"The statement, as worded, is the position I am taking."
Ok. So fuzzy it is.
"That certainly isn't my view of things (ID is more than sufficient) so I don't know why you are making such a statement.'
What is it with you and straw men? I never claimed it was your position, I am just pointing out that you are wrong. ID can fill any cracks because one just has to posit a miracle. If a transitional fossil is found, well, no big deal. Science becomes a game of whack-a-mole...
"I don't know who you are referring to as the 'we know it' group but I know there is more than one avenue to knowledge"
The scientific method, which is what drives science, is not really amenable to miracles. I am reminded of a cartoon that shows a guy scribbling equations on a board, gets to a certain point and writes "a miracle occurs" and then continues on. His adviser, or some older gent, points at the statement and says "this step needs some explanation"...
If you drag in miracles, then the set of things that are unknowable cannot be quantified.
"You will have to define 'foundation for science' if you want to use it as a basis for arguing anything here. "
This is your argument? Dancing around terminology?
Science is based on observation. Hypotheses are developed to explain those observations, and they are then tested to see if they are valid. In more abstract sciences, like cosmology and sub-atomic physics, the emphasis is more on building models and validating them against observations. These are more precarious, it is a lot more iffy to claim they are how reality operates, rather they are just models that might show how reality operates.
"I've never come across someone from that oft referred to crowd."
I think I know what you are trying to state. The spiritual heirs of creationism is the ID crowd. Different name, different terminology, same ideas. The big killer argument for the creationists was birds and flight. They'd go on and on about how anything less than full-fledged flight was inferior to any proposed ancestral form. And then those fossils were found in China which clearly showed transitional forms that were pretty functional...
Oops.
Then, I suggest you look up Popper and falsifiability. Basically it is a statement of testability. If you can't actually test it, it isn't science, it is faith.
"You are being redundant here and you haven't begun to do what you said you were going to do. You are merely, and predictably, attacking some straw man of your own making."
Show me where I ever claimed you backed ID. Or anything of note. I am just pointing out that your position that both evolution and ID cannot explain certain critical things is so much nonsense. To make such a statement shows you lack either information or critical reasoning skills. And seems to be an attempt to pretend you are open minded on the issue, despite not knowing some of the important ramifications.
But, whatever.
Anyway, I have established that ID cannot be science. Evolution, OTOH, can be. It meets all of the basic criteria. it is falsifiable(testable), it can be used to make predictions and it is logically consistent with what we know.
So let's take these one by one. Evolution can be tested. Granted, it isn't an easy thing, but certainly if something can be found that cannot be explained with the fossil record, that is one way to test it. Now bird flight has been used in the past to poke holes in evolution. Certainly things like the evolution of feathers seemed to be a tough one. With the popularly known fossils of the time, it seemed like pretty complex structures, i.e. flight feathers, developed in a short period of time. However, with the discovery of new fossils, and the realization of what some ones that had already been discovered but were not interpreted correctly, along with thermal modeling of dinosaurs, it became obvious that feathers were very, very old. It now looks like feathers were a feature of many dinosaurs, initially likely to reduce the thermal requirements for a high energy lifestyle and allowing young dinos to grow very, very quickly. They were likely co-opted for decorative purposes for mate selection and other displays. Evolution does those sort of things.
Evolution can be used to make predictions. We know enough about it that transitional fossils can be predicted with some degree of accuracy. AS far as others, I just googled this site.
chem.tufts.edu
Finally, evolution is logically consistent with other things we know. It fits in with what we know of chemistry, geology and other sciences. |
