fishstix said:
What if we are interpretting science wrong? Perhaps I should say interpretting data wrong. Even what once were thought to be good scientific theories have been discarded as time passes and things are re-thought or new discoveries are made.
We have already tried interpreting the data in terms of other theories. That's how we falsified the other theories.
When you go to meetings, this is focus of most questions and objections to papers -- you can interpret the data in light of other hypotheses. Mostly this means that you failed to eliminate the other hypotheses as possible. Put another way, you didn't do the appropriate controls.
To get a flavor of how this is done, read the critique below. The original authors found a fossil skeleton of a boy that they interpreted as having both neandertal and sapiens features. They then used this interpretation to say that neandertals and sapiens interbred. Tattersall and colleagues are now coming back and saying they misinterpreted the data (measurements of the fossil) and that the boy is, in reality, simply a stocky sapiens boy.
6. Ian Tattersall*, and Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Commentary Hominids and hybrids: the place of Neanderthals in human evolution PNAS 96, Issue 13, 7117-7119, June 22, 1999
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/13/7117
This is the type of fight that goes on all the time in scientific circles. It is the fight that went on in the period 1850-1880 regarding common ancestry and natural selection (evolution). What happened is that the critics failed and everyone (including the critics) eventually agreed that we were not misinterpreting the data.
Now, yes, hypotheses/theories can be overthrown by new data. That's always part of the way science works. In that case, the old data has to be revisited to make sure it is consistent with the new theory that replaces the old. And, yes, if data to falsify evolution were found, that would be the way it is. However, scientists have been looking for such data since 1848 when Chambers first seriously brought forth the idea that species were not fixed. They have tried every test to falsify common ancestry that we can think of. The only test left would be finding mammalian fossils in the Cambrian or before.
And seriously, I can't think of any test that could be tried to falsify natural selection. They have all been tried already. Behe's "irreducible complexity" is simply a re-working of Mivart's and others arguments of over a century ago. And those arguments were falsified then. Dembski's "complex specified complexity" has either 1) been falsified or 2) shows that God can't create CSI either!
One more time. Yes, we do filter the Resurrection thru science. It's just that science doesn't show what you say it does. You have made a mistake about science. "special creation" or creationism is a scientific theory. The data shows it to be wrong. The Resurrection is data. Theory cannot show data to be wrong. It's very simple. Don't worry, another 50 or so repititions to you and you might even get it.
Ark Guy's arguements are the same as the atheists because he has no other. He's not actually saying that those are his arguements. He's trying to prove evolution false by saying that it would falsify Christianity. Either that or he's trying to say that we're not true Christians because his logical extension is that we can't be.
