josephpalazzo

As a response to my letter to the Montreal Gazette(Oct19), the following exchanges took place.


Dear Editor,

Regarding Janice Keane's letter (Gazette, Oct. 18, "Creation is always a leap of faith") in which she asserts that "it (evolution) still is and remains a theory, rather than a fact", disparages not only evolution but all of science. Newton's law of gravity is a theory, so is Quantum Mechanics and Einstein's famous E=mc2. Yet when it comes to evolution which encompasses well-established principles found in physics, chemistry and biology, people like Janice Keane, who can't accept its implications that life arose on this planet as a random process, resorts to this ultimate dismissive that 'it is just a theory', meaning that it has very little value. Let it be clear and simple: an attack on the theory of evolution, not on its content which is open to debate but on its reason to exist, is an attack on all of science.

Joseph Palazzo

In answer to that, another letter was published (Oct.23). It read as followed:

Joseph Palazzo (Letters, Oct 19) is clearly confused about the difference between theory and fact. If I drop an apple, it will fall to the floor 100 per cent of the time, so gravity is a fact, not a theory. Evolution, however, cannot be proven. So saying that evolution is a theory does not disparage real science.
Intellectual honesty dictates we recognize that creation and evolution are both theories. I lack the faith to believe that order came out of chaos T the Big Bang theory) or that the complexity of nature is a result of chance development (evolution).

Rev. Rich Mellette


To which I have responded:

Rev. Rich Mellette's answer (Letters, Oct 23) to my letter (Oct 19) further confuses the issue. Observing an apple falling is a fact, Newton's law of gravity that explains that fact is a theory, not a fact. Nonetheless on that theory -- Newton's law of gravity -- we were able to send a man to the moon and back. That we have such much confidence in that theory might lead us to believe that it is a fact, when in reality it is not.

Now Creationism can be construed as a theory but not as a scientific theory. The danger of this misconception has led, as in the case of the Kansas State Board of Education, to force science teachers to give equal time in their biology classroom to Creationism. But Creationism, and its hybrid Intelligent Design, have failed on all counts on the Popper's fallibility test and have been rejected as a scientific theory by the science community. In a democratic society, the religious beliefs of any person are nobody else's business. The creationists are free to believe whatever religious tenets they like. And Creationism can be taught as a course in the religious studies or the humanities, but it has no place in a science class.

Joseph Palazzo

http://soi.blogspot.com/

Anyone with a suggestion, would greatly appreciate

dancer_rnb

How do you know one property of the intellegent designer isn't that it pushes the apple to the ground?
So I make the claim that the theory of gravity is not true.

josephpalazzo

Perhaps that intelligent designer does indeed push the apple to the ground, but believing in that theory, is it science? What experiments can be devised to prove that theory? What predictions can be done with that theory? A better theory (not necessarily scientific and totally useless) would be that it falls because it is in its nature to fall. :Cheeky:

josephpalazzo

What other arguments would be good to use in my next letter to the editors, anyone?

[email protected]

Tell them it can't be a science until they have a theory explaining how an intelligent designer is formed by the decay of a singularity, collision of branes, or projection from some underlying geometry.

After all, everyone else had to.

Berthold

Some misconceptions are widespread:

Confusion between science as a method and science as the current corpus of knowledge accumulated by this method. It can only be the latter when people say, "Science has been wrong before!" To the scientist it is trivial that the current corpus is preliminary and subject to continuous change. The principles of the method are not. Therefore, a proposal has to be testable by the scientific method if it is to be considered a scientific proposal.

A fact is, strictly speaking, one observation. The theory postulates that processes everywhere follow certain rules. So the law of gravity is, strictly speaking, not a fact, although it is a theory with a high degree of confidence. This priest screwed up categories of basic Aristotelian philosophy, though he of all people should know it: To conclude from the single case (fact=observation) to the general case (theory) is impossible, therefore there has to be the basis of the falsifiable theories, an essential part of the scientific method.

travc

One fun way to go... talk about the bird-flu and the fact that the prospect it mutating within human hosts such that it can be transmitted from human to human is the source of the current worries about it. So if you don't believe in Darwinian evolution, then you really shouldn't be worried about it... or take flu shots at all since the only reason you need one every year is that the flu virus evolves.

Agreeing with Berthold basically...

Your next step (should have been in the first letter really) should be explaining what a "fact" is. In science, a "fact" is not a precise term (as far as I know) but is sometimes used to refer to a single observation (that is independently repeatable at least in principle.)

A scientific theory is a logical construct that explains a set of observations and predicits the outcome of observations that have not yet been made. Theories are never proven, only disproven by showing that they don't match observations.
The theory that the gravitational pull between an apple and the Earth will cause an apple to accelerate towards the ground at about 32 ft/s^2 at sea level is a theory.

Laws are a bit different... they are basically emperical relationships. The law of universal gravitation doesn't say why objects are drawn together with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them squared... but just that this is emperically true. Funny thing, the Newton's law of universal gravitation is actually wrong, but it is still a law (and pretty useful since it is actually correct for most situations).

Another thing... don't say the process of evolution is "random". Not really true, and terribly misleading to folks who don't really understand evolution. Darwininan evolution simply states that heritable variation that effects the reproductive rate or survival of one variant over another will change the proportions of those variants in future generations. Pretty simple and pretty impossible to argue with. The implication that this simple process can and has led to a vast variety of highly adapted and complex forms of life on Earth is where most "anti-evolution" people get tripped up. The heritable variation that is invoked most often in the neo-darwinian sythesis is "random genetic mutations", but the "random" part there is basically a null hypothesis. Assuming that random genetic mutations are the primary (or only) source of heritable variation has been shown to be incorrect, yet including the additional complexity of the less-than-random mutations (and non-genetic effects) makes applying the theory of evolution practically extremely difficult... so we just accept the simplification, and note that most everything we see in biology is explanable. (Much like engineers and architects using Newtonian mechanics, which Einstein showed to be incorrect, but are much simpler.) This point is hard to boil down.

A good rule is just not using "random" to describe Darwinian evolution, even if you don't endeavor to explain why "random" only applies to the generation of variation (which is only part of the assumptions of evoltuion.... selection is very much not random).

One final point. I like to point out that someone can believe in whatever they want, yet still recognize Darwinian evolution as a very powerful and incredibly useful organizing principle in biology. Even if you believe God created everything on Earth a few thousand years ago (or a few seconds ago), the fact is that species are organized in such a way that invisioning the evolutionary relationships between species is much easier than trying to memorize the properties of each species. Furthermore, the way species and especially things like viruses and strains of bacteria change fits perfectly with the theory of evolution. Problems such as desctructive insects developing pesticide resistance, new diseases like the bird-flu developing, and even the way normal cells become cancerous all make sense (and can possibly be "fixed") using the theory of Darwinian evolution.