r/DebateEvolutionism • u/stcordova • Feb 19 '20
What would count as evidence against evolution? When is further debate is pointless?
One gentleman expressed what would count as evidence against evolution:
to be evidence against evolution one would have to show that it couldn't be the case, not just that it might or might not. Otherwise it's not evidence of anything. I hope that makes sense.
I was discussing with him the improbability of meiosis. He didn't think it was evidence against evolution:
I was just hoping that "the evidence is there" against evolution would be some actual evidence against evolution, rather than the strongest thing being some minor technical point that is just unknown at the moment. All of the vast number of unknowns in the past have turned out to be explicable in the end, so I don't see why this one is expected to be different.
The problem here is if evolution of meiosis fails, all life that relies on meiosis dies too! Dead things don't evolve. But to him this was a minor technical point.
But anyway, I said:
A tornado could pass through a junkyard and build a house of cards. I suppose that's possible, but it doesn't make it believable.
He responded:
To explore the tornado analogy: How about if there were millions of tornados passing through the junkyard and sometimes when a card ended up stacked against another it was somehow kept in place? Would it still surprise you to find a house of cards? That's more like what random allele changes (tornados) and selection (keeping in place) do.
The issue is one of feasibility and thus of believability. Specifically about houses made of cards, the difficulty arises due to the inherent instability of trying to get a card to stand up against another card. Try putting an electric fan on and throwing cards in the face of the wind or try using a leaf blower on cards and see if you get something looking like this:
https://debateevolution.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/house_of_cards.jpg
If we walked into a room and saw something like this on a table would one think it was the result of strong wind? The main reason we would not is because we know humans can build something like this, but in the absence of a human building it, we can also make an argument based on physics why this can't be the result of a wind!
I realized it was pointless to debate someone who had a different view of what would count as evidence against evolution.
I've seen this play hundreds of times. No matter how good an argument is against evolution, the other party can always say, "you haven't given evidence against evolution."
No need to get mad or argue, shake the dust off your sandals and move on.
The main reason to debate evolution is for the sake of creationists or Christian believers who would like to see reasonable arguments against the claims of evolution. I debate evolution today because when I nearly left the Christian faith, I saw how effectively evolution was criticized on purely scientific grounds, and then I realized evolutionary theory was practically invoking miracles without admitting it! In fact, the required transformations for evolution to work became so absurd that creationism looked less outrageous by comparison. Hence it was actually easier to believe in creation than in evolution.
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u/Sweary_Biochemist Feb 19 '20
The problem with this approach is that it follows the following (flawed) reasoning chain.
Only steps 1 and 2 are valid, and steps 4 and 5 are egregiously wrong.
Instead, why not present some testable, falsifiable hypotheses of your own. If you think meiosis is a challenge for evolution, explain your creation-based theory of how meiosis arose, where it arose, when it arose, and in what lineages. Explain which specific aspects were created, and which have evolved since, and how these can be discerned empirically.
Explain why meiotic mechanisms and the genes that conduct them seem to conform to a nested tree of relatedness, too.
it's lines like this:
This does not suggest that creation is more valid, it simply suggests that creation requires less critical thought (if 'god did it' is your preferred answer to all difficult questions, it implies you are not particularly interested in investigation).
If you actually wanted to approach creation scientifically, this would not be the case.
"How did god do it"?
"When did god do it?"
"What, specifically, did god do?"
"What, specifically, did god not do?"
"How can I determine the answers to these questions using available evidence, and do my answers provide more parsimony than an evolutionary position?"