QUOTE(Doc glasgow @ Thu 20th January 2011, 11:09am)
The Creation Science article contains, not to put a fine point on it, some laughable statements:
QUOTE
If there were credible scientific evidence against evolution, scientists would be the first to discover it, the first to publish it in peer-reviewed journals, and the first to debate its validity and importance. After all, discovering credible scientific evidence against evolution would be a revolutionary accomplishment, worthy of a Nobel Prize. That’s why accusations from creationists and intelligent design advocates that scientists are conspiring to suppress evidence against evolution are, to put it mildly, silly.
ORLY?
If some researcher did (for the sake of argument) discover some evidence that seemed to count against evolution, and tried to publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, what would actually happen?
I mean, he'd be ostracised as cook, have every aspect of his research called into question, have journalists dredging through his past to "prove" he was motivated by religion, and then, even if his findings couldn't be dismissed they'd be put aside as an anomaly to be explained later, a freak result, or evolutionary theory would be tweaked by some complexities to explain the new data.
The notion that evolutionists are open minded here, and all they require is some proof for them to rethink is absurd. The notion that theory evolution is open to falsification is also absurd.
FWIW, I do not believe the existence of God can be "proved," because proof is always subjective - and, with enough will, another explanation can always be found. But the same is true of any number of deeply held beliefs - this is not a phenomenon restricted to religion. The problem with most scientists is they have studied too little epistemology - and therefore ignore their own subjectivity.
Yes, no, maybe. It's not that the data and theory would be suppressed, although it might be ridiculed for a while. However, if new data came out to support it, it would eventually become part of the consensus. Read the WP article on
Hopeful Monster which tells one such story in biology in more detail than I have time for, here. In general, atheists are happy with "gradualism", whereas any kind of sudden or "saltatory" change tends to make creationists happy, since it's harder to explain as a slowly-working natural process. If there's a sudden change, now you have one more thing to "explain" and that makes natural laws work extra hard. And science is "lazy," as it prefers Ockham. However, the universe is full of sudden changes as parts of natural processes, just from chaos. Consider avalanches and earthquakes and supernovae. Non-linear physics does admit sudden events happening (seemingly) "spontaneously" from deterministic chaos. As also does linear but non-deterministic quantum mechanics.
Another obvious example are a number of biologists who argued that the human eye is an example of a system of irreproducable completity, thereby making very many creationists happy. However, a careful examination has since shown eyes of varying complexity, all partly functional, from the color patch of single-celled euglena, right up to the glorious peepers of you and me. So nice a progression can be seen, that ID people have notably stopped mentioning the eye at all (they used it as a counter evolutionary example all the time, 30 years ago). Much the same thing is true of biological wings, which have many uses other than propulsion. So none of those need saltation. The creationists are now down to arguing at the level of the bacterial flagellum-- see how far they've retreated. But a sort of saltation in the arrival of life on Earth I suspect will end up being necessary; all it means is that life (as single bacterial cells) evolved someplace else in the universe, where it had more time and conditions to do things more gradually than on Earth. There's nothing unscientific about panspermia as an explanation for the rapid apearance of life on Earth (versus local
organic evolution to make non-life into life). However, the debate still rages, because we have no good evidence either way. Organic evolution and theories about how life itself arose, are in a very sorry state indeed compared with ideas about how to get from bacteria to people without ID.
If you want a third example, consider the
Big Bang. Read the WP article, which is pretty good. Lemaître, a Catholic priest who argued for a "primeval atom" exploding into the universe in 1927, was ridiculed as promoting religion by the back door, even though his general relativity math was perfectly consistant with Einstein and Friedmann's (Einstein said to Lemaître that his physics was good, but his insight abominable). Lemaître's theory preferred an expanding universe, which was one of Friedmann's theoretical alternatives, but not one supported by any data in 1927. Both Einstein and Friedmann, as pinko secular Jewish types who rejected any sort of personal God, preferred their universe to be comfortably uniformitarian and deterministic; they didn't like big jumps or indeterminism (for that matter, Einstein didn't like quantum mechanics, either!). And there's nothing quite as saltational and indeterministic, as a Big Bang, where known laws of physics all break down.
Alas for the uniformitarians, Hubble found the universe was expanding in 1929, forcing Einstein to call himself stupid for not keeping his mind open. Lemaître, the Catholic priest, had called the shot, and nailed it.
From 1929 to 1962 scientists argued about the Big Bang, which looked suspiciously like a Creation Event out of somebody's mythology. But in the early 60's the microwave background was discovered, and by that time it had been realized that nothing but a Big Bang could explain the primordial concentrations of hydrogen, helium, and deuterium. So the scientists gave up and accepted the religious-looking theory. According to you, this sociological revolution in science toward a theoretical alternative proposed by a priest (!), and looking like Genesis (!) should never have happened. Except it did.