnum opus that any biological
system or structure which could not be built by successive, gradaul
linear steps would be a road block to his theory----that is, the
existence of such systems would be falsifiers of his theory. Behe
identified two such biological systems which are irreducibly complex
and cannot be built in linear fashion. Over the last 10 years
atheists have not been able to show that these two systems are not IC
or produced empirically testable darwinian processes of how they could
be built in linear fashion.

The bit about "linear fashion" is your own invention, not something Darwin ever said. And there is no reason that an IC system can't evolve through numerous successive, slight variations (which is what he actually said). Even Behe's "linear fashion" is a caricature of evolution, involving the addition of invariant parts to a system.

4. e coli breeding over 30,000 generations have shown the limits of
biological change. Such observations have shown that change is
limited to at best one or two substitutions leading to some positive
effect. However, even this limited change oscillates over time within
limits and does NOT proceed coherently and progressively towards novel
structures and systems as would be required if darwinism were true.

Can you back up this interesting assertion with some kind of citation?

[snip bits where I don't know or care where Tony is trying to go]

4. Finally since "evidence" is a conclusion in the light of some
theory, the "evidence" is only of value if the theory is objectively
true. All false theories in the history of science have garnered some
"evidence."
By your twisted logic, evidence is of no value if it disproves a theory. Anybody with a passing knowledge of how the world works knows that is hogwash.

1. Evidence certainly has value just not the value attached to it by
atheists.

Whoops. Where did "atheists" come from? Whatever does the scientific method have to do with atheism?

2. My point in (4) is that "evidence" tells us almost nothing about
whether the theory under review is true. However, observations which
falsify the theory under review tell us deductively that the theory is
logically false. This information is extremely valuable.

This is nonsense, apparently some garbled version of Popper.

The level of evidence, in and of itself, cannot tell us
whether the theory is true AND it cannot even tell us whether the
theory is probably true.

In other words, nobody can know anything. It doesn't seem to work that way, does it.

1. Where do I assert or imply such a thing?

You don't. It's merely the inescapable logical inference from what you do say. It's deductive!

2. However, no where does Rusty Sites remediate the long standing
"problem of induction" which says that observations we can make are in
no way connected to those we cannot make. The observations we can
make are not even connected to the probability of occurrence of those
we cannot make. In theories about Origins where most observations
concerning PREhistory can't be made places serious limitations of the
efficacy of the scientific method.

The deductive consequence of your claim above is that we can't say anything about any event we don't actually observe. Because one apple falls we can't infer that any other apple will fall. Because one electron has a charge of -1 we can't infer that any other electron has a charge of -1. And as pointed out already, your memory of the bible as historical record of a great flood doesn't mean that's what the bible says now, though it may reflect what your personal copy of the bible said when you last read it. And this absolute chaos of expectation, each observation unique and unrepeatable, does indeed mean that we can't know anything, or at least that what we can know is so limited as to be useless for all practical purposes.

Fortunately, induction seems empirically to work just fine, even if it's not deductively provable. Without induction, there can be no confirmed premises for deduction to work with. Hume knew that. Why don't you?

One cannot
cling to the dogma of creationism and look at the evidence objectively
at the same time.

1. Here Switch89 is under the mistaken notion that some set of raw
observations uniquely points to or deductively leads to only one
theory. This is NOT the case. There is likely a very large number of
logically possible theories (possibly an infinite number) which can
interpret the same collection of raw observations as "evidence."
As before, I will ask you to name just one of the infinite number of theories. As before, you will not.

It is not really necessary that we produce them. It is enough to
understand that every finite collection of relevent observations is
INSUFFICENT to allow an investigator to deduce the true theory. This
is a well known fact in the philosophy of science.

It's also well known that it doesn't matter. The principle of parsimony (Occam's Razor) is a useful device. And we don't need the true theory, only one that's true enough. If we believed you, it wouldn't destroy just evolution, but all science.

It would be nice to have at least one example out of the infinity of theories you toss off here, though.

As
such "evidence," in and of itself, cannot even help up decide between
theories let alone tell us which theory is true.
Which would imply that no evidence could show a theory to be false. If that is true, then there is no such thing as a theory. We all thought the ether theory had been ruled out by experiment, but Tony tells us this is not possible.

1. Unfortunately you demonstrate your ignorance of Science.

2. While the "problem of induction" prevents atheists from using
level of corroboration to justify the claim that a theory is true or
even probably true it is NOT a road block to falsificationism.
Falsification is a deductive process not inductive.

Only in the most trivial possible way. If you have a theory that all swans are white, one black swan falsifies that theory, but doesn't falsify the nearly identical theory that all swans but one are white. Your version of falsification is useless without induction.

2. Furthermore Switch89 hasn't established that the creationist models
are unable to interpret the same observations as "evidence" in their
framework.
Of course it can't be shown that they can't work. They work in all possible cases. That's why they are worthless.

1. Again ignorance of the creationism is Rusty Sites undoing.

I see you don't really enlighten him.

2. Creationists for many years thought the Vapor Canopy model could
explain some of the preNoahic environment and provide the inital
conditions to explain the Noahic Flood. It was; however, discovered
to be untenable by relevant observations. This not the only model
that has been discarded or considered questionable by creationists.

Nonsense. The vapor canopy theory was shown to be untenable by it's impossibility given what we knew already before the theory was even proposed. And many creationists continue to use it anyway.

Creationism is of course testable. The real problem is that creationists refuse to submit to tests, or acknowledge when their theories are falsified by the data.

Secondly, there are very few sciences that do not contradict young
earthism in some way. All biological, geological, astronomical, and
cosmological sciences contradict it. Even chemistry contradicts it,
since there is massive biochemical evidence for evolution.

1. I'm not even sure that much of this is true. Biology (as opposed
to evolutionary biology)
Except that evolutionary biology is interwoven into all aspect of biology.

1. Perhaps but it is not necessary for the study of biological
entities as they exist now.

It is if you want to know why they exist that way.

2. It is the conjoining of evolutionary biology which may be leading
investigators in the wrong direction in solving the problems of
malaria and other infectious diseases.

Interesting claim. Can you explain?

generally studies living things as they exist
not how they came to be. As such biology does not contradict
creationism. Chemistry studies matter, its properties, and their
interactions as it exists not how matter and its properties came to be
so chemistry does not conflict with creationism. In fact the vast
majority of our background knowledge does not conflict with
creationism.

2. The hog wash that creationism is inherently anti science and that
it conflicts with all of our scientific background knowledge is little
more than the political theatre that atheists have been peddling.

3. Some conflicts do exist; however, they usually exist in areas of
investigation OUTSIDE the competence of the scientific method.
Evolutionary biology, paleontology, abiogenesis, cosmology all attempt
to reconstruct prehistoric events which were NEVER observed, are NOT
recurring, and are NOT experimentally reproducible. Such evidents are
NOT directly accessible to the scientific method.
They are, you just don't understand the scientific method. It does not require that somebody be present and make observations at the time of the event.

1. I understand the method only too well. I had to study it for
myself to understand its limitations. Atheists for 75 years have been
inappropriately conflating science and technology and misleading
millions about the efficiacy and limitations of Science. They have
embued Science and its atheist practioners with an authority that they
do not possess.

Atheists again?

2.. How (pray tell) can the scientific method DIRECTLY access Origins
events in PREhistory that were NEVER observed, are NOT recurring,
canNOT now be observed, and are NOT experimentally reproducible.

Tony, if you deny the validity of induction, NOTHING is experimentally reproducible, and all events are unique. If we believe your claims, science is impossible, regardless of what it's investigating.

Now for rational people, you don't have to observe or recreate an event to know what happened. Did you ever see an episode of CSI? Hokey, perhaps, but it illustrates the principle. Effects tell us about causes. That's all.

3. As such to suggest that Science has some special insight to the
truth and that other ways of knowing are deficient is naive at best
and arrogant at worst.
Let's see. There's the science people who say we know the truth because we went out and looked and those like you who claim to just know. Who are the truly arrogant ones?

1. This is exactly the point. In Origins research we cannot go out
and observe what happened 900 million years ago. At best we can find
some fragments of what might be left after those events occurred.

Yes, and those fragments can tell us what happened.

2. This severly limits the efficacy of the scientific methods whose
strong suit is the investigation of those events which are directly
observable, recurring, or otherwise reproducible in the laboratory.

Sorry, but according to your rejection of induction, recurring events tell us nothing about what came before or after, and nothing is reproducible.

3. So who is more arrogant: Rusty Sites for endowing the scientific
method with power it clearly does not possess or me for pointing out
the limitations of that method so the investigator and those who might
rely on his conclusions are not misled.

You. Not only arrogant but ignorant.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Why were these apes not selected to live ?
    ... command respect whether jealous Darwinists give it or not. ... support the ToE long before they support Creationism. ... The evidence for evolution is very ... Try evolutionary science, or the Modern Synthesis. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Aforementioned paper: Evolution and Creationism.
    ... The conflict between science and creationism in this country is not ... adults were open to the idea of creationism and evolution being taught ... of science, and so thoroughly supported by the evidence, attacks on it ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Iains rhetorical tactic betrays an ignorance of science and his neoDarwinian model is irrefutabl
    ... >>If one does not initially put forward what one's evidence is evidence ... > that change has occurring in the fossil world or the living. ... I'm glad to see that you reject young Earth creationism, ... you do *not accept the science of genetics. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Reason rips Expelled, a priori worldviews
    ... biological evolution is amply supported by evidence from the fossil ... molecular biology confirms that the more ... "There are people out there who want to keep science in a little box ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Index Falsehoods
    ... "The teaching of creationism does not belong in science classes ... religious belief, not on evidence. ... punishment from God for denying Him that recognition (Dr. Scott, ...
    (talk.origins)
Loading