From: Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1.fidonet.org
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Logic and God
X-Sender: newtout 0.02 Aug 21 1992
Date: 02 Sep 92  17:55:00

 > From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
 > Message-ID: 1285@tecsun1.etl.army.mil

 >>>>>Whether Darwin was right or not depends
 >>>>>quite solely on his ability to have made a calculated scientific
 >>>>>wild-ass guess.
 >>
 >>>>This is just gibberish.  As a historian, you're an idiot.


 > But is creationism bad science ? I am convinced that one can
 > take the exact same set of data that exists now, and by changing
 > the fundamental assumptions on which the theory is based, come up
 > with a different conclusion.

Please state this as a scientific theory. Otherwise it's just verbiage.

 > encountering incomplete and often complex data. Can evolutionary
 > biology really be so simple that we can teach it to high school
 > students without losing something in the process ?

1. We have sequential dating of fossils and strata from several independent
methods. When observe the inventory of lifeforms through time, we see it
change. Moreover, we have seen some changes occur in our own time in living
lineages. We call the the fact of evolution.

2. We have proposed mechanisms for how this happens. We call them the theory
of evolution.

Yeah, i think that's simple enough for high school.

 >       I am really bemused by the statement that I'm an ignorant
 > historian. Since semantics have been thrown my way, I would

You were called that because you called Darwin's original work "a calculated
scientific wild-ass guess" when if you had actually read about it, you'd know 
it was a long and stressful process, backed up by painstaking observations and 
inquiries.


 > simply like to point out that the preponderence of evidence for
 > evolution does not lie in any written record (that is, after all,
 > what history is based upon), but on physical evidence/observation
 > and deductive logic. How, then can we justify evolutionary biology
 > as a "historical science". Just because something allegedly
 > happened in the past does not make it history.

No, the description of what happened in the past is history, and evolutionary 
biology describes what happened with life in the past so it is the history of 
life.

And, when it is possible for someone to propose ahead of time, that a search
would uncover such and such a detail, with good reasons why, that is
historical *science*.

+--------------------------+--------------------------------------+
| 10                    2  | Garden Grove Institute of Technology |
|        DR PEPPER         | Community Outreach Center            |
|                       4  |                                      |
+--------------------------+ Snail Addr: Unit #1, 7872 Trask      |
| Real americans don't     |             Westminster, Ca  92683   |
| pledge allegiance, they  | Modem:      714-894-7039             |
| make the government earn | Fidonet:    1:103/241                |
| it.                      | Candynet:   42:1001/1                |
|                          | Internet:   Dr.Pepper@f241.n103.z1   |
|                          |              .fidonet.org            |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------------+

---
Newsgroups: talk.origins