Is there a scientific consensus that evolution is a fact?

[busterdog]

Hi Busterdog, nice to see you back.
Interesting argument. Creationists don't have to worry about the scientific consensus on evolution because there can be no scientific consensus without a complete theory. Is there any area of science that meets your requirement? At very least, until CERN comes with evidence for super symmetry in the particles that make up atom we cannot claim any scientific consensus on atomic theory. Even if supersymmetry is found that will probably just be the beginning of a whole new area of study rather that its completion. So any creationists who wants to deny the existence of atoms is perfectly justified. Why shouldn't they be if there is no scientific consensus on the theory? Likewise, we haven't worked out all the details of the solar system Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, there is still disagreement over what constitutes a planet, and as for understanding what gravity is which is supposed to keep the planets in obit around the sun, well... we don't even have a Higgs yet. So no complete theory on the solar system, so no possible worldwide scientific consensus about it. Perhaps you can tell where I am going here. Anyone for geocentrism? According to creationism the field is still wide open. And lets see, what do we still not know about the structure of the earth, that some scientists arrogantly claim is round...

Yes, one can certainly reject the theory of atoms. There is barely any evidence of where they came from. So, the theory is pretty limited. There is a big difference between a theory that explains what you are seeing and a theory for where it all started in pre-history. As you say, our understanding about the underlying components could explode, but we do know that there is a vast amount of information we cant get a grip on. The amount of missing information is so vast, that one could conceive of a theory that is so much more complete that our theory of atoms becomes relatively useless for many purposes -- and origins especially. Your analogy works well.

We needn't waste our time on geocentrism. I could just as well hammer that Nazi sympathies of some evolutionists.


Intersting screed against the consensus idea:

Some Real Scientists Reject Evolution

 

[Skaloop]

There are lots of scientific reasons for a young earth. First and formost is the historical chronology listed by Moses in Genesis 5 & 11.

Genesis is not a scientific reason.

That is all.

 

[Christos Anesti]

All the high school and college biology and anthropology books I've seen take it is a given that evolution takes place. That seems to be a good sign that a fairly strong consensus exists.

 

[Dark_Lite]

There are lots of scientific reasons for a young earth. First and formost is the historical chronology listed by Moses in Genesis 5 & 11. I have seen no skeptic opinion that would invalidate the veracity of that lineage of early man. Not only so, but much of it has been verified historically by historian Bill Cooper in his work After the Flood in which he traces the royal families of Europe all the way back to pre-flood times.

People don't live to be 900, and Genesis is not scientific evidence.

http://www.icr.org/pdf/research/AGUC-14_Poster_Baumgardner.pdf

This is an acceptable, positively-phrased piece of evidence for YECism. At least, it seems so. It was done without attacking evolution, and attempts to apply the scientific method in order to find evidence for a young Earth. It is falsifiable. It sounds like they applied the scientific method properly. Now, the real question is: what factors did they fail to take into account?

I looked over the chart and the first statement that jumped out at me was "Given the 5730 year C14 half-life, organic materials older than 200,000 years (35 half-lives), should contain absolutely no detectable C14."

I'm skeptical of this claim, as C14 could seep in to these old samples from external sources. Situations similar to this are seen when carbon dating is used improperly on certain objects that higher amounts of carbon-14 because of the nature of the material and its location.

Thirdly, there are a host of evidences from the heavens that reveal a young universe...by way of example:

Stars emerging from the same point of origin moving in opposite directions that if their velocity is extrapolated backwards, could not be more than ten thousand yrs old.

This, unlike the first evidence, has no data. Just a picture with some arrows and a claim that the universe is no less than 10,000 years old.

Galaxy NGC7319 with what is supposed to be a quasar 12 billion miles beyond the galaxy...but the quasar is in front of and/or between the galaxy and the earth, the red shift theory notwithstanding. This suggests that the distance of the stars as is commonly believed is not nearly what we have long thought.

Same with this one.

http://creationwiki.org/Many_current_scientists_reject_evolution

Project Steve | NCSE

 

[Calypsis4]

Genesis is not a scientific reason.

That is all.

Says you. God Almighty says otherwise.

"Who(God) will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge(Greek = 'gnosis' - knowledge, science) of the truth." I Timothy 2:4.

"O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called." I Timothy 6:20.

{science (gnosis) = knowledge}.

You are one who believes in 'science falsely so-called'. Evolution is pseudo-science.

 

[Calypsis4]

People don't live to be 900, and Genesis is not scientific evidence.

Are you sure about that? Have you been in all places at all times and observed all events and occurrences in world history in order to qualify yourself as an authority on that point? Should we believe that you are correct and Moses was not?

Why can't people live to be hundreds of yrs old? Do you know what we have on record for even the modern age in such matters:

Quote: "Petracz Czartan, died at 185 Years of age. Died in 1724. From the Temesvar Bannat in Hungary. Engraving by J.A. Schmuzer." From the book Das Merckwürdige Wienn 1727.

This is an acceptable, positively-phrased piece of evidence for YECism. At least, it seems so. It was done without attacking evolution, and attempts to apply the scientific method in order to find evidence for a young Earth. It is falsifiable. It sounds like they applied the scientific method properly. Now, the real question is: what factors did they fail to take into account?

I looked over the chart and the first statement that jumped out at me was "Given the 5730 year C14 half-life, organic materials older than 200,000 years (35 half-lives), should contain absolutely no detectable C14."

I'm skeptical of this claim, as C14 could seep in to these old samples from external sources. Situations similar to this are seen when carbon dating is used improperly on certain objects that higher amounts of carbon-14 because of the nature of the material and its location.

Of course you are skeptical. You were trained by evolutionists. But I am ex-evolutionist and I see through the shallow and/or tortured logic of the evolutionist protagonists.

This, unlike the first evidence, has no data. Just a picture with some arrows and a claim that the universe is no less than 10,000 years old.

Then look at the following websites and learn the truth about it:

http://www.electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm

Scroll to the bottom and do some searching and you will find the photos I posted.

Same with this one.

Do the search. I did.

Project Steve | NCSE

Best wishes.

 

[Calypsis4]

If evolution were true then why are astronomers continually finding 'mature' galaxies in the area of the universe where they should not be seen?

Quote:
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]"Until now, astronomers have been nearly blind when looking back in time to survey an era when most stars in the Universe were expected to have formed. This critical cosmological blind-spot has been removed by a team using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope, showing that many galaxies in the young Universe are not behaving as expected some 8-11 billion years ago. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]The surprise: these galaxies appear to be more fully formed and mature than expected at this early stage in the evolution of the Universe. This finding is similar to a teacher walking into a classroom expecting to greet a room full of unruly teenagers and finding well-groomed young adults. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular]"Theory tells us that this epoch should be dominated by little galaxies crashing together," said Dr. Roberto Abraham (University of Toronto) who is a Co-Principal Investigator of the team conducting the observations at Gemini. "We are seeing that a large fraction of the stars in the Universe are already in place when the Universe was quite young, which should not be the case. This glimpse back in time shows pretty clearly that we need to re-think what happened during this early epoch in galactic evolution. The theoreticians will definitely have something to gnaw on!"[/FONT]

Gemini Deep Deep Survey: AAS Announcement

This is no surprise to creationists who believe the universe and everything in it is the same age...a young age.

 

[Calypsis4]

That's a very interesting statement.

He speaks for himself on that issue. I am not here to 'muck up' anything.

I believe in a young universe and I think the scientific evidence points to that fact. Here is another one:

A ring galaxy with blue stars on the rim. But blue stars cannot be millions of yrs old according to evolutionary astronomers.

Quote: "Radiation levels of 100,000 to 1 million times as much as our own sun is emitted by these stars! Yet, by the standard solar energy theory, they do not contain enough hydrogen to perpetuate atomic fusion longer than approximately 50,000 to 300,000 years."

source: THE AGE OF THE EARTH

Really? So why would such blue stars be the dominant feature of the outer ring of such galaxies as depicted above?

 

[Dark_Lite]

What does the position of a star in a galaxy have anything to do with the age of the galaxy?

 

[Calypsis4]

What does the position of a star in a galaxy have anything to do with the age of the galaxy?

If you were to discover gray hair on the back of your hands or arms long before you saw the first gray hair on your head would you not find that rather odd?

But if the birth of stars has an origin in or near the center of galaxies as NASA (among others) promote...

then why would the youngest of the stars be on the outer rim?

I hope you will deal with the other questions I posed earlier also.

Best wishes to you.

 

[Assyrian]

That's strange. You appear to have replied to my first post twice rather answering my reply.

Yes, one can certainly reject the theory of atoms.

Although I would hope you are being ironic here, it is interesting how creationist attempts to undermine evolution argue against even basic science they do accept.

There is barely any evidence of where they came from. So, the theory is pretty limited. There is a big difference between a theory that explains what you are seeing and a theory for where it all started in pre-history.

You seem to be hinting at another bad argument against evolution, the fact that it deals with the past. But this has nothing to do with your consensus argument, which applies equally to atomic theory, heliocentrism or evolution. Your attempt was to limit consensus to complete theories, which if Godel is anything to go by, will never happen. But it doesn't mean we there can't be scientific consensus about what has been established even if it isn't part of full complete theory of everything.

Somehow creationists always like to think that evolution is different, there is some reason specific to evolution that sets it apart from other sciences so you can accept the others while rejecting evolution. Yet atomic theory was established and accepted by consensus long before it was possible to see atoms and electron, if we can even do that now. Heliocentrism was accepted when space travel was as impossible and far fetched as time travel is today. All they had were observations of a handful of lights moving back and forth in the night sky, vastly less information than is available in the study of evolution. And when the scientific consensus accepted the world was round, who had ever travelled to the far side of the earth? In fact that was one Christian flat earthers argument against the round earth theory. (Lactantius, it is amazing how similar flat earth arguments against science sound so much like todays creationist arguments) All science had was the way sunlight shone down wells and the shadow of the earth on the moon, if indeed that was the earth's shadow. Enough to establish scientific consensus though.

As you say, our understanding about the underlying components could explode, but we do know that there is a vast amount of information we cant get a grip on. The amount of missing information is so vast, that one could conceive of a theory that is so much more complete that our theory of atoms becomes relatively useless for many purposes -- and origins especially. Your analogy works well.

You know science has changed our understanding of the structure of the earth, even its shape isn't a sphere but a oblate spheroid, but they never went back to saying the earth is flat. And the science that supported a round earth, even if they hadn't got the shape quite right, still holds today. Astronomy has changed radically since Copernicus suggested the earth and planets went in circles around the sun. The planets move in ellipses and we learned from Newton it was gravity that moved the planets in their orbits, even the theory gravity has been changed since Newton. And as you suggest the new understanding is very useful, we could never use Copernicus' model for space flight or satellites. But even though Copernicus theory was radically changed, science never went back to geocentrism and the scientific evidence that supported Copernicus' model is still valid today.

We needn't waste our time on geocentrism. I could just as well hammer that Nazi sympathies of some evolutionists.

If you wanted call down Godwin's law on yourself. It is not as though my argument was an ad hom like the creationist argumentum ad hitlerum. The fact is your argument about consensus, if it were valid, would apply as much to heliocentrism as it does to evolution or the atom. Geocentrism is also very relevant to the discussion because the church did follow scientific consensus and changed the traditional geocentric interpretation because scientific evidence and scientific consensus showed them their old literal interpretation was mistaken.

Intersting screed against the consensus idea:

Some Real Scientists Reject Evolution

A fascinating list of famous scientists from before the theory of evolution. But as the website rightly points out, the list contains a 20th century scientist too, Werner von Braun the famous Nazi rocket scientist. Seems ironic. His biopic was called I aim at the Stars. Though it has sometimes been referred to as I aim at the stars (but sometimes I hit London).

 

[Calypsis4]

Here is yet another problem for believers in stellar evolution:

Comet 73P (Shwassmann/Wachmann)

From the ESA (European Space Agency) Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 is a short-period comet that approaches the Sun every 5.4 years. Two apparitions ago, in 1996, the comet nucleus split into five pieces (Fragments A, B, C, D, E) of which 3 (B, C, E) were still visible at its 2001 return.

When it approached the Sun again this year, seven fragments were initially observed, indicating that the comet was breaking apart again. Indeed, as astronomers watched, further fragments broke off.

But this is the way of comets. Comets come and go through our solar system for reasons that no one knows and no one knows how they are formed in the first place. My theory is that God causes certain meteoric particles to fly through the waters outside our solar system and as they fly through that cold region they collect the moisture there in the form of ice. The further it proceeds the larger it gets, just like dust particles in our atmosphere becomes hail in a similar process.

“As soon as comets appear, (in the solar system) they start to disintegrate. It's simple physics-- the sun heats them, and off goes the ice -- direct to water vapor.” The Why Files.

But the point is that comet 73/P is doing what all comets will do and they are not millions of yrs old. They will all go the way of 73/P and it won’t take millions of yrs for them to fall apart. Some scientists have calculated that none of the observed comets is more than 10,000 yrs old.

In his 1968 book, 'Mysteries of the Solar System', R.A. Lyterton says :- "probably no short period comet can survive more than about ten thousand years."

But many have still survived. The British Astronomical Association in 1971 listed ninety four short period comets, so there are at least ninety four heavenly witnesses that the solar system is very young.

 

[busterdog]

That's strange. You appear to have replied to my first post twice rather answering my reply.
Although I would hope you are being ironic here, it is interesting how creationist attempts to undermine evolution argue against even basic science they do accept.

Yes, but creationists are always right. How's that for a snappy comeback?

Lets assume that we have a theory that is ten times as powerful as the current model for atoms (in a field that hypothesizes mass variance, time variance, etc.; ie, there is lots of ground for improved clarity). At that point, the atomic model is not useless, but you pretty much stop using it for the serious work. Instead of talking about things like virtual particle pairs (Virtual particle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), you actually understand them and their behavior - not just as a froth of indistinct activity. I you really understood that fundamental process, you would have something much better than what you have.

SOrt of like when Darwinists pitched randomness, and yet snuggled closer to grandpa Darwin as if he was nothing but prophetic on all issues. You might have a sea change in understanding the atom, but with more realism about the flaws in the earlier theory.

Like the understanding of the atom, evolution has these major ragged edges. IN dealing with origins and remote events, both fail to be definitive. THat's why they are theories.

 

[Papias]

Hey, Whoa! Many here are seriously off topic here, folks.

Galaxies, comets, and such do not tell us whether or not there is a scientific consensus.

All that data is worth discussing - on some relevant thread. Please stay on topic. That'll keep people from observing that Creationists often shift the topic if they appear to be losing in the topic at hand, and of course creationist posters wouldn't want to give that impression.

We are talking about the scientific consensus, and so far we have at least the following data:

• The Gallup poll showing that 95% of scientists support evolution in the US.
• Busterdog posted a link that has claims of lists of scientists (50, 650, and 10,000 in the same article), but none of them provide names or anything (and admit including the general public, not just scientists), so I think that one has to be recorded as rumor or anectdotal evidence. Please supply the lists if possible, as that (especially the 10K number) is relevant to our discussion.
• Christos A. Supplies anecdotal evidence that there is a scientific consensus in support of evolution.
• DarkLite supplies a link to Project Steve, which has over 1000 Scietists in support of evolution, and only accepts scientists from the US named Steve.

Before we go any farther, does anyone have an actual list of scientists rejecting evolution? I'd hate to start comparing Gallup's 95% and 1000 scientists to zero on the other side, because as of now, the only evidence we have of scientists in support of creationism is anecdotal. I'm sure there are lists out there, I think I remember seeing some....

Papias

 

[sfs]

Lets assume that we have a theory that is ten times as powerful as the current model for atoms (in a field that hypothesizes mass variance, time variance, etc.; ie, there is lots of ground for improved clarity). At that point, the atomic model is not useless, but you pretty much stop using it for the serious work. Instead of talking about things like virtual particle pairs (Virtual particle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), you actually understand them and their behavior - not just as a froth of indistinct activity. I you really understood that fundamental process, you would have something much better than what you have.

Then we'll switch to using that theory. That does not mean that there is anything but a scientific consensus now about atomic theory, or that we should be giving equal consideration to the theory that everything is composed of earth, air, water and fire.

Like the understanding of the atom, evolution has these major ragged edges. IN dealing with origins and remote events, both fail to be definitive. THat's why they are theories.

No, that's not why they are theories. They are theories because they are scientific models that explain a wide range of observations. Ragged edges, missing pieces and a reliance on randomness have precisely zero to do with their status as theories. Your hypothetical 10x better atomic theory will also be a theory, as will every other model in every other field of science. Theory is as good as it gets.

 

[Assyrian]

Yes, but creationists are always right. How's that for a snappy comeback?

Lets assume that we have a theory that is ten times as powerful as the current model for atoms (in a field that hypothesizes mass variance, time variance, etc.; ie, there is lots of ground for improved clarity). At that point, the atomic model is not useless, but you pretty much stop using it for the serious work. Instead of talking about things like virtual particle pairs (Virtual particle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), you actually understand them and their behavior - not just as a froth of indistinct activity. I you really understood that fundamental process, you would have something much better than what you have.

SOrt of like when Darwinists pitched randomness, and yet snuggled closer to grandpa Darwin as if he was nothing but prophetic on all issues. You might have a sea change in understanding the atom, but with more realism about the flaws in the earlier theory.

Like the understanding of the atom, evolution has these major ragged edges. IN dealing with origins and remote events, both fail to be definitive. THat's why they are theories.

So creationists can throw out evolution and atoms but not heliocentrism?

 

[Calypsis4]

We are talking about the scientific consensus, and so far we have at least the following data:

• The Gallup poll showing that 95% of scientists support evolution in the US.

We don't care. The majority doesn't determine truth. They are men and women who were brainwashed with wrongful interpretations and by the use of tortured logic just like I was. I am an ex-evolutionist.

• Busterdog posted a link that has claims of lists of scientists (50, 650, and 10,000 in the same article)

I have that list. One is a complete list of those who reject Darwinian evolution to one degree or another. The other is a list of the number of scientists associated with the Creation Research Society membership. The list of 50 I am not sure about.

• but none of them provide names or anything (and admit including the general public, not just scientists), so I think that one has to be recorded as rumor or anectdotal evidence. Please supply the lists if possible, as that (especially the 10K number) is relevant to our discussion.
• Christos A. Supplies anecdotal evidence that there is a scientific consensus in support of evolution.

My evidence was not anecdotal but that didn't make one bit of difference to you.

• DarkLite supplies a link to Project Steve, which has over 1000 Scietists in support of evolution, and only accepts scientists from the US named Steve.

Well, Steve Austin is not among them, that's for certain. There were a lot of other 'Steve's' that don't believe that nonsense.

Papias

We want the truth, not the mind bending, tortured logic, and shallow conclusions of people who ought to know better.

 

[Calypsis4]

So creationists can throw out evolution and atoms but not heliocentrism?

Nope. Just evolution. Atoms and heliocentrism are scientific.

 

[29apples]

tortured logic

Its ironic that you use this phrase yet committed a red herring logical fallacy with your stellar evolution example.

 

[Calypsis4]

Its ironic that you use this phrase yet committed a red herring logical fallacy with your stellar evolution example.

Tell the readers which of the many examples I posted and then show the fallacy.