From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,talk.origins
Subject: Re: Logic and God (was: Young earth creationist logic NOT!)
Date: 28 Aug 92 14:13:47 GMT
Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Followup-To: talk.origins
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
In-reply-to: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)

In article <1272@tecsun1.etl.army.mil>, riggs@descartes (Bill Riggs) writes:
>				     My real complaint is that you
>and many, many others have stated repeatedly and dogmatically that
>if we just were intellectually honest and followed the data, it would
>automatically lead us to believe in evolution.

That's right.  The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.  The only way
you can be intellectually honest and reject evolution is to reject maybe
99% or more of modern scientific knowledge--there are few things as solidly
established.

I happen to know one such intellectually honest person.  He does not believe
that Jupiter is a billion miles away, he does not believe that the world
is round, he does not believe there were any massacres in China a few years
ago, and so on.

>					        That is clearly what
>Steven Jay Gould means when he states that evolution is a fact.

Exactly.  It _is_ a fact.

>	I would really like to know what your definition of a 
>"scientifically factual process" is supposed to be. The Marxists
>claimed that they had a "scientifically factual process" as well
>(objective, too).

The Marxists are obviously speaking gibberish, starting with Karl who
refused to check out any actual data.

>		   We have not disproved evolution as a means of
>explaining the rise of man any more than we have disproved Marxism
>as a means of explaining human society.

Uh, Marxism has been shown to be total trash repeatedly.  Repeatedly.

>					 But do you not see that
>simply avowing evolutionary theory

No one is "simply" avowing evolution.  The evidence is overwhelming.

>				    as being the only "right" 
>basis to look at these issues automatically limits what we can determine,
>yes scientifically determine ?

No, it does not.  You're free to find stupendously overwhelming evidence
that dwarfs the current views.  It's happened before.

>			        Darwin and Lamarck could be just as wrong
>as Galen and Aristotle were, but we have not found the way to
>extract the data yet which proves them so.

So what?

>					    Does this mean that mankind
>should stop trying to explain the unknown, or to challenge "received
>truth" ?

No.  Meanwhile, evolution is one of the most solidly established facts
in all of science. 

>	  If all theory (okay, wise guy, hypotheses) has/have to pass
>muster in relation to previously "proved" hypotheses, is this 
>really science ? This is what Medieval scholasticism taught. It is
>quite possible to be logically consistent, intellectually balanced,
>and just plain wrong if you are working off the wrong data. I would
>have thought this point to be relatively non-controversial.

It's also completely trite and uninteresting.  WHAT wrong data?  It's
cheap and rather meaningless to utter dire predictions of what might
be found.  

The only reason there is any controversy is this sophomoric philosophical
triviality is treated as some profound subtlety overlooked by scientists.
It's not.  It's *ignored* by scientists--in EVERY branch of science.  If
your argument has some point, it should apply across the board.

>>>	But let's put the shoe on the other foot for a moment. If creationism
>>>does a lousy job at documenting the past, how well does evolutionary theory
>>>predict the future.

It does a very good job for what it claims to predict.  The most famous
prediction, of course, was that geologists and physicists did not under-
stand enough of their subject in the nineteenth century to date the earth.
No one, absolutely NO ONE, within physics was predicting that there were
serious gaps in such understanding.  In our own lifetime, molecular
homologies were searched for and found, just as predicted by evolution.
This time no one was surprised.

>>>		       Geez, well, you know evolution is based on pure
>>>randomness, isn't it ?

No, it's not.  It kind of knocks the core out of your argument if you
don't know the basics of the basics about what you're talking about.

>>>			  Too much randomness out there to PREDICT future
>>>development of species, no ?

That's true.

>>>			        Show me the scientific study of biological
>>>diversity which explains what is happening out there NOW. And don't try
>>>telling me that you don't have enough data.

Why should we bother with this?  Evolution never claims to explain things
at this level of detail.  Of course, the same is true of physics, astronomy,
chemistry, meteorology, etc etc.

>       As a historian, I would not hang my hat on evolution.

As a historian, you're an idiot.

>							      There is not
>enough data there to prove beans.

Only if you shut your eyes and live in a sealed room.  The data for
evolution is overwhelming.

>				   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.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
Xref: sparky sci.skeptic:15367 talk.origins:10351