The facts of life; the harsh realities

Most of the people who claim evolution is a fact don't know what a fact is, nor do they have a worldview that can provide them with a foundation for facts. As the Christian theologian Cornelius Van Til often said, 'before we can talk about facts we need to talk about the philosophy of facts.' Eugenie Scott is one apologist who believes M2M evolution is a fact. Is it?

Quotes and comments;

A. May 21, 2010 — In many public school science classrooms today, Darwinism is taught uncritically as a scientific fact. Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) defends that practice, and Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute (DI) contests it. [1.]

- People don't argue about things they consider to be facts; that people argue about e. theory is ample evidence it's not a fact. Scott claims (how she does this with a straight face I don't know) that 'real' scientists don't argue about evolution. This is utterly fallacious. If you read the literature you see that people who call themselves Darwinists or evolutionists argue continually about virtually every aspect of the grand theory. This argument (or conversation if you will) extends across everything thing from macro theories (e.g. gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium) to the fine details over whether some fossil belongs in one class or another, etc. etc. There is virtually Nothing that isn't hotly debated. (Apologists like Scott talk about the theory of evolution; but in reality there are many theories. These theories are somehow smuggled under one overarching theory of origins we might call Materialism.)

When Scott says M2M evolution is a fact she means that most scientists agree that some kind of materialist explanation for origins is undoubtedly true. This isn't anything like saying there is some one explanation that everyone agrees on. She's being disingenuous. To say that some materialist explanation must be true, is simply to say that no creationist account can be true. In other words, all these people are doing is telling us that they're Materialists. I only wish they were honest enough to admit this, instead of pretending 'evolution' is a scientific fact. This is little different than saying cosmology is a fact, or gravity is a fact. She's confusing the data with an explanation of the data.

Apart from all this, I'm of the opinion that the materialist explanations are woefully inadequate, and that they will never be able to give a valid explanation of human origins. Although she refuses to acknowledge them, many informed people have rejected the Darwinian (evolutionary) explanation for Origins. (To refuse to acknowledge people is one way to dehumanize them.) This means that her claim is disproved both from within the materialist camp and from without.

B. 'In Nature, Scott wrote a book review of How Science Works: Evolution. A Student Primer by R. John Ellis (Springer, 2010). [1.]

- We have here (again) another reification of science. This book (if the author wished to be rational) should have been titled 'How scientists work' not how 'science' works. (Science is an abstraction, and thus isn't required to do any work :=) Actually since Ellis can't possibly know how all scientists work his book should have been called 'How some scientists work'. Since it's a work about what he knows happened in the past it really should have been called 'How some scientists worked in the past' (subtitled; at least as far as I know; or at least according to what they told me) So why isn't it? I don't know; but I see a widespread attempt to reify science; to divinize it almost. It's to be the new god and the new religion; and so it must be spoken of as if it were a divine (infallible, etc.) being, and not some sloppy process engaged in by corrupt and fallible people.

Summary;
It seems clear to me that most of the 'facts' in our society are not things that have been discovered, but things that have been manufactured. Differentiating between the real and the manufactured can be an exceedingly difficult task. I'm against branding theories as facts, as this leads to a lack of prudent scepticism about scientific (political, etc.) claims. The materialist especially has no foundation for believing that man (in his view a random speck of matter falling through the void) can know what ultimate reality is. [2.]

- Mike Johnson [frfarer - at- Gmail.com]

Notes;
1. Should Darwin Get a Pass in Science Class? Creation/Evolution Headlines 05/21/2010
- I highly recommend the above article and commentary.
2. I won't get into it in this post (I've written on it before) a materialist like Scott has no way of even knowing what a fact is, let alone know whether M2M e. is a fact. i.e. if all is matter in motion in a 'cosmos' of flux nothing can be a fact. If all is constant change, nothing can stand still to be a standard for definition. As Van Til used to say; if all is mere matter in motion man is nothing but a white cap on a bottomless, shoreless ocean (of random chance). Scott forgets that on her worldview she's nothing more than matter in motion, a chance collection of chemical reactions. How then can she speak of facts? (She does; obviously; but when she does she's not speaking in terms of her own materialist worldview.)
3. For x to be a fact we would have to know x perfectly, and we can't know x perfectly unless we know the universe perfectly. Since this is impossible it's valid to say that there are no facts. This isn't the end of the world (as your grandmother might say) as we don't need facts. We can get by just fine with theories. It's evidence of scientism to claim x is a fact. This leaves no room for error, and just ignores the implications of our finiteness and possible blindness. (In the biblical view, man is finite, fallible and fallen, and to ignore or to deny this is to be in error.) Only an all wise, all knowing, all powerful creator God could know if X is a fact.
4. 'The problem with Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education is that she never received a good science education. She got a defective education from the triumphalist Julian Huxley era when logical positivism was in swing and Darwinism was presented as a done deal.' [1.]
- Unfortunately, this was/is true for most people. What students get isn't an education about scientific discoveries, but instruction in Materialist philosophy.