i posted the following comments to another thread, and it was the last post to the thread. since it took my a while, i thought i would get some use out of it and post it in a new thread, since i think it addresses some of the misconceptions about science that many creationists on this board seem to have. i have edited the post to make it a more general discussion, since it was originally a response to a particular post. the main aim of this post is to address the creationist notion that creationists and scientists are just interpreting the evidence in different ways. but the thing is, evidence is not interpreted in science. whether or not a piece of data supports a theory is an objective thing. no sort of interpretation is involved at all...
Can we test gravity? yes, we can.
and we can also test evolution, in precisely the same way we test gravity.
We can drop a rock, and see that it falls to the ground. And every time we do this, the same thing happenes.
likewise, we can observe evolution occuring, both in the wild, and in the lab.
Although scientists don't know what it is yet, they know that it exists, and it can be tested.
well they have theories about how it works. specifically, general relativity is the current theory of how gravity works. we use the theory of general relativity to explain our observations of gravity. likewise we use the theory of evolution to explain our observations of evolution, and to explain our observations of the fossil record that show that species have greatly changed over time. and we test general relavity in the same way that we test the theory of evolution. general relativity makes predictions about how gravity works, and we can go and check if these predictions are correct or not. specifically, general relativity predicts that the path of light will be bent by gravity.
previously it was thought that light would not be affected by gravity because photons are massless, and with the newtonian theory of gravity, this means the force of attraction would be zero. so if general relativity is right, then we should see that light is bent by gravity. since that prediction was made, we have been able to observe that the path of light IS indeed bent by gravity.
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and so this piece of information becomes evidence for general relativity.
that's what evidence is: verification of predictions of a theory. and if our predictions turn out to not be true, then the theory must not be true either. in other words, the theory is falsified. this is the form that all scientific evidence for any theory takes. interpretation is not a part of the process. when we have strong specific predictions from a theory, either the data does not match our predictions or it does. light is either bent by gravity, or it is not. no interpretation goes into determining whether or not this is the case.
so of course, the evidence for evolution is of the same form. evolution makes very strong and specific predictions about the way things must be, and you can read a great article about these predictions here:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
if these predictions are found false, then evolution will be found false. but as you can see from the above article, evolution has a fantastic track record as far as it's predictions go. in fact, we have many more lines of evidence supporting evolution than we do supporting general relativity. yet you never see creationists arguing against gravity.
That is how science works!
When someone are trying to proove gravity, would they ever get the conclusion that God makes it happen? No, God is not an option in science!
it is true, science cannot say "god did it" about something. that is because we cannot test such an explanation, because as an explanation, it makes no predictions whatsoever about what we should find. because of this, any possible data we could ever find would be 100% consistent with this. so therefore we cannot have evidence for this type of theory, because it is impossible for us to be surprised that any data is consistent with our explanation. after all, it is impossible for data not to be consistent with our explanation. so science doesn't rule out the possibility that god was involved, it just can't be used to test the idea. 'last thursday-ism' is a good example to demonstrate why we can't test such an idea with science. i could claim that the entire universe was created last thursday, with the appearance of great age, and each of us created with false memories of our earlier lives that never actually happened. how could we test whether or not this explanation is true? we can't, because there's nothing we could ever find that could possibly contradict it. it is for the same reason that we cannot use science to test the claim 'goddidit', so we cannot have evidence for this.
that being said, there are some creationist models that do make predictions. YEC models include a global flood and a 6,000 year old earth, and falsifying evidence was found for both of these claims 200 years ago.
good theories in science are ones that are falsifiable, but we haven't been able to falsify them yet. all the creationists ideas i have heard so far have either been falsified, or were not falsifiable, and no amount of interpretation can change that fact. so creationism is not supported by science. evolution makes strong predictions, so it is falsifiable, and in 140 years it has not been falsified, though i'm sure i will soon hear claims to the contrary. if you do care to post such a claim to this thread, please post the specific prediction you think evolution makes and the data that contradicts this prediction.
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