Hey, cool. My friend Ericka has updated her site, and I'm one of her friends... aww, thanks. Her boyfriend looks like a pretty good looking guy.

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23:28 (utc-5)

 

Hey Keith, I didn't forget, I just hadn't gotten around to writing a response yet. But your prodding worked Congrats on your new job, by the way.

When you call something a science it means something very specific. Not everything that can be studied is a science, for instance. We can study history and draw conclusions about the past, but the study of history is not scientific.

Something that is scientific can be repeatedly observed and tested, and allows us to make predictions based on our experiments. (macro)Evolution has none of these characteristics.

The reason I asked you about Logical Positivism is because the view of things you seem to hold is reminiscent of that view of science. First they tried the principle of verification, where something could be considered meaningful or true if it was verifiable. Then they realized that that excluded more than they wanted, so they changed their criterion to whether something was falsifiable. Unfortunately, that criterion of truth also has proved to be untenable, and Logical Positivism has utterly failed to come up with a workable definition of science or meaning.

You may not necessarily hold to the extreme views the Logical Positivists did about falsification. Nevertheless, rather than falsifiability being the important thing, you got at something more important in one of your statements: that we have to be able to experimentally observe these things.

I deny that (macro)evolution is a science. In the very nature of the case macro-evolution is not a scientific theory. I also don't think it fits the available data, regarding, among other things, the fossil record, known mutation rates and mechanisms, information theory, complex structures we find in nature, and on and on.

Keep in mind, I don't claim that creationism is a science. It's a story of origins, just like (macro)evolution is. A person typically doesn't choose to believe in either creationism or (macro)evolution primarily because of anything attractive in creation or evolution themselves, but rather because of the existence or absence of an underlying commitment to naturalism.

Finally, "there's nothing random about evolutionary processes"? Mutation is the very mechanism of macro-evolutionary change, and mutation is a random process.

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23:03 (utc-5)
edited: 23:06 (utc-5)

 

NewsMax.com, Why Terrorist Detainees Are Not POWs: "Specifically excluded from POW status under the GPW Geneva convention are unlawful combatants, which is exactly what the Guantanamo detainees are. They don't come close to being POWs under terms of this convention – they do not meet the criteria."

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00:37 (utc-5)