Re: Assurance of faith

Michael Roberts wrote:
>
> Evolution is more of a historical explanation than a predictive theory, as
> it is based on historical rather than empirical science. Its test is whether
> it explains and whether it gives retrodictions of what must have happened in
> the past. It retrodicts that Precambrian fossils ought to exist and that
> these will not be vertebrates and will be "simpler" than Cambrian fossils.
> Evolution is also falsifiable if vertebrates are found in the Precambrian
> and humans in the Mesozoic of Texas at Paluxy.....................

        The critical question isn't whether or not a theory predicts _events_ in the
future but whether it can predict the results of _observations_ (including of
course experiments as controlled observations). E.g., hot big bang theory predicts a
microwave background even though the relevant event (last scattering of photons) took
place billions of years ago.
        & it's not even necessary that the observations in question lie in the future.
The precession of Mercury's perihelion was known well before Einstein, but since he made
no use of that in developing general relativity, that theory's correct value for the
precession (with no need for adjustable parameters) counts as a "novel fact" in favor of
the theory.
        
                                                        Shalom,
                                                        George

George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Fri Mar 26 07:56:33 2004