Everything boils down to testimony to
Me. When you read a scientific paper, we generally trust that those doing the experiments are actually giving us data they collected, that they calibrated their instruments, that they are reporting fairly and accurately and not trying to secure a grant or push finding. The cool thing about science is that the testimony of scientists should be repeatable and fallible by others all over the world. But that means non-scientists are going to rely on the testimony of other scientists to verify the testimony of other scientist and the data they claim to have measured/collected and so on. We are going to accept the testimony of manufactures that their instruments are calibrated correctly or the scientists who test them before use.
Testimony most definitely qualifies as evidence. But itâs not proof and evidence still has to be vetted. History is vastly different from science because even eyewitness testimony (which it is extremely difficult to even establish we are even dealing with in 2,000 year old documents) is not repeatable, verifiable or generally falsifiable. There is no peer review or questioning other contemporaries.
But the human population very much is dependent on the testimony of scientists and everyone in general. Most testimony is given the benefit of the doubt in our day to day lives. Many Christians seem to trust the testimony of the apostles they believe were chosen by Jesus or the Sacred authors God chose to write His words over the testimony of scientists.
If the God of the universe wrote a book and said the earth was 6,000 years old and there was a global flood that wiped out all humanity, why wouldnât we discard methodological naturalism and listen to our Creator? Science has been great but clearly itâs doing something majorly wrong because God disagrees.
You appear to be saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree to a large extent and I think that is a safe and moderate way to live life. But science as a principle assumes it will be able to explain that measurable miracle. As does history. Their methods and tools assume these things donât happen or ignore them as a general rule. Also, saying âGod acted hereâ to explain some gap in our knowledgeâis a theological statement that is not verifiable or falsifiable. Things that seem impossible or inexplicable to people in the past are now explainable by us. I see little reason to assume this trend has ended.
You are not talking ToE. You are not talking âexpectedâ results.
Sceince does not normally set out to âproveâ a theory. When it confirms it is because the data is duplicated within the set parameters. But the throery came second, not first.
There is no way to confirm or deny the meaning of the DNA comparisons. There is also no way to confirm or deny what the pattern could be other than what is decided.
T Keeps on about âexpectedâ results. And asking what I might âExpectâ⌠That is not the scientific method or the way to costruct a theory. You do not start with expectations.
People have âfoundâ a code in the Bible, because they were looking for it. In thrth it is hogwash, but there are those who still believe.
Regardless of the dots that Sceince creates and the percieved connections. Unless you have a method to get from A-Z without âgapsâ it is worthless. In law it is called circumstantial.and it is not enough to confirm or deny the verdict without true ecvidence. That evidence does not exist. It happened millions of years ago.
More like a crack â thereâs not enough difference to make a chasm.
Thereâs not enough substance to it to call it an interpretation. To me the response âa chasmâ indicates âIâm not going to be bothered to think about itâ.
Or objective evidence that canât be repeated.
Some of those are scary, like the ones that will kill a goat, place the body at your back door and the head at the front as a physical element of a curse.
This brought to mind a science fiction story that included a discovery of time âviewingâ. When it was discovered everyone was clamoring for what to go look at, and then one of the developers managed to communicate two huge limitations: having viewed something in year X, nothing farther back than X could ever be viewed again, and nothing in year X could be viewed again without waiting a year (and it still had to be a later date than the previous view). The invention faded from public view as scientists, historians, philosophers, etc. worked to compile a list of events â and what brought this to mind is that in many historical cases they werenât sure which event preceded another certain event!
Yes, I am. It was not uncommon for them to have different expectations of the results due to their worldview differences.
That depends; it sometimes goes the other way.
Yes, it is! Hypotheses tend to be âif . . . thenâ statements, and the âthenâ is an expectation. For instance, from Einsteinâs equations it was expected that in deep space we would occasionally observe some given galaxy appearing in two different places, or even see a galaxy appear to be a giant ring lightyears across. As it happens, those turned out to be correct.
That strikes me as being like saying you canât plan a backpacking trip without knowing the exact steps youâre going to take. Iâve done some where all we had was checkpoints, and identifying checkpoints often involved the scientific method, e.g. âIf this is Williams Glacier, then over to the north we should see Mount Washington and to the south we should see Green Lakeâ â and more than once someone objected that if we were instead at Barns Glacier weâd see the same landmarks, so we needed another expectation to narrow things down.
Your claim also turns out to be false with respect to how stars operate: we knew that our sun was âburningâ light elements in fusion, but we didnât know how that was possible â indeed from what we knew about fusion it shouldnât have been possible. So we had the characteristics of our local star, we had the output of that star, but we didnât have the steps in between â yet from that output we knew fusion was going on.
No, it sets out to test a theory, which is generally done by comparing predictions of the theory with data. Which is what you donât want to do.
Sure there is. Thereâs no way to be absolutely certain of a conclusion, but deciding which explanation for a pattern is more likely to be correct is precisely what science does.
Youâre trying to lecture scientists here, and your attempts do not reflect the reality of how science works â at all.
No, but you need two strong legs, the ability to traverse any rivers or chasms en route, and provisions to survive the trip.
Analogies are usually biased. In this case the route is usually planned and such things a s obstacles catered for, only the weather is unknown.and even yhay is usually predicted.
ToE cannot predict either the environment or the route it taking, let alone the things it has to âcreateâ.
Testimony is considered evidence. While it is challenging to convict a person of a crime based on testimony alone, it is not outside the realm of possibility. But testimony in itself is a form of evidence. If you have the testimony of 2 or 3 credible witnesses then you have a better case. Like if a classroom of 4yo say their milk boxes taste sour.
Because a miracle is not a possible explanation under MN
Did you ever see the video on miracle healing I started a thread about here? Craig Keener, Peter May, and Joshua Brown discuss the evidence for a couple outstanding cases. I started rewatching it last night. I forgot how well they handled the discussion. The first 20 or so minutes are outstanding.
Interesting, although maybe your memory is not perfect in this. Permafrost is rare in Scandinavia, mainly found in specific type of bogs (palsa mire/bog). There are some small glaciers where something could have been preserved but these probably contain very little human DNA. There is also the problem that soils are in many places acidic and do not preserve biological remains well.
Despite the paucity of old DNA, those studying human DNA have made really interesting findings. One finding has been that the ancient people of Scandinavia (5000+ years ago) have disappeared. These ânativeâ people had blue eyes and dark skin, a combination you do not usually find today. Nowadays common pale skin apparently came with immigrants, possibly first along the northern coast from the direction of coastal Siberia. Mixing of immigrants from various directions created the current population. At least in southern Scandinavia, the dominant genetic background comes from the Yamnaya, people that migrated to Europe from the direction of the Pontic-Caspian steppes (a steppe area spanning from Eastern Europe to central Asia) crudely 5000 years ago.
More detailed information about genes have been obtained mainly by comparing genomes of people living in different areas of Fennoscandia. That has revealed both the maternal and paternal sources of people and some information about mutations.
When the goal in science is to test a particular idea, then we need to know what the expectations are if that idea is true. Then we can see whether the results of the testing or observing are a sufficiently better match for the idea being tested than not. Thatâs the whole idea of looking for a p value under 0.05, for example. Of course, it is often helpful if the individuals doing the measuring do not know all of the relevant expectations - a blind or double-blind study. But if I want to know whether a new drug helps to prevent Byneâs disease, for example, those doing the measuring do need to know to look for Byneâs disease, even if they donât know which is the control versus the experimental group. Thus, some level of expectation is needed, even if itâs just âI think it will be interesting to observe X and see what happensâ. (Given that Byneâs is not really a disease, no a drug wonât help.)
For evolution, the question becomes whether a particular set of patterns matches the expectations of evolutionary scenarios better than others. For example, if a designer were making chimps and humans separately, thereâs no particular reason why the genes that do the same thing across all mammals would show any particular pattern of similarity. Our mitochondrial DNA might be more like that of mice, and our nuclear ribosomal genes could be more like those of marsupials, etc. But if creation used a pattern of common descent with modification, then the pattern of similarity between species in genes should be consistent across genes (allowing for lateral transfer, hybridization, and independent loss of variants). The patterns observed are a close match for those expected if organisms do descend through an evolutionary pattern.
Following an evolutionary pattern in no way rules out Godâs design behind the process; itâs just a good physical description of the pattern. The ârandomnessâ is that humans canât predict with absolute certainty âwill mutation X happen in this particular situationâ and that organisms canât decide âhey, I need this mutationâ and change their genes accordingly. God can be in charge of both of these, but biology lacks theometers to measure that.
But Richard is using several key terms differently from standard biological usage, which leads to confusion and lack of communication.
Is there any particular reason why it wouldnât? And is that reason science? Unless we humans can collect data on how omnipotent deities create life across multiple worlds and come up with testable and falsifiable claims, how do we know what the genes of life should look like if designed? I think Richardâs point maybe that science leaves the realm of science here and enters into rationality. Evolution just makes more sense to most people than imagining God making all this forms and meandering to and fro as seen in the fossil record. Itâs also consistent with what we see in genes etcâŚ.but thatâs not a scientific statement, just a human opinion on how we think a Designer would or should design. I donât see any problem with that type of thinking but it seems to me that is not pure science but an interpretation of it based on how we understand human design. I felt like Richard was trying to bring the discussion to a deeper level but was probably using terms differently or inconsistently.
I would prefer to say from a different perspective to the consistent one of science. I would hope that I am not ambiguous,
That is the underlying question I have been failing to get an answer to other than âWhat would I expect them to look likeâ. Basically I expect them to look like they do, because that is what I think has happened. IOW Ii is the assessment of the data that I am disagreeing with and the denial that an algorithm (invented by man) could possibly prove anything in terms of how something was formed or developed (by God or by Naturalistic Evolution).
We could think that structures and functions need certain kind of DNA sequences as blueprints. Similarity in structure and function would mean similarity in DNA. That would not reveal whether organisms are directly created or evolved but in theory, such similarity could be produced by direct creation.
If the similarity of DNA would be caused by direct creation of species or kinds, we would expect relatively tidy genomes. Similarity in coding DNA but there are no reasons to expect that the non-coding or âjunkâ DNA would be similar between species/kinds as the accumulation of this âjunkâ would have happened independently in each species. If creation is relatively recent (10k years or less), there should not be much âjunkâ because there has not been much time for the accumulation of such material.
If creation happened through the process of evolution, during a very long time period (hundreds of millions of years), we would not expect as tidy genomes. Unnecessary material tend to be wiped out during evolution as all material is costly. Yet, there should be more non-coding or junk DNA. If the accumulation has happened very slowly and genomes shared via common ancestry, we would expect similarities in the non-coding/junk DNA. Closely related species should have more similarities in the non-coding/junk DNA than distant relatives.
These are two predictions based on the origin of species, direct creation vs. evolution during a very long time period. Those who know genetics can comment how well these predictions fit to the reality.
Has anyone investigated so called âjunkâ DNA in relation to embryonic development? The human foetus goes through several Metamorphoses including having gills. Such information would then superfluous to the adult.(junk?)
Iâm assuming such a thing has been dismissed, butâŚ
We can watch the mechanisms of evolution in action, and from those observations predict what features we should see in genomes if species share a common ancestor and evolved. Thatâs how science works.
Yes, you do start with expectations. Itâs called a hypothesis.
That method is biological reproduction and common ancestry. Itâs the same method that causes you to share a common ancestor with all other human beings.
Concluding that the patterns we see in DNA are evidence for common descent doesnât require any understanding of what an intelligent designer would do. If we have two hypotheses, one of which makes highly specific predictions about what should be seen in empirical data and the other of which makes no predictions at all (which is essentially what youâre suggesting here), then observing the predicted patterns is evidence for the first hypothesis. The space of possible patterns is vast indeed, so correctly making predictions about real patterns is strong evidence that the hypothesis is onto something. And yes, that kind of reasoning is scientific.
In practice, the argument against common descent is often worse than this. On the one hand, weâre told that the complex functional systems in living things are evidence for the intelligence of a designer, implying that we can know what the product of intelligent design should look like. Then, when some of us point out that many features of organisms look nothing like intelligent design, we are also told that we canât say that because we have no idea what things designed by an omnipotent deity might look like. Pick a lane, guys.
