The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158223   Message #3750520
Posted By: GUEST,MTB
13-Nov-15 - 10:23 AM
Thread Name: BS: The Pope in America
Subject: RE: BS: The Pope in America
Pete wrote:
evolutionists believe a lot of stuff that they are not able to substantiate by observable, testable ,repeatable science , and most of what they do offer has been countered by creationists.


You could write the exact opposite - "creationists believe a lot of stuff that they are not able to substantiate by observable, testable ,repeatable science , and most of what they do offer has been countered by evolutionists."

In 2002 Scientific American published an article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/15-answers-to-creationist/ which contains, amongst other things, these paragraphs -

The historical nature of macroevolutionary study involves inference from fossils and DNA rather than direct observation. Yet in the historical sciences (which include astronomy, geology and archaeology, as well as evolutionary biology), hypotheses can still be tested by checking whether they accord with physical evidence and whether they lead to verifiable predictions about future discoveries. For instance, evolution implies that between the earliest-known ancestors of humans (roughly five million years old) and the appearance of anatomically modern humans (about 100,000 years ago), one should find a succession of hominid creatures with features progressively less apelike and more modern, which is indeed what the fossil record shows. But one should not--and does not--find modern human fossils embedded in strata from the Jurassic period (144 million years ago). Evolutionary biology routinely makes predictions far more refined and precise than this, and researchers test them constantly.

It should be noted that the idea of falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science originated with philosopher Karl Popper in the 1930s. More recent elaborations on his thinking have expanded the narrowest interpretation of his principle precisely because it would eliminate too many branches of clearly scientific endeavor.