Re: The nature of evidence

John W Burgeson wrote:
>
> The following text was in a recent AIG newsletter.
> ---------
> "Many people do not really understand the nature of ‘evidence.’ They
> think that to oppose evolution or disprove an old earth, one has to come
> up with totally different or unique ‘evidence’ and don’t understand that
> it is not a matter of ‘their evidence vs ours.’ All evidence is actually
> interpreted, and all scientists actually have the same observations—the
> same data—available to them in principle. If Christians really understood
> that all evidence is actually interpreted on the basis of certain
> presuppositions, then we wouldn’t be in the least bit intimidated by the
> evolutionists’ supposed ‘evidence.’ We should instead be looking at the
> evolutionist’s (or old-earther’s) interpretation of the evidence, and how
> the same evidence could be interpreted within a biblical framework and be
> confirmed by testable and repeatable science."
> -------------
> How might it best be answered?
>
> My own take is that, while it is a true statement, a YEC interpretation
> requires thousands of "ad hocs" to be consistent while conventional
> science requires few or none. But I'm sure there is a better response
> than that.....................................

        I suggest that again Lakatos' description of the way science works can be
helpful here. Pasted at the bottom is an excerpt from a 15 October post of mine
("Falsifiability ...") which described this briefly.

        AiG is right to the extent that one can hold YEC as one's hard core & have
theories about radiometric dating, fossils, &c as a protective belt which can be altered
as need be to protect the hard core. Similarly for evolution. The question about each
theory then is whether it's degenerating or progressive. The answers seem clear to me.

                                                        Shalom,
                                                        George

George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

        Falsifiability (F) is a useful working criterion for
scientific theories but in the end it isn't adequate.

        The idea of F (Popper) is an advance on the naive idea that theories can be
tested simply b "verifying" them. F rules out theories which claim that phenomena are
caused by agents whose _only_ effects are the phenomena in question ("invisible demons"
e.g.) But it runs into problems with more complex theories. The basic difficulty is
that you can always avoid having your theory falsified by introducing additional
elements into the theory.

        Case in point. You can maintain (against general relativity) that the geometry
of the world is always strictly Euclidean. That requires additional hypotheses about
effects of gravitation on rulers and clocks - & perhaps changes in these hypotheses as
new data are gathered. But no one can absolutely falsify the claim that the sum of
angles of a triangle is exactly 180 degrees.

        A better way of understanding how science works, IMO, is that of Lakatos, which
has been developed by Nancey Murphy (especially in _Theology in the Age of Scientific
Reasoning_) in application to theology. Essentially the idea is this.

        You have a "hard core", a theoretical claim at the center which you're going to
try to maintain in the course of investigation. & then there are surrounding theories
forming a "protective belt" which can be modified to protect the hard core. In the
above example, the hard core is strict Euclidean geometry (as a claim about the physical
world, not just math) & the protective belt is made up of ideas about the influence of
masses on rulers & clocks.

        So how do you ever decide if a theory is good or bad? It's not a matter of
evaluating a static theory but of an ongoing research program - new observations &
experiments & theoretical development. If your theory can continue to predict "novel
facts" (i.e., those not used in construction of the theory) with no - or slight -
modification of the protective belt then it's a progressive research program. If you
can't predict novel facts & continually have to be changing the protective belt to
shield your hard core from the implications of new data then your research program is
degenerating. & if it keeps on degenerating, eventually most scientists will abandon
it.

        One good example is steady state cosmology. In the 40s & 50s it had the merit
of being "more falsifiable" than BB theory because it made unique predictions about
things like counts of radio sources. But those predictions turned out to be wrong, & BB
theory predicted the MWB while classical steady state theory didn't. However, you can
introduce auxiliary hypotheses (our universe is just a fluctuation in the overall state
state, appropritae scattering of starlight by dust to make the MWB) to protect the hard
core of the state state theory - which is that the universe is, on the average,
unchanging - & there are still a few diehards who hold that theory. (Hoyle did up to
his death.) But most cosmologists think that the SS program is degenerating & the BB
progressive.
Received on Sat Dec 13 16:21:59 2003