Cliff:
>You seems to be protesting the irregularity of history. Why should
>history have to be smooth and gradual? Eukaryotes appeared suddenly
>and so did the Cambrian fauna. The evidence implies that these organisms
>did not form gradually. The challenge for science is to discover what
>happened and to explain how it happened.
Not quite. According to the NAS, "it is the job of science to provide
plausible
natural explanations for natural phenomena." This means, as one biologist
has put it, "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an
hypothesis
is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic." Thus, science does
not take up the challenge of discovering what happened. It merely attempts
to find the best naturalistic explanation. Whether such an explanation truly
describes what happened is something science does not address.
I think this type of confusion is close to the heart of all the political
dispute
concerning origins. On one hand, we exclude ID for methodological reasons.
Fine. But then we teach scientific origin explanations as if they are
objective
accounts of what happened. But those conclusions do not follow once
we exclude one class of explanations for a priori methodological reasons.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 21 2000 - 17:57:31 EST