Let's step back into philosophy for a minute first (details later).
As a scientist, I have found it to be of great importance to understand my own assumptions and presuppositions. This is especially true of the unspoken and often unconscious assumptions behind my world view. Of course this is not always an easy process.
If one is not aware of their most basic assumptions, they will have blind spots of which they aren't aware. These blind spots can cause us to miss or mis-interpret data all too easily.
At a very basic level, there are three underlying worldviews.
1. The universe is chaotic - Cause and effect is an illusion. (I mention this only for completeness)
2. The universe is characterized by the uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system.
3. The universe is characterized by the uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.
Science, or any sort of rationality is impossible under number 1.
Number two is very common, and can be theistic or atheistic - but it doesn't matter much in any practical sense. Even if God created in the first place, He is either inside or outside the universe. If outside, He is completely irrelevant and has no effect on anything inside. This would be the position of some forms of Deism.
If the closed system God were on the inside, He would be a
part of the uniform cause and effect. Any actions would be pre-ordained by whatever the initial conditions were - again, completely irrelevant, but consistent with some forms of Deism and also some forms of atheism because this kind of god could hardly be called a deity.
If you take this to its ultimate result, you also find that humanity falls away completely. Ideas and thoughts are only illusions - pattens in the brain which are the effects of previous causes and inherent in the initial conditions of the universe. Any free will we might think we have is an illusion, a la B. F. Skinner. Nothing has any meaning, and even the idea of meaning is an illusion. (BTW. If all ideas are illusions, then the idea that "The universe is characterized by the uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system." is also an illusion. This makes it arguable that the idea is self-stultifying since it caries its own refutation). This philosophical position has lead to the philosophy of nihilism and the reaction of to nihilism known as existentialism. For a fuller treatment you may want to read the first couple of chapters of Francis Shaeffer's "The God Who is There".
In an open system, humanity - both individual and collective - again has significance and the possibility of meaning, but it also leaves the door open for God.
Note that all of these positions are ASSUMPTIONS. If you take the second assumption, you remove any possibility of God
a priori. The possibility simply does not exist. You also remove any possibility of creativity - including your own. It might be argued that you remove any meaning from anything you say or write, and any significance from your actions. Assumptions have consequences.
Similarly, we can define "science" as only concerning naturalistic explanations and processes if we want, but that restricts the areas that science can address. To illustrate - and I am borrowing this illustration - Consider that you are a high powered chemist with a great talent at qualitative analysis. I will put a beaker of clear liquid in a lab, and put a cloth over it. I tell you that in the morning, there will be a precipitate in the beaker. You will then use any method you wish to determine a scientific explanation for how the precipitate came about.
The next morning I remove the cloth, and you can see cloudy brown swirls around a hard chunk of precipitate. On the rapidly decaying chunk, you can just make out the letters "O R E O".
The obvious answer is "you dropped a cookie into the beaker", but that invokes non-naturalistic processes, and even an appeal to intelligent design, so it isn't a "scientific" explanation by this definition, and thus isn't allowed.
Presuppositions control what we see as evidence, and even whether we can see it as evidence. That is why it is necessary to understand your underlying assumptions - so that you can see any blind spots they cause. Understanding does not mean giving up your assumptions, but it does mean trying to get outside them occasionally to answer the question "What if my assumptions were wrong?".
If we make the
assumption of naturalism, some form of evolution is the only game in town. There is simply no other possibility. In some ways, it makes the idea of evidence for evolution moot since the question is already decided by the initial assumption.
I'm reminded of a "Bloom County" strip from several years ago (anyone remember Bloom County, or am I the only old one here?). The first frame hass Oliver Wendel Jones on his roof looking at the stars with his telescope. In the second frame, the stars have re-arranged themselves to read "Repent Oliver". The third frame has them back in their origial configuration, and Oliver saying "Bloody difficult being an agnostic these days".
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Now the details.
Here is a series of articles on some of the details of plate tectonics. In addition to the articles themselves, there is an extensive list of references, so you should have no difficulty in further research. Oard compares the predictions of the models to the details of the geological features. Remember, a model is only good insofar as it mimics the real system in the aspects of interest.
"Lack of Evidence for Subduction Renders Plate Tectonics Unlikely: Part I - Trench Sediments and Accretionary Prisms" Michael J. Oard . CRSQ Vol 37 Number 3, Dec. 2002 pp. 142
"Lack of Evidence for Subduction Renders Plate Tectonics Unlikely: Part II - Extension dominant at "Convergent Subduction Zones" " Michael J. Oard . CRSQ Vol 37 Number 4, March. 2003 pp. 227
If a being/organism/group of molecules arranges itself in a way that counters our intuition regarding entropy, it is only because it used energy to do so. That energy is released as heat and dissipates outward in accordance to the laws of thermodynamics.
This is exactly the point. The being/organism has
mechanisms in place to harness energy, much like a water wheel arranged to pump some of the water to a higher level than the source using the energy available in letting most of the water move to a much lower level. Without the mechanism, the water only goes downhill, and without the mechanism the energy only goes to increase the disorder of the system. As for the "group of molecules organizing themselves", I'd like to see an example.
Order can come about spontaneously through energy loss - ice and crystal growth etc. But this order is completely determined by the physical properties of the molecules/atoms in question. The information content is negligible. Mechanisms and other organized things require some - and perhaps a large amount of - information content.
If we want to talk about uniformly observed experience, in every case in which we have complex information and we know the source, the ultimate source is an intelligent agent or agents (with the possible exception of certain Microsoft products
). For instance, this bulletin board is very information rich, thanks to the efforts of application programmers, operating system programmers, hardware designers, system administrators, and those who contribute the content. So if we see complex information anywhere, it is not unreasonable to look for an intelligent source.
We see variations in different populations to respond to environmental conditions. We see dogs producing dogs, cat producing cats and so on. We never see dogs giving birth to cats. There is a huge amount of variability inherent in the genomes of different kinds of creatures. I once saw an estimate of 10^2000 for the number of unique genetic combinations for the offspring of two humans who's genomes are as heterozygous as possible. That's a lot of room for variation within a kind. All of the variations used to support evolution - that is, the ones which are actually observable - are of this type, or of an information loss through mutation. Nowhere do we see any variations which increase information content. These would be necessary to turn microbes to man or anything of the sort.
We've all seen fossils. I used to hunt fossils all the time in the creek bed of my Grandparent's farm, and some of the dinosaur skeletons are very imperssive. They don't come with dates attached. The largest portion of the fossil record is marine invertebrates. Most of these are identical to modern versions. The record is characterized by sudden appearance and stasis. Stephen J. Gould's punctuated equilibrium theory has this feature as its main line of evidence.
I have heard the argument that denying evolution is like denying gravity before. There are some significant differences. The phenomenon we call gravity is directly observable. The description of gravity can be used to make detailed predictions. The form of the law (force going as r^2) is the only one which gives rise to the Keplerian orbits we observe. Careful observation and measurements of planetary orbits showed an anomaly which could be explained by "a planet right about there" and when we look there, lo and behold, a planet. We can make a prediction that "if stars are in such and such configuration we would expect this kind of behavior", and look for stars in that configuration and see that behavior. We can measure the forces between masses with great precision in the laboratory. While it is still an open question as to why inertia attracts other inertia, the effect is well quantified if not perfectly understood.
With evolution, we have a different situation. We have variations within kinds - some very dramatic variations - to adapt to environmental conditions. This natural selection is not controversial at all, but selection has to have something to select from, so where do novel features come from. We've never observed any, so to get the full blown evolution, we need to make a HUGE extrapolation, and extrapolation is always somewhat dangerous. Here is a humorous example:
"In the space of 176 years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore any calm person who is not blind or idiotic can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upward of 1,300,000 miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token, any person can see that 742 years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding along comfortably under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact" (Mark Twain)
I've studied dating methods, and used various radiometric methods myself, and studied nuclear physics at the graduate level, so I do understand how they work, and the inherent assumptions that go with them and the potential problems. There are also many dating methods which don't rely on radiometric methods, like magnetic field energy decay, ocean salinity, atmospheric helium content and lunar regression which give upper bounds on age, with explicit assumptions.
All dating methods require some assumptions, ie. what were the conditions when the "clock" was set? Does the process run at a constant rate - or do we know how it changes with time? Could something have interfered with the timing process or contaminate the tested samples? Understanding uncertainty and evaluating possible sources of systematic errors can be more an art than a science, but it is important to all experimental sciences. The choice of assumptions is also colored by the underlying assumptions and world view.
Some recent work done by the
RATE (Radio-isotopes and the Age of The Earth) project group shows a lot of promise in isolating and testing some common assumptions. The final report is due sometime next year, but the link discusses some preliminary findings.
So, where does this leave us - beyond a much-too-long post
?
My contention is that if one assumes a closed universe, or that materialistic naturalism must give the answers, then there can be no debate on evolution because it is a fundamental assumption, and is prior to any evidence. If this is your assumption, we can only agree to disagree since nothing can possibly count as evidence against the naturalistic assumption.
My personal preference is to assume an open system, and then either naturalistic or intentional causes are available for explaination. I'm using intentional as meaning "intended by some entity" in this context. From there we can go where the evidence leads. The uniform experience of the past leades me away from naturalistic explainations for origins.
Frank (who is too tired to think of something clever to put here)
)
