Science vs. Religion: (Chapter 4) (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, July 11, 2011, 23:07 (4679 days ago) @ xeno6696

Although this discussion is strictly between Matt and David in relation to David's book, I hope you won't mind my joining in, as there are some extremely provocative statements here that I think are of interest to us all.-MATT (to David): You also perpetuate the public's use of the word "theory" which really means "hypothesis". A scientific theory is a theory that has been repeatedly verified by experiment, where scientific laws are taken often as axioms.-And this is a source of confusion. Why should scientists use terms in a manner contrary to "public" use? The term "theory" as used in relation to evolution seems to me a fine example of the ambivalence of this distinction, as illustrated by the following observation in your earlier post:-"Evolution IS a fact; we started with simple bacteria and ended up to where we're at today."-A fact is incontrovertible. It is as near to knowledge as we can get, and I myself would not wish to dispute the second part of your sentence. But this is only part of what most of us understand by The Theory of Evolution, because it is a theory composed of many different hypotheses, very few of which HAVE been verified by experiment, including the claim that humans can evolve from bacteria! The hypothesis that changes in the environment can produce totally new species is also unproven by experiment. (We know that such changes can produce adaptation and variation, but these enable existing species to survive.)-So what do our atheist scientists fall back on? Natural Selection. You wrote: "I have always understood NS as the entire system [....] The entire theory is called "evolution by natural selection" and this holistic view encompasses the entire process from stimulus to action." David has explained that he sees NS as "the endpoint, that is, who survives", and has always stressed that NS is passive. This is worth repeating a dozen times. Natural Selection does nothing more than decide which organs and organisms survive. It makes absolutely no contribution to the origins, adaptations or innovations without which there could be no evolution. If we are descended from bacteria, and bacteria have survived every environmental change that's ever happened, what on earth was the need for legs, eyes, brains, hearts, penises etc.? And how did they come about? Without these colossal changes, there would still be nothing but bacteria on earth, and there would be nothing to select from! -Darwin's theory, and the theory subscribed to by Dawkins et al, is a collection of hypotheses, and by focusing on the two that seem most convincing ... common ancestry and natural selection ... apologists claim that evolution is as close to knowledge as we can hope to get. But the hypotheses concerning how and why new organs and species came into existence (this is not a metaphysical why, but a biological why) remain far from factual, and these innovations ... not natural selection ... and the mechanisms that enabled them to take place are the crucial driving force without which there could have been no evolution, and life would have remained on the level of bacteria. Thus the claim that the Theory of Evolution is a fact, i.e. has been repeatedly verified by experiment, is highly misleading, and many aspects of it conform to the despised public use of the term "theory" and not the scientific use.