Way OT: <the phase of the moon or the number of roaches in the building>
It is always possible that a variable you aren't looking at, is the crucial one. But, by plodding along, one by one eliminating all the variables you think are likely, and then the unlikely ones, and then the really weird ones, you will eventually stumble on the right one, or ones.
It isn't so much the process where most mistakes are made; it's the unspoken initial assumptions. And confounding correlation with causation. And not having an honest-and-true Control Group.
<your decision to stop collecting the "relevant" evidence and start analyzing it is also a leap of faith>
For that, there are ways (purely mathematical ways), to decide if you have a large enough sample, to get results that answer the question.
You are saying Creationism comes up short. But you are using an Enlightenment yardstick to measure. Not fair. Both Ideas insist they are universal, and so cannot admit the validity of competing yardsticks to measure the world with. So they just end up dissing each other, and calling it debate (just like NeoCons and pacifists). Best just to agree to disagree.
The Gaians solve this problem, by saying that the natural world, in all its immense complexity, is God (Goddess, actually). The moon, the roaches, the fossils, you and me and the Koalas, all are organs and cells and organelles and excreta of a single living Being. |
