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Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me?

Alright, Ill answer your "refutations" then:

"Why shouldn't you suspect that decay rates could change?"

If you read my post, I explained why : Because there is no evidence that suggest it is changing, and no known physical mechanisms that can produce such change. The moon could suddenly start orbiting the other direction relative to earth tomorrow, but there is no signs, no evidence, that suggests or implies that it will, and also physics dont allow it unless it is pushed or pulled by some very large force etc.
Bottom line, change in the decay rate is an assumption of something for which there is no evidence. Thats why scientists dont waste their time suspecting this.

As for the line "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense". Well thats a poetic thing and all, but its not really true when you think about it for a little bit: for the most part, this is how we exclude things from our reality, and separate what is real or not. It is perfectly consistent to say "I really dont think this thing exist" while remaining, in principle, open minded. There might be green hairy monsters hiding under my bed, I can never know for absolute certain, but I dont THINK so, the absense of evidence convinces me there are none.

The same is true in say, particle physics, there may be thousands of different "higgs-bosons" of different kinds doing all sorts of crazy shit in physics, but again, in the absense of evidence... you cant just build your ideas around fantasies.

Do you know the geologic column doesn't actually exist in reality?
Are you alking about illustrations of the geologic column? Then yeah, I'm aware that it doesnt look like that in real-life, but the term is definately real, and yes, erosion and things like that can expose old layers to fresh air, this is of course well know in biology and geology. When I say fossils are layed down in order, I dont mean that they are all physically on top of eachother, but that the dating of the layers match with the kind of animals found in that era. IE: there are no "fossil rabbits in the pre-cambrian" as one biologist replied when asked what would truly disprove evolution.


Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Hahaha, if that was said by an actual molecular biologist capable of finding his own ass, I'll eat my hat. This is so obviously Creo-speak from here on to hell. The first thing an actual biologist would do would be to question the use of the word "information" (I'm assuming he's asking about the information contained in DNA) in this context. Because we refer to DNA as a language and "it contains all the information needed to assemble a human" and so on, Creationists think of DNA as some sort of literary masterpiece, it seems. The truth is of course that its 4 acids spelling 95% repetetive gibberish intersped with some interesting bits that code for proteins and do actual useful stuff.

They also seems to think that (perhaps because they believe it themselves) humans existed from the get-go, and that DNA somehow evolved inside us or some shit like that. (Like one creationist who asked Richard Dawkins how we humans peed before our penises and vaginas evolved..) Anyway, like our penises, our DNA is of course much older than humans themselves, We are simply the latest iterations of a nearly endless line of attemps by nucleic acids to clone themselves by way of making an animal that does the reproduction.

I highly suspect that interview was faked by creationists , but even if it wasnt, it'd just mean that there's a molecular biologist out there who doesnt know fuck all about molecular biology and hold some strange beliefs, and he's wrong. Simple as that.


You then have the obligatory list of quotations, and what can I say?.. I can see how you think these are somehow indicating a plot or something against creationist, but honestly this is just plain quotemining.

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

>> ^shinyblurry:

I'm not really convinced that you understand the subject matter well enough to refute me, and what I've written so far is really just a superficial commentary on the underlying technical problems of these theories. I would also note that it is intellectual honesty that compels us to understand something before we pass judgment on it, and if you are going to call the creationist model "obvious nonsense" before understanding it, not only is that intellectually dishonest, but also willfully ignorant, which doesn't really seem to support the tone of your post.


Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

Besides, you might want to learn to read; I didn't call creationism obvious nonsense, I called "flood geology" obvious nonsense. Creationism isn't even nonsense, it's just bullshit. It's a fairy story and believing it is the very definition of wilful ignorance.

@shinyblurry said
It's quite a racket they have going, where the evidence is interpreted by the conclusion. Last time I checked that wasn't science.

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

>> ^ChaosEngine:

@shinyblurry, just stop. When you bring up such obvious nonsense as "flood geology", it makes it really hard to take you seriously.
Honestly I'm not even going to bother to refute this bullshit (although it's trivially easy to do so), but then again, I'm not going to prove that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist either.


I'm not really convinced that you understand the subject matter well enough to refute me, and what I've written so far is really just a superficial commentary on the underlying technical problems of these theories. I would also note that it is intellectual honesty that compels us to understand something before we pass judgment on it, and if you are going to call the creationist model "obvious nonsense" before understanding it, not only is that intellectually dishonest, but also willfully ignorant, which doesn't really seem to support the tone of your post.

@shinyblurry, just stop. When you bring up such obvious nonsense as "flood geology", it makes it really hard to take you seriously.

Honestly I'm not even going to bother to refute this bullshit (although it's trivially easy to do so), but then again, I'm not going to prove that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist either.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that it was a bit of an assumption to say that decay was constant, lets just linger with that idea for a second. We see some decay happen, and we assume its contant backwards in time. well what would be the alternative? Well, a non-constant decay, of course. The problem is just that we have no information, that is, no evidence, that the rate of decay has ever, or even can, change. Worse still, since there is no evidence, we cant say how the rate has changed. Is it decaying slower and slower, (which would imply a younger universe) or faster and faster (which would imply an even older universe) or does it fluctuate wildly? There is of course no way to tell, except to concede that there is no evidence for any of these three scenarios. According you Young Earth Creationists, the earth is something like 6-12000 years old, which would mean a MASSIVE, impossibly weird and complicated, and seemingly undetectable deceleration in the rate of decay of all known elements. Worse still, in order for the math to work out, all the different elements would decelerate at different rates, for some, again, inexplicable reason. And again, without this being detected by todays best scientists.

Are these the worst scientists then?

http://www.futurity.org/science-technology/decay-detector-gives-solar-flare-alert/

You should be careful not to let yourself become blinded by conventional wisdom. Why shouldn't you suspect that decay rates could change? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.


Talk about making assumptions, about having faith All in order to make a magic book remain magic.

Oh well.

It doesn't sound like you read my comment. I changed my mind, not in spite of the evidence, but because of it. I was perfectly fine with being a theistic evolutionist.


But of course, thats just be beginning, because it just so happens that the assumption we made (that the rate of decay is constant) lines up pretty damn nicely with other known facts about the universe, like how big it is, what stars are made of, how massive they are how long they have burned, how the whole universe is expanding, how tectonic plates move, how animals evolved,

Yes, you're right, it lines up just fine with all of the other giant assumptions that have been made about how the Universe was formed, because they are all predicated on the basal assumption of deep time, and conversely, they are all used to support that assumption of deep time. It's quite a racket they have going, where the evidence is interpreted by the conclusion. Last time I checked that wasn't science.

how fossils were buried by Satan to fool us all laid down in order over the eons, genetic diversity and the relationships and relatedness of all living things.

Do you know the geologic column doesn't actually exist in reality? It doesn't sound like you do, if you think it's all laid down in a neat little order like you see in the text book. The truth is, the geologic column is entirely theoretical. You don't find it anywhere on Earth. What you do find is various layers here and there, and what they assume is that layer a is the same as layer b if they find the same fossils in them. The depths you see in the various layers of the column does not reflect reality. You can find Cambrian fossils 10 feet down in some areas, so if you went by physical depth, you can say in some instances Cambrian was planted last and not first. The amount of circular reasoning employed to describe the geologic column is astounding.

Another question is, do you understand flood geology? Please read what we actually believe before you criticize it:

http://creationwiki.org/Flood_geology


It all pans out pretty fucking nicely to an emerging picture of a universe thats 13.72 billion years old, and an earth that is about 4.6 billion years old.

But I guess all these aligning scientific facts make the baby jesus sad and must be ignored, or at least made out by believers to be "based on faith" (The very thing that, by definition, underpins the entire worldview of a believer!) So that they can dismiss it because its just faith. Oh the irony, it burns.

As I said to someone else, if you're already committed to materialist explanations, it doesn't sound like a big leap. To someone who isn't so committed, it is a bigger leap than it might appear to you. I was willing to reinterpret my understanding of Gods word for what science had to say, and still am, but not for a mountain of circumstantial evidence and a just-so story to tie it all together.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan

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It is credible to believe that the Universe was designed and created by God.


This is something I should have clarified before - my use of the word "universe" includes any sort of God (who would, then, have created the rest of it - presumably). This term gets used a lot of different ways in different contexts, and I don't think the way I'm using it is, in any way, more correct and my use of the term over different conversations is likely inconsistent. Anyways, how we're using the term certainly has a huge impact on the discussion. So, to be clear, when I say universe I mean absolutely everything: God (or Gods or whatever), laws, matter, and anything else that can be said to be. So it makes no sense for me to say "God created the Universe", but it certainly makes sense to say "God created everything else in the Universe" or (if you see things a different way) "Everything in the Universe is part of God" (or some variation). Hopefully that clarifies my position.

Anyways, if you have a universe that includes a God with certain properties, that God goes ahead and designs and creates a bunch of other stuff and you end up "here". The minimum we need for this kind of universe to proceed is one being, with certain properties.

The minimum we need for a Godless universe to get to "here" is a certain set of arbitrary physical laws, and possibly some matter (matter may be optional - but, to be clear, "nothing" is not an option - the universe at very least would need physical laws to get going.. and that is very much something, and it's something that's unavoidably arbitrary).

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't know isn't a theory. What most atheists mean when they say "I don't know" is "I know it isn't the Christian God, but otherwise I don't know". The next thing they say is, you believe in God because you're afraid. That I "chose" God because I am scared of death, or because the Universe is too big and scary for my mind to handle the uncertainty of not knowing.


Well.. I, for one, don't know it isn't the Christian God. I just don't have any real reason to believe that right now. And I didn't mean to suggest YOU accepted an idea because you're "scared" - rather, what I meant to say (and didn't say clearly) is that it wouldn't be a good idea to accept something just because "something" is better than "I don't know". I prefer no explanation to accepting one that I don't have reasons to accept (and, again, I'm not saying you don't have reasons - I'm saying I don't have them).

And to be clear: I wasn't saying Devil's Tower is a current mystery (one of sufficient import) or that it wasn't caused by water action (I was making a little crack at old timey semi-scientists that explained lots of stuff away by referencing the Biblical flood).

Rather, I was suggesting a hypothetical wherein I had discovered Devil's Tower and didn't have any ideas about it's cause (which is not incomparable with where we're at with abiogenesis). In both cases, my point is that even without a real candidate theory it's not crazy to assume the explanation will be similar to other explanations we've accepted, and to guess that the explanation will not introduce large new assumptions.

For a geologic feature, you'd expect to be able to explain the feature through known mechanisms - erosion, glaciation, deposition, tectonic activity, geothermal weirdness, etc.. and you'd try to find an explanation using those sorts of things before you'd look further afield. You certainly couldn't guarantee the explanation isn't something more extraordinary, but your incoming bias against that possibility is not irrational - it's just following a reasonable search pattern.

Rubbish. It's stuff like that that makes religious people dislike atheists.

I'm not an atheist--but neither am I Christian. Nonetheless, I think it's worth pointing out some serious flaws in the argument here.

First, the literal interpretation of the Bible has never really been primary. Actually, this is almost universally the case for sacred writings. The Greek myths were to be understood as metaphor, and the Koran is considered by many Muslims to be a repository of spiritual truths which are not necessarily on the surface, and which require study to glean from the text.

Interpreting the Bible as non-literal--as metaphorical, analogical, etc.--goes back more than 2000 years. One of the first writers on the Old Testament, the Jewish scholar Philo, wrote a treatise that regarded the sacred books as almost entirely non-literal. He viewed it as encoded with revelations about Platonic truths, the structure of the spiritual world, and not necessarily a history book.

This viewpoint was carried through to the Christian period. The Church Father Origen famously interpreted the book non-literally. The 4th century Church Father St. Augustine even wrote a tract called "On the literal interpretation of Genesis," in which he excoriated the Creationists of the day, who believed the world to be flat and the sky to be a literal blue dome--and who believed, contrary to all observation, that the world was only a few thousand years old, when anyone with eyes could tell that it was clearly much older. Augustine cautioned the Christians against such interpretations because they were clearly wrong, and because they made Christians look like idiots.

Augustine instead proffered the interpretation that the world had been made all at once, in one instant. The "days" referred to in Genesis he instead took as referring to the distinct logical elements of the instantaneous act of Creation. Incidentally, Augustine claimed that this was, indeed, a "literal" interpretation--the term "literal" meant something very different in those days.

Of course, the ancients also viewed the world in a very different way. In those days, it made perfect sense to see an actual, physical object as also metaphorical or analogical in some way. A temple or a statue of a god could be, in a very real way, the instantiation of the god in the physical world. According to Aristotle, every object had its natural goal, its "telos." An object fell because it was its "telos" to be at its natural resting point on the ground. And so on. There was no such thing as dead matter, devoid of an intimate relationship to mind or spirit, in the view of the ancients.

It was not until the rise of the scientific worldview in the 17th and 18th centuries that the literal interpretation of the Bible became popular. Matter came to be viewed in Cartesian or corpuscularian terms, as pure mathematical extension in space, entirely passive unless moved from the outside. In Cartesian terms, things like the "telos" were unthinkable for physical objects.

Seeing the popularity and utility of this new viewpoint, the Protestant preachers began devising literalist interpretations of the Bible. Their goal was to vindicate the Bible in scientific terms. Their effort might have been laudable, but it became occasionally silly. Some theologians argued that Jesus hadn't actually died on the cross--he had just fainted, and then woke up in the tomb later and walked out.

Nonetheless, their efforts were genuinely honest and took the newest and best science to heart as they worked on their interpretations. Some of these theologians were scientist in their own right, making important contributions to biology and geology. However, as time went on, their efforts proved ultimately futile, leading the best theologians to gradually abandon the literalist approach the Bible.

Unfortunately, there are still a number of Christians who cling to 19th century literalist approach. So-called "creation science" comes out of this tradition, for instance. It should be remembered, though, that these Christians are not only rejecting genuine science--they are also rejecting centuries-old traditions within their own religion.

>> ^messenger:
So, how is you believing that you have a superior intellect to someone who believes in God not pride?

Read it again. Nobody claimed to have a superior intellect to anyone else. The contrast is between using our intellect and not using it. As Galileo famously put it, "I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use." Now, he was talking from the perspective of a person of faith who simply didn't believe the bible or church teachings anymore but certainly did still believe in God. We are speaking as people with sense, reason and intellect who don't see sufficient evidence to come to the conclusion that God might reasonably exist.

It's the entire contention that someone who believes in God is not using their sense, reason and intellect that is prideful. Did you know that 40 percent of biologists, physicists and mathematicians believe in a personal God? Some extremely intelligent people believe in a Creator, and they can back up their beliefs with logical evidence. You see theists through a grossly distorted lens created by your own prejudice, and it blinds you. Galileo, by the way, did believe the bible; what he didn't buy is the catholic interpretation of it, and rightly so.

>> ^messenger:
Since there is no empirical evidence for or against Gods existence, how do you calculate how likely or unlikely His existence is?

The lack of evidence for existence is a non-concrete kind of evidence for the lack of existence. So the overwhelming lack of evidence for God is a bloody strong case. Everywhere we look in nature, we continue not to find God.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Although I think there is evidence, such as fine tuning and information in DNA. In any case, do you honestly believe you can point an instrument at God and say "there he is!". Is this idea not fundamentally ridiculous? I think what youre confusing is mechanism with agency. You think because you describe a mechanism, how something works in a mechanical sense, somehow it rules out an Agent. God says He upholds the entire Universe; that He is the one that keeps the atoms from flying apart. How does mechanism rule out Gods agency?

Not only that, but if God created the Universe, do you realize that the entire Universe is evidence of Gods existence? The question I would put to you is, how would you tell the difference? How would you know you're looking at a Universe God didn't create? What would you expect that to look like?

What about the laws of logic? Where do they come from? If they're only in our brains, subject to constant flux, then what is rationality? It isn't anything you can trust if what you believe is true. Therefore all of your arguments fall apart. You have nothing in your worldview that can explain it, yet I can explain it. I know there is an omnipotent God who made us in His image, and we are rational beings because He is a rational being.

>> ^messenger:
Please, stop talking about science. You really do not understand it. You sound like a religious sceptic spouting crap about the bible. Really, what you say about science is just non-verified faither talking points. All science is based only on observation and drawing generalized inferences from that. "Theories" are just that. The strength of a scientific theory is roughly [how well it predicts other things] ÷ [how many things you have to just accept]. The belief in a particular atomic structure for oxygen has many predictions, which are testable and have largely been shown reliably true. So the atomic structure of an oxygen atom is a generally accepted theory, even though we will never be able to sense it directly. It's scientific. On those same grounds, the theory of evolution is also a strong theory in science. It has very few conjectures (three simple ones, I believe I heard Dawkins once say), it generates predictions, the predictions are testable, and they affirm the theory. Saying that evolution is untestable is as ridiculous as saying we haven't investigated every oxygen atom, so the model of the atom is untestable, and therefore unscientific.

If you understood it better than I do then you would know what macro evolution is. The scientific method uses empirical evidence, which comes from empirical experimentation or observation. There is no experiment to prove macro evolution, nor can it be empirically observed. It is simply an unjustified extrapolation from micro evolution (which is proven beyond a reasonable doubt), and based on nothing but inferences from *circumstantial* evidence and not evidence based on empirical observation.

Many people have this conception that the theory of common descent is as certain and proven as 2 + 2 = 4, or as Sepacore put it:

"once claimed to be a book of literal truth, becomes more and more metaphorical as science stomps its way all over the human races ignorance of the universe reaching greater level's of understandings that are testable through mathematical predictions"

That is certainly how it is taught in schools, as absolute fact, and that's why I believed it too. It's when you stop looking at their conclusions and see the actual data they base them on that you will get the shock of your life. Yes, you're right, the theory makes a few predictions, all of which have turned out to be wrong..such as this:

The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Darwin

Darwin predicted that for his theory to be true, there must be innumerable transitional forms in the fossil record. What have we found?:


"Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils as they pursued them up through the rock record. That individual kinds of fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, .., prophesied that future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent search... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later, it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this part of Darwin's prediction. Nor is the problem a miserly fossil record. The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong.
N. Eldredge and I. Tattersall, The Myths of Human Evolution, 1982, pg 45-46.

What we find is that creatures appear in stasis, and enter and leave the fossil record abruptly with no changes.

Another prediction is a start from simple to complex, with an increase of diversity of the phyla over a long period of time.

"Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably longer than the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer."
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st edition, pg 307.

What we find is that all of the phyla we have today all abruptly appeared in the "cambrian explosion"

"The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs ... "
S. Gould, The Panda's Thumb, pg 238, 239.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for how poor a theory macroevolution actually is, but you won't have a shortage of true believers in it, even though they don't even understand what evidence it is based on. I do know something about science, and although I am a layman, I am perfectly capable of understanding of what makes a sound theory, and what doesn't. I would believe in macroevolution if the evidence supported it. Not only does it not support it, but it actually argues against it. It is shocking to someone who has been indoctrinated (like I was), but if you want to talk about fairy stories, macroevolution is a whale of a tale.

>> ^kymbos:

How does something like that even form?
To the geology lab!


I'm pretty sure that's a quarry and the snow is making it look more impressive through the fisheye than it really is. A true mountain would have SOMETHING growing on it. At least within eyesight.

Don't get me wrong though, he's still around 100-150ft up. A fall would -at best- hurt like a sumnabitch.

How does something like that even form?

To the geology lab!

>> ^Jinx:

Wasn't there also a theory that the moon collided with second smaller moon early in its formation and that accounts for the difference in geology on the different sides of the moon.


They are launching a prove probe to investigate that hypothesis, but it can't really be called a theory at this point. It is purely based in mind stuff, not evidence at this point.