Re: Phillip Johnson (and Methodological Naturalism)

From: Brian Harper (harper.10@osu.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 16:19:57 EDT

  • Next message: Brian Harper: "Predictions"
    At 08:34 AM 10/14/2003 -0400, Walter Hicks wrote:
     

    Don Winterstein wrote: 

    The fact of evolution is easy to falsify in principle:  Just
find a bunch of fossils
  grossly out of sequence in undisturbed formations.  For
example, find homo
  sapiens skeletons in undisturbed Carboniferous limestone. 
Evolution emphatically
  predicts such things do not exist, so to falsify it, just find
them.  YECs in fact
  have claimed to have made finds of this sort (e.g., human
footprints alongside
  dinosaur tracks), but none have stood up under
scrutiny.
    Actually, the "fact" of evolution was not my question. That is a lot of the difficulty of working with evolution. The same term is used for the theory and fact (or data). But you raise a good point. The flood catastrophe folks have to go through a lot of convoluted reasoning to get around the sequence.
      

       
  Proposed mechanisms of evolution are a different story. 
Support for these comes
  from plausibility arguments, and such arguments aren't
falsifiable.  You either
  believe them or you don't.  Nevertheless, they are widely
accepted because they
  are the best natural mechanisms we know
of.


    That is the basic issue raised by Johnson ===>  namely, that he doesn't think that "natural mechanisms" are at work. One does not address his concerns or arguments by saying that this is "the best natural mechanisms we know of". It can only be addressed by making predictions and demonstrating that they work and that those alone are sufficient to demonstrate that evolution of species can happen.

    I believe from all of the avoidance I see, that one cannot do the above and, therefore, there is no valid theory for the evolution of species. When (or if) there ever is, people will stop dancing around the  question IMO.


    Walt,

    I hope you can understand that it is really difficult to find any sympathy for this. You previously mentioned that you don't have a textbook on evolutionary biology, relying instead on lecture notes on the web. Despite that you want to come to the sweeping conclusion that "...there is no valid theory for the evolution of species". Based on what, avoidance? This is simply ad-hominem.

    A few more comments. Newton's universal law was accepted despite the fact that Newton did not feign to even so much as suggest a mechanism. It is not possible to show, to the same degree of rigor you suggest above, that the behavior of a real double pendulum is caused by gravity. There are many examples I could give along these lines. Here is another. There is no theory of plasticity that can correctly predict large scale plastic deformation in metals under complex loading conditions.

    ===============
    "If you see finite strain plasticity calculations, and
    even more so if they're cyclic or dynamic, and you have
    an experiment and all the finite element points are on
    the experimental curve, you've seen a fraud because it
    just doesn't work out that way. There are too many
    uncertainties. You can match certain functionals of the
    solution in certain cases but it is very very difficult,
    given the uncertainties in theory, the uncertainties in
    measurement, even if you can do perfect calculations,
    to get really good results ..."
    -- Thomas J.R. Hughes, <Plasticity of Metals at Finite
       Strain>, Proceedings of Research Workshop held at
       Stanford University July 29 - June 1, 1981, p.719.
    ===============

    I'm also going to give some specific predictions for evolutionary theory, but I will put that in a new thread.


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