George wrote:
> 1) My basic point, which I will restate as bluntly as possible,
> remains. The "nobody was around to see what happened" (or "we can't see
the
> past") argument is utterly inept and cannot be used by anyone who has any
> knowledge of the way the world works.
I don't want to pick an argument here, and I sense from the perjorative
words that you use, such as "utterly inept" that you are piqued. I will
just say that I don't consider the following to be "utterly inept":
"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you
understand." (Job 38:4).
I have no objection to theorising, as long as it is made quite clear that it
is theorising. I started this thread by objecting to the statement that
shared DNA code was "conclusive proof" of Darwinism. It seems to me that
all too often theory is confused with fact. I am sure we are all aware that
atheists like Richard Dawkins use evolution as a battering ram to preach
their message that there is no God.
The first chapter of "The Selfish Gene" is entitled "Why are people?". At
the end of the first para, Dawkins writes:
Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious
child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to
superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life?
What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions,
the eminent zoologist G.G. Simpson put it thus: "The point I want to now is
that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that
we will be better off if we ignore them completely".
I believe that man is the creation of God, as I'm sure we all do on this
list. Evolution is the current attempt of mankind to describe "How" that
happened. But Dawkins, I think, would have you believe that it answers the
"why" as well. I think the import of the Job verse has to be that any
attempt to answer the "Why" question before or since 1859 is worthless.
Let's get on with the science, and try to find out about the "How". One
day, when we no longer see through a glass darkly, and see God face to face,
I believe we will know "why".
> 2) Many "creationists", & not only those of the YEC variety, don't
like
> theories, labelling them speculation, against common sense, &c. But if
they try
> to deal with observational data at all they MUST theorize. The problem is
that
> they don't know how to do it! A common approach which shows up in many
YEC
> claims (e.g., changing speed of light, shrinking sun, decay of earth's
magnetic
> field) is to take some data gathered in the past couple of centuries &
> extrapolate that data into the distant past. If you're not careful that
may
> mean you're just extrapolating observational uncertainties or errors,
which can
> just produce nonsense. (Though sometimes one just gets lucky, as with
Lowell's
> prediction of Planet X.)
> The more fundamental error, however, is the failure to realize
that what
> they're doing IS theorizing. In order to extrapolate, you have to make a
more
> or less intelligent guess about the form
> of the curve you're going to use - linear, exponential, or whatever. & of
> course that's a theory. But just drawing a curve through points on a
graph
> without having any ideas about the underlying physical processes isn't
likely to
> give any real insight.
> This doesn't mean that extrapolation is always worthless, but you
need
> to have some idea how & why to do it. E.g., extrapolation of changes in
the
> earth's magnetic field as simple exponential decay would make sense IF the
field
> were simply frozen in to a fluid conducting core. In fact, you don't even
need
> any data to determine that with such a model the half-life for decay of
the
> field would be a few thousand years. But there are good reasons for
rejecting
> such a model.
> In other words, if you're going to do theoretical physics, learn
to do
> it right. & you can't do that if you're contemptuous of the whole concept
of
> scientific theory.
>
I think we're in agreement over this. I am certainly not contemptuous of
the whole concept of a scientific theory. But I am contemptuous of the
practice of clinging to a manifestly bad theory in the absence of anything
better. It would be better to remain agnostic, and say "we just don't
know". To cling to the idea that the speed of light must have slowed down
by several orders of magnitude over the last 6000 years in the absence of
any other way to reconcile the biblical timescale is a "scientific theory"
which it is right to hold in contempt, particularly as the only evidence is
the tail of a curve of noisy and inaccurate measurements. (YEC cosmologist
Russel Humphries utterly rejects the variable speed of light notion; though
I'm not at all convinced that his alternative theories are sustainable given
observational data; but they are certainly more respectable that the
decaying speed of light idea).
As far as evolution is concerned; I remain an agnostic. If it happened at
all (leaving out the question of timescale), then I don't think that
"copying errors" and natural selection are sufficient to make it happen even
in a billions of years timescale.
As a matter of interest, I often wonder why Dawkins makes such a play of
"Copying errors", or mutations. In the Genetic Algorithms community, it has
largely been recognised that "Crossover" (ie. genetic recombination) does
most of the hard work, with "mutation" playing a comparatively minor role of
maintaining diversity in the population. In practice, what really does most
of the hard work is a heuristic known as "elitist selection". What this
means is that the best individual in a population is cloned so an exact copy
of it is preserved without crossover or mutation to the next generation.
That way the fitness always monotonically increases. That seems to be the
"hand of God" if ever I saw it. It usually makes the difference between the
GA being able to solve the problem and not being able to solve it.
All the best,
Iain.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 16 2001 - 15:50:02 EST