> Moorad's POV, with which I concur, is that "evolution-in-the-full-sense",
> including abiogenesis, is the ONLY option available to the scientist who
> works (as I do) under the methodological naturalism assumption. No
> experiment or discovery, not even "kitty cat bones with dino bones," not
> even a dinosaur skeleton with Ally Oop's skeleton entangled in its teeth,
> would negate that. [...] It is a necessary consequence of
> the MN assumption.
This is not strictly true. MN requires one to produce theories about
how life got here by natural means. "Evolution-in-the-full-sense" is
(or seems to be) the statement that life developed by natural means
from non-living matter, and that different living things are related
by common descent (again by natural means). This is a theory allowed
by MN, but it is not, at least in principle, the only one. The other
MN-allowed possibilities would seem to be that life has always existed,
or that different life forms developed independently of one another.
Steve Schaffner
sschaff@slac.stanford.edu