I'll bite,
At 11:31 PM 12/11/97, Lloyd Eby wrote:
>1. The earth and living things on it are much older than 6000
> years. (This means that the so-called "young earth theory" -
> - held by a few religious fundamentalists or Biblical
> literalists -- is denied.)
many Christians deny this statement.
>2. Living species did not appear on earth all at once. (This
> claim can be further stated or specified as:)
Even some ID people deny this in a real sense. Behe believes that all the
information for ALL the subsequent species was placed into the dna of the
first cell. In a real sense, Behe is advocating the appearance of all life
at once only he does it in the form of information all at once. Yet this
view must be wrong because there is not enough nucleotides in a 4 billion
unit genome to hold all that information.
> The error in much evolutionist thinking and argumentation comes
>about, I think, because of this confusion: 1 through 5 are known
>to be true. Moreover the truth of 1 through 5 offers some
>evidence toward the truth of one or more of the statements 6
>through 8. On that basis, many evolutionists go on to assert that
>one or more of the statements 6 through 8 is true.
>
I think that you miss an important point in the creation/evolution debate.
I know that your statement 1 denies the young-earth view, there is a big
problem with large groups of christians denying all of the statement 1
through 5. So I would say that you have oversimplified the problem. While
evolutionists sometimes go beyond the data, too many christians don't even
accept the data.
> First, what is usually called modern science -- that is the
>empirical science of today that goes back at least to Copernicus
>-- has been successful because it has adopted statement 8 (the
>stance of metaphysical naturalism) as its methodological stance.
>In other words it has assumed that all observable phenomena or
>data can be investigated and that this investigation must be done
>in naturalistic terms -- i.e., it has held that there must be a
>naturalistic explanation (as opposed to a supernatural one) for
>everything. We have methods for testing naturalistic hypotheses,
>but we do not really have methods for testing extra-naturalistic
>or supernaturalistic ones. Another way of making this point is to
>say that, for modern science, to be scientific has meant to be
>naturalistic, and modern science has made enormous discoveries
>and advances through and because of that stance.
>
> In reply to that we can say that there is no adequate reason
>why metaphysical naturalism must be the only truly scientific
>stance. But, in practice, this stance has yielded all the results
>and explanations of modern science, and it seems reasonable to
>suppose that had this naturalistic stance not been taken then all
>the advances and discoveries we think of as modern science would
>not have come about. Moreover, although there may be ways of
>testing extra-naturalistic hypotheses, we have not, in fact,
>possessed them in any way that we could really call scientific.
>The question of whether extra-naturalistic hypotheses and
>explanations can be tested in any adequate way thus remains open
>and unanswered, I think. Another way of saying this is that we do
>not at this time have available any good or adequate model or
>paradigm for a non-naturalistic science.
With this lack of non-naturalistic science, what exactly are you advocating?
If we can't provide an alternative are we merely to say that we shouldn't do
science?
>
> A second problem is that statements 6 and 7 (in whatever way
>they are understood, i.e., in whatever way the most recent or
>most subtle or most adequate form of evolutionism as a stance or
>ideology is understood to be defined or to operate) do give a
>paradigm (to use Thomas Kuhn's terminology) and a research
>program (to use the terminology of Imre Lakatos and others) for
>the biological sciences. Thus, the denial of 6 or 7 would leave
>the biological sciences (as they presently exist, anyway)
>foundering, at least to an important extent. For that reason,
>those biologists who hold to the notion of evolution embodied in
>those statements 6 or 7 frequently challenge anti-evolutionists
>to propose some other testable theory if they wish to deny the
>evolutionary one.
>
> From one point of view that demand is reasonable -- having
>no alternative theory but nevertheless denying the evolutionary
>stance or paradigm would seem to leave the biological sciences
>without any way of going ahead. From another point of view,
>however, that demand for an alternative need not be met by the
>anti-evolutionist. One can know or be convinced that an
>explanation or theory is false or inadequate without needing to
>propose an alternative.
This is not really workable. It gives the appearance of stubbornness. it
appears like saying to others, "I won't accept any data you present in favor
of your view, and I won't present any alternative to your ideas, but you are
wrong!"
Could you get away with this in front of your boss? I doubt it. If you
workplace would not accept such a standard why should anyone else?
(For example, I can know that it is false
>that John murdered Mary without knowing who did, in fact, kill
>Mary or even without having any good theory about how Mary died.)
>So, the burden is not necessarily on the anti-evolutionist to
>propose another theory, but one can understand why evolutionists
>frequently become exasperated with anti-evolutionists. It is
>difficult for any science to admit that it is stymied in its
>present theoretical base and its research program, and that it
>does not yet know how to get beyond that impasse. (I mean this to
>be both a psychological and a logical-methodological
>observation.)
This is an argument for solipsism. I can't know anything and the burden is
not upon me to present any explanation at all.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm