That is called moving the goal posts. We were discussing falsifiability and the fact is that the fossil and genetic evidence could have falsified evolution but they do not. Certainly you cannot claim that creationism predicted anything that is shown by either the fossil or genetic evidence. The fact that you can move the goal posts and alter your idea of creationism to fit the facts just demonstrates that creationism is not falsifiable.
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Depending on your definition of macroevolution. If you include speciation in macroevolution then there are a few candidates; but the London Underground Mosquito is still a mosquito even if it can’t interbreed with its parent species (at last report I saw it still can).
However if you set the bar above speciation then you are quite correct.
Fossils and such genetics could at best only confirm the theory of common descent if plausible. They can’t prove it. But then in science no theory is proved in principal.
This has been the goal post from the beginning of my discussion, I regret if you’ve missed it or if I wasn’t clear enough. I have no particular dispute with the theory of common descent… in that sense, not unlike Professor Behe… who I understand himself fully embraces the theory of universal common descent, and if I understand properly, precisely due to his understanding of genetics and fossil record.
That has not kept him from being a critic of the mechanism of unguided variation and natural selection for the last two decades. That is what I am asking if it could be tested, observed, and/or falsified.
So, I’m afraid that particular goalpost was established at least back in 1996 when he published Darwin’s Black Box.
First you ask about falsifiability and when that is demonstrated then you not only pretend that your question was about exclusive confirmation, but now you shift the whole discussion from the one we are having right here in the forum to one written in a book by this pseudoscientist Behe from the Discovery Institute.
And who here believes that evolution is unguided any more than they believe that a Christian life is unguided? But just because we believe God has a role in both evolution and our lives doesn’t mean that the laws of nature such as gravity and natural selection do not work according to the mathematical equations and principles discovered by science, just because God is not a variable in those equations.
I think what is really going on here is that creationists simply don’t want science to investigate the origin of life and the species because they simply want to dictate the origins to everyone. They don’t want people to choose whether to believe in God, they simply want to burn people who dare to question their beliefs at the stake.
A couple of general comments may be useful in this discussion/debate.
1) Evolution as natural history: The earth is old and the kinds of organisms that populate our world have changed over time.
Evolution is generally discussed by scientists as a theory (some regard it as fact, just as 2+2=4). 1) however, is dangerously close to a vacuous statement; by this I mean that long time periods in natural history are observations which depend on established methods and/or laboratory instruments for determining geological ages. Everything changes with time, including the ecology of the planet, and within this, it is obvious that these ecological changes would include plant and animal life forms. So, what is added to our scientific understanding by using the term evolution in these discussions, and how can this be presented as a scientific theorem, with all of the usually pre-requisites for all theorems in the sciences?
2) Evolution as a mechanism: A combination of variation and natural selection helps explain the structure of the observed change over time in natural history.
Part of an answer to this has been addressed in that we are unable to consider counterfactuals; however, in view of the difficulties in falsification, and I may add verification (we cannot travel back in time to obtain factual data for particular species and provide the verification needed), which are intrinsic to the nature of this proposition, are we not left with a descriptive approach which essentially is founded on experimental measurements and perhaps some predictive approaches, to sustain a mechanism(s) which the experts in this field fully agree is of immense complexity at the molecular level.
I am not demeaning laboratory work in any way, but simply stating the obvious in that 2) combines a fundamental requirement for a theory that can only be understood within natural history and a planetary environment.
@Daniel_Fisher, God in God’s wisdom makes it possible to find an excuse to not accept the reality of evolution, Jesus, or even God if we really do not want to. We are free not to believe, even though the facts are there, if we are open to understanding.
The choice is ours, but of course our freedom makes us we are responsible to God for that choice.