Posted on 10/01/2002 6:32:12 AM PDT by Phaedrus
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:34:48 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
I don't know how much thinking they do, but they work hard at being a War Room style PR shop. In this press release, for instance, senior Discovery fellow Jonathan Wells gets out the ID-side spin on the same day as the announcement of an important study supporting the evolution of insects from more basal arthropods.
A mutant shrimp is being claimed as "a landmark in evolutionary biology" that proves creationists wrong, but it's not. Whatever its implications for creationism, molecular biologist Jonathan Wells, a senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., calls the claim "greatly exaggerated," and describes the mutant shrimp as "an evolutionary dead end that tells us little or nothing about how insects might have originated."The only problem being that the subject of the study was fruit flies, not shrimp.
Science, however, in the proper sense of the term, includes all that comes under the compass of human knowledge. Scientia is the Latin term for knowledge. If you want to reserve true knowledge for only those things that are provable, you will back yourself up to give a philosophical justification for the criteria of of a legitimate proof.
I'll lay a wager that not one American public school student has a textbook that mentions it.
evolution is a scientific theory with a massive non-scientific lobbying group behind. explain that without bringing religion/anti-religion into it?
Does it have such a lobby group? No matter, it still redounds to my point: the battle over creationism is the sole issue here.
I suppose you could look at it that way.
Nope. Science avoids that trap. Science does not reserve "true knowledge" (your term) to things that are provable. Science avoids the philisophical traps by merely requiring that its theories be disprovable - a completely separate and much easier condition to meet. All that is required is that when a theory is specified, it must be done so in such a way that it can be disproved. Do you see the distinction?
This is also why theology is, in general not scientific. If I state "God exists" - that is not a theory as I have not made a statement that can be disproved.
Science really is limited in its domain. I think it is just that because it has become successful (by using the scientific method) that the unwashed masses (and especially the ignorant media, as unscientifically educated a group as can be found outside the NEA) want to call many things science that are not.
In the interests of accuracty--ie, before I get pounced upon--DI isn't cited here. Wells is, and West was allowed to write the article for Fox as though West were were a neutral reporter.
Theology has never been a science.
What was considered "science" at the time of Aquinas is not considered "science" today. The meaning of words changes over the centuries. Theology is considered a branch of metaphysics or philosophy. Your definition really refers to a branch of philosophy known as "symbolic logic", which is related to mathematics.
(1) All winged animals can fly.
(2) Horses have wings.
Therefore, horses can fly.
True, if the assumptions are true. But not science.
Your philosphy might be stated:
(1) Scripture is true.
(2) I can use logic to validate my theology using scripture.
Therefore, my theology is true.
But you cannot prove your 1st assumption. Symbolic logic is a useful tool. But it is not the scientific method, and it is philosophy, not science.
One of those professors is Dr. Henry Schaefer, here at UGA. Here is his guest editorial from Sunday's AJC.
[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 9/28/02 ] GUEST COLUMNISTS
Standard evolutionary theory has shortcomings
By Henry Schaefer
Professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia
As a theorist who uses quantum mechanics to solve problems ranging from biochemistry to astrophysics, the subject of this essay is of great interest to me. It is a question that is discussed in depth in my University of Georgia freshman seminar entitled "Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?"
This autumn 18 gifted UGA students and I are spending six weeks examining Stephen Hawking's best-selling book "A Brief History of Time." Therein Hawking states, "A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements. And it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations."
I consider Hawking's statement to be an excellent definition of a good theory. How does evolution stack up to the two demands of a good theory? By the term "evolution," I mean the claim that random mutations and natural selection can fully account for the complexity of life, and particularly macroscopic living things.
I think that the standard evolutionary model does a good job of categorizing and systematizing the fossil record. It serves as an effective umbrella or big tent under which to collect a large number of observations. If evolution has a weakness in this regard, it is that the tent is too big. Thus the 20th century witnessed a series of hoaxes, beginning in 1908 with Piltdown Man and continuing to recent fabricated fossil "discoveries" in China, that have been embraced as missing links by distinguished paleontologists.
Nevertheless, I give evolution a B grade with respect to Hawking's first category.
The second requirement for a good theory is far more problematical for the standard evolutionary model, sometimes called the modern synthesis. Over the past 150 years evolutionary theorists have made countless predictions about fossil specimens to be observed in the future.
Unfortunately for these seers, many new fossils have been discovered, and the interesting ones almost always seem to be contrary to the "best" predictions. This is sometimes true even when the predictions are rather vague, as seen by the continuing controversies associated with the purported relationships between dinosaurs and birds.
Is the expectation that a good theory be predictive unrealistic? Let us consider two theories to which evolution is often favorably compared. The theory of gravity precisely predicted the appearances of Halley's comet in 1910 and 1986. On the latter occasion I was on sabbatical from Berkeley at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The newspaper (informed by classical mechanics and the law of gravity) told me exactly when I had to wake up in the middle of the night to enjoy the wonder of Halley's Comet. And in fact, the theory of gravity never fails for the macroscopic objects to which it is applicable.
A second successful theory, the atomic theory, is grounded in Schroedinger's Equation and the Dirac Equation. Atomic theory is able to make many predictions of the spectra of the hydrogen molecule and the helium atom to more significant figures that may be currently measured in the laboratory. We are utterly confident that these predictions will be confirmed by future experiments.
By any reasonable standard the theory of gravity and the atomic theory are good theories, well deserving of A grades. In comparison with these quantitative theories of the physical sciences, when it comes to Hawking's second requirement for a good theory, the standard evolutionary model fails, and should be given a D grade at best.
Might I be more detailed in stating my reservations concerning the standard evolutionary model? Sure. Let me preface these brief remarks by noting that I think the scientific evidence that God created the universe 13-15 billion years ago is good.
My first concern is that, with the collapse of the Miller-Urey model, there is no plausible scientific mechanism for the origin of life, i.e., the appearance of the first self-replicating biochemical system. The staggeringly high information content of the simplest living thing is not readily explained by evolutionists.
Second, the time frame for speciation events seems all wrong to me. The major feature of the fossil record is stasis, long periods in which new species do not appear. When new developments occur, they come rapidly, not gradually.
My third area of reservation is that I find no satisfactory mechanism for macroevolutionary changes. Analogies between a few inches of change in the beaks of a Galapagos finch species and a purported transition from dinosaur to bird (or vice versa) appear to me inappropriate.
The story is about the Cobb County school board. The spin on the story comes from the Discovery Institute. It's like reading an editorial on Toricelli written by the DNC.
Yes, disproving something is a kind of self evident proof. But you must see the difference between stating something so that it can be disproved, and not doing so.
I can understand why you mention my statement is dogmatic in nature. Actually, I'm basing it on a strict definition of science which is: a branch of study in which facts are observed and classified, and, usually, quantitative laws are formulated and verified; involves the application of mathematical reasoning and data analysis to natural phenomena (from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms). In other words, scientific understanding is a subset of understanding.
Your statement that "areas of human experience cannot come under the scrutiny of human knowledge" does not fit into the classical definition of science. Theology is one such example. Can the mind God (let alone the mind of a human) be reduced to a series of mathematical equations? Could the thoughts of a poet be expressed as a formula? Can the Bible be deconstructed in a lab, a theory developed and new Bible verses predicted?
My point is that thee are many areas of human understanding that fall outside the realm of science. Science is only one way of building understanding. It is systematic and cold in its ways. I do not demean theological study when I say it is not science, because the nature of theology is not scientific, nor is science theological. But that does not mean that either are diminished in the realm of human understanding. They are different tools that let us understand different things.
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