Eminent Domain Stuff
New London Update (2/24/06)
Bad NLDC!
Coverage of the Rally at New London's City Hall (w/ pics)
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Evolution
Robert McHenry makes a great point regarding evolution that I have tried to get across ever since I started arguing with people about this topic (for example h-e-r-e):
(via Chaos-In-Motion)
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Science begins with the foundational assumption that all material phenomena have material explanations. Science does not assert this to be true, though some individual scientists may do so. This point is worth making more pointedly: There is no necessary association between science and atheism, for science takes no position on matters supernatural. (It is a pity that one source of the confusion of the two is a prominent evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, an acerbic atheist whose chair at Oxford is dedicated to, of all things, the "public understanding of science." You're not helping here, Dick.) A commitment to materialism is simply the necessary axiom upon which to build a structure of demonstrable knowledge about the natural world. What this means is that when a scientist's first attempt to explain the origin of thunder fails, he does not shrug and declare "OK, it's Thor." Instead, he looks for another material explanation. He keeps this up until he finds one that is consistent with what is already known and has predictive power that encompasses other phenomena. His tested and verified hypothesis then becomes part of the body of scientific knowledge, but -- and this is an absolutely vital point -- it remains, as all human knowledge must, provisional. The best grounded and most rigorously tested of our theories remain provisional, open to challenge on account of new observations or failures to predict. A theory thus challenged may be discarded or it may only need to be modified, but it is the essence of the method that it respond to the challenge. (emphasis added)Thank you. I hope that people on both sides of evolution v. ID debate read that paragraph and take it to heart. Seriously, read it again. "...science takes no position on matters supernatural." Can it be any clearer than that?
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