Bill again:=============================================================
Still, Brian makes an excellent point in reminding us that a quite a
number of scientific discoveries have begun with someone noting an
anomaly in som data and _not_ attributing it to randomness. A good
example might be the discovery of Uranus. Anomalies were noted
(I believe) in the orbit of Neptune, and one possible explanation was an
undiscovered planet between Saturn and Neptune. My understanding is that
by doing some perturbation analysis, astronomers were able to determine
where to look for Uranus.
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I guess I shouldn't complain about making "an excellent point", however
I believe the point I was making is much much stronger than this.
It seems to me that a fundamental aspect of practically all of science
is the attempt to compress the regularities observed in nature. This
is in fact what a natural law is, a highly compressed description
of regularities.
Let's consider another example. Evolutionists make a big deal about
about the patterns seen in the fossil record, claiming that these
patterns give strong evidence for common descent. Were I to use
the evolutionists fallacy I could simply say "so what". The pattern
seen is no less likely to have resulted from a random placement
of fossils here and there.
Note for Glenn: in case you were breathlessly searching through this
for a response to your latest post; sorry about that. I was putting the
finishing touches on this one about the time I received your post.
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Brian Harper:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=
"I believe there are 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,
044,717,914,527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 protons in the
Universe and the same number of electrons." Arthur Stanley Eddington
:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=:=