I noted the following exchange between Hobberus and Hillary_Step:
Hobberus: I have shown above on this thread that those who apriori limit themselves to only "naturalistic" explanations (as many evolutionists do) have themselves reached a conclusion before looking at the data.
HS: Wrong. The reason you are wrong Hooberus is because you are ignoring the evidential steps already uncovered by science, steps that are irrefutable. Scientists may have, as they often do, suggest a hypothesis within an already established framework, science justifies or condemns this hypothesis by discovered fact.
Hobberus: Please give a few examples of these "evidential steps already uncovered by science, steps that are irrefutable"
The evidential steps are part of the history of science and ought to be known by anyone claiming a knowledge of science. Here's an example of such steps, adpated from a debate I had with a YEC a couple of months ago:
I want to say something about the basic philosophy of Intelligent Design, starting with a story about Isaac Newton. Newton was a committed Christian and wrote quite a bit of material in support of the Bible and Christianity. He saw a great deal of evidence of God?s handiwork in the natural world. But there was a problem that he never solved. In 1687 he published his revolutionary work The Principia on physics and gravity. A few years later, astronomers predicted the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn using his mathematics. But they found that the measured positions didn?t quite match up. Newton attributed this to God?s tinkering with the orbits. There was no scientific answer to the problem until the English astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781. By about 1800, astronomers had fully worked out how Uranus perturbed the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, so there was no need to ascribe their motions to God?s tinkering.
This story illustrates the so-called "God of the Gaps" problem. Scientific knowledge is, of course, always provisional, never certain. There are always gaps in understanding, just as Newton didn?t understand why his theory of gravity didn?t appear to work perfectly. Like Newton, some Christians have attributed to God the mechanism behind various gaps in knowledge. But, as with Newton, in many cases the gaps have disappeared as scientists made new discoveries. Over the years this disappearance has caused a good deal of embarrassment to Christians who espoused such ideas, so today many Christians are loath to propose any kind of "God of the Gaps" theory to account for the many gaps in scientists? knowledge of the mechanisms of evolution. My point is that the fact that scientists don?t now know the exact mechanism behind something in nature is not a particularly good reason to ascribe that mechanism to God. One problem for Intelligent Design, then, is that it may amount to yet another "God of the Gaps" theory.
I trust that I won't have to enumerate the evidentiary steps evident in the above two paragraphs. The fact is that scientists have always found, as did Lagrange, that they didn't need a hypothesis like "God did it" to explain various scientific phenomena. They were able to explain things using naturalistic explanations, i.e., explanations that rely only on the so-called laws that govern the behavior of matter and energy in our universe. So it was with Darwin in attempting to explain the way species are apparently related. He didn't need a "God of the Gaps" theory, and neither do modern day scientists. That doesn't mean that scientists have all the answers, for they evidently do not. But experience shows that resorting to "God did it" is no explanation at all.
I leave open in my mind the question of ultimate origins. Perhaps some Supreme Creator or a race of super-intelligent aliens from an alternate universe created life on earth, or even our entire physical universe. We simply don't know. What I do believe is that no "God of the Bible" exists or had any hand in such creation. But that's a subject for a different thread.
AlanF
