MortalWombat

If you take a look at the 29 Evidences for Macroevolition page, each example given provides a potential falsification.

emotional

1) Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian, as J B S Haldane answered when asked this question. Or any other taxonomical finding unearthed out of place of what is possible by evolution.

2) Hybrid creatures such as centaurs, griffins and mermaids. They can't be produced by evolution.



Right! But try telling that to creationists...

Interpreting the rainbow as God's sign is a folk-tale explanation, not a scientific explanation. It is exactly analogous to explaining the emergence of babies by saying the stork brings them, instead of sexual reproduction. It's things like this that make it quite clear that the Bible has no scientific answers, and that the creationists, who want to push the Bible as an alternative to evolution, are not scientific contenders.

fundamental spawn

I once attended a debate wherein Pigliaucci absolutely destroyed the Institute for Creation Research's Duane Gish.

ManM

MortalWombat,
Thank you for the information. Still, given the evolution of evolutionary theory, I believe that even those falsifications would not do anything more than spawn more complex theories. It has happened before, so I see no reason why it would not happen again.

emotional,
If something is found out of place, evolutionary theory changes to accommodate it. Even if evidence was found that met the criteria from the talk.origins website, I do not think it would be enough to cause people to make the huge paradigm shift toward creationism. Instead of asking what would disprove evolution, I suppose I should have asked what evidence would be accepted as supporting creation. What is necessary for someone to abandon evolution? Not just one particular evolutionary theory for another, but evolution as a whole? I honestly believe such evidence is not even within the realm of possibility. We are creative creatures, and can explain away just about anything.

Interpreting the rainbow as God's sign is a historical record of what Noah felt about the situation. Does the inclusion of his feelings invalidate the historical claim that he lived through a flood and saw a rainbow? If an English sailor wrote that God guided his aim when firing at the incoming Spanish Armada, does that immediately mean the Spanish Armada did not really exist?

emotional

Scientists can be close-minded like all humans are, but they are bound to the evidence, and if such evidence of a fossil out of place were found, they would have to acquiesce to it. Evolution is not dogma, not holy scripture, and it will be abandoned if enough corroborated evidence is found to refute it. So far, finds that refute evolution, such as Piltdown Man, were found to be hoaxes. Evolution is a Theory in the sense that it has passed multitudes of tests with flying colours.



For scientific theory B to supersede scientific theory A, this theory B must explain all the things previously explained by theory A. Evolution explains such things as vestigial organs, homologies (different organs having the same structure, such as human hands and dolphin's flippers), pseudogenes and other features of suboptimal design. Creation is not an alternative to evolution, because it does not explain these things (especially not if you posit an omni-max designer).



Again, evolution is not dogma, and it can be refuted if the evidence against it is substantive (ie repeatedly observed and verified). So far evolution has passed all tests, and the creationist objections against it have all been found as strawmen, and even outright lies.



The account of the rainbow is not Noah's feelings, it's in God's alleged own speech. We would expect the Grand Designer of the world to know better than that. It suggests that, before the flood, there were no rainbows at all. A very unlikely situation meaning there was no rain, or that the physical laws of refraction had not been set.

Why does God describe the rainbow as His ordained sign of promise, when this sign can actually be duplicated by spouting a hose of water in front of the sun? Is this God doing the explanation, or rather ignorant, pre-scientific men?

Such a description would not be accepted as a scientific explanation. Newton's laws of motion are the place to look for when enquiring about such things.

In so far as the Creator let things come to be by His divine fiat, He so created the natural universe that it would operate by the action of natural laws alone. That is why methodological naturalism has been so successful in explaining how things in the universe work.

ManM

emotional,
I would suggest you look closely at the history of evolutionary theory.

Which particular theory of evolution has done this? Classical? Punctuated equilibrium? My entire point is that it has become dogma. I can think of no evidence that will do anything more than spawn a new theory of evolution. It operates in the same way as creation. And remember, not all creationists are YECs.

Vestigial code can be found in many of my computer programs (sometimes it is more efficient to reuse code, even if some of it is not applicable to the current problem). My hardware designs often share the same (or very similar) design building blocks and structures. It is not obvious to me that structure reuse in nature is a clear indication of evolution. Furthermore, creation can well account for such things, as I have seen analogies in my own creations.

Or it may mean that this was the first rainbow Noah saw, and he took it as God's promise. Stop beating up on strawmen. Creationism and theories about floods do not hinge on a literal interpretation of the bible.

:banghead: See below.

You completely missed the point. Sure, the sailor was ignorant of physics. He was not ignorant of the fact that he fired a cannonball at the Spanish Armada. Sure, Noah was probably ignorant about rainbows. He was not ignorant of the fact that he lived through a huge flood. Denying the flood amounts to accusing the authors of the bible of deceit, not ignorance. And not only the Jews, but the 100+ other ancient peoples that mention a great flood.

And hopefully to avoid more strawman attacks; I am undecided about the whole debate. I see great arguments on both sides. However, what bothers me are the attempts by the evolutionary folks to discredit the creationist camp through propaganda and labels. Nothing can be more opposed to science than that sort of behavior. But if it to be so, then science truly is the Catholic church of the new century.

emotional

I still don't agree evolution is dogma, but I have to mention that our natural scientists don't have much of a choice in the matter. I mean, are you expecting them to arise together and declare in unison, "our new theory is that God created everything"? That's not going to pass muster any more than the old theory that demons cause disease. Scientists are going to look for a natural explanation for everything even if there isn't one available. The only middle alternative I can think of is the Raelian-type scenario of naturalistic creationism: aliens created us. That would be acceptable science, but that's not what the creationists are aiming for.



I'm afraid this is a point where science and theology meet, but it can't be helped: what does it say about the Creator who intelligently designed vestigial organs, pseudogenes and predation (the lion eating the lamb)? The best you can do, again, is posit a non-omni-max designer like an alien. But creationists are aiming for the omni-max designer of theistic religion, and when you posit that one, questions begin to rise.

Computer programs and simulations are a good notion, by the way. I accepted evolution only when I was shown, by means of evolutionary simulation programs, how it was possible for organisedly complex entities to arise by blind evolution.



The worldwide flood may have happened, but it is so riddled with problems that the more probable hypothesis is that it was local, and extrapolated into a global flood by the narrator (keep in mind that the known world was much smaller in Biblical times). The Creation and the Worldwide Flood are plausible models when you regard the data available to people then; but with our knowledge of the natural world, we need an updated picture, just as we have updated upon the physics of Aristotle and even Newton. "In the beginning God created" is plausible, but 15 billion years ago, not 6000 years, and not in the order the Bible says.

In short, the Bible doesn't deliberately lie, it's just uninformed. Scientifically outdated.

I have some sympathy with Intelligent Design, but only with strict reservations. If ID/Creation is merely healthy scepticism of evolution, then I commend it; it is a worthy endeavour and a fertilises the scientific dialectic. But if ID/Creation is rejection of evolution a priori in favour of a preconceived model (such as the Bible), then it is religion trying to usurp science, and has no place in the scientific dialectic. Thus the question to ask every IDer/Creationist is: why are you sceptical of evolution? Because things are not clear enough, or because you are inclined towards the ID/Creation scenario? Indeed the usual order of becoming a creationist is, first a conversion to orthodox Christianity or Islam, and then "scepticism" of evolution (which is thus not really scepticism at all). If you really want to be an evolution sceptic then you must detach yourself from an underlying theology. I for my part have no problem with either creation or evolution; all I care is that the afterlife exists (which means I'm not impartial when it comes to neuroscience and the mind-brain problem).

MortalWombat

Quantum mechanics and relativity did not do away with Newtonian mechanics. They do a better job of explaining things at very small scales or at very fast velocities, but they did not supplant Newtonian physics; just added to it. Do you have the same opinion about physics, that it is dogmatic too?

The fact is that there is no other scientific explanation, based on the combined data from the following disparate sources

the fossil record
biogeography
molecular genetics
comparitive anatomy

than descent with modification. None other. Perhaps it seems like "dogma" because 150 years of experimentation and observation by hundreds of thousands of scientists from various cultures, backgrounds, and religions have confirmed it to such an extent that no other explanation can even come close. But that's not the fault of the scientists. It's just where the data has led.

Since this conversation has deviated from the original post, perhaps you might care to take it up again in the Evolution/Creation forum, but I am finished with it here.