By definition, a scientific theory CAN NOT be proven, it can only be DISPROVEN.
Disagree. All science seeks to prove. I can prove a car engine won't run on water.
I can't tell who actually said the 'disagree' line but whoever it was has a fundamentally flawed idea as to what science is. The first sentence above is entirely correct.
Science is based on hypothesis testing. No hypothesis is ever 'proven' in an absolute sense. A hypothesis can be tested and if it 'passes the test' then you can only say that you failed to disprove the hypothesis. If it fails the test then ythe hypothesis has been 'disproven'.
Proof is an absolute term. Science cannot prove anything. Instead, oncae a hypothesis has been repeatedly tested over time, and has survived enough challenges, you can say that the hypothesis is generally 'Accepted'. At some point, an accepted hypothesis becomes thought of as a fact, but that does NOT mean that it is proven.
As an example, for centuries everyone 'knew' that all swans are white. Hundreds of thousands of swans had been observed over hundreds of years by thousands of observers. Descriptions of the species in textbooks invariably described them as a white bird.
Then an explorer went to Australia / New Zealand and discovered that there are, in fact, black swans. In one observation, the centuries-long accepted 'fact' that swans were white was falsified. It is exactly that same potential for an unexpected observation to royally mess-up your paradigms and factual theories about anything that leads scientists to be careful about claiming something to be fact. In reality, the decision as to when to accept a theory as a 'fact' is an entirely subjective one and has the potential to embarass whoever makes that decision too swiftly.
As to the generally accepted theory of evolution....
Evolution comprises two parts:
Natural selection.
Creation of novel traits.
Natural selection does not make random choices. Only beneficial/neutral changes are passed on.
Natural selection does not encourage good survival traits. It is simply more
likely to remove organisms from the gene pool which have bad survival traits more often than organisms with 'good' survival traits.
This is an important distinction. Natural selection creates nothing new. It only removes 'inferior' organisms from the gene pool.
If a forest is clear-cut and turned into pasture, natural selection does not take a forest-reliant bird and give it traits that it didn't already have in order to help it survive in a pastoral environment. Generally, massive environmental disturbance leads to massive extinction of specialized animals. We see it all the time wherever environments change massively. There's no speculation involved.
Now I don't think you'll find anyone who will disagree that natural selection occurs and is real, tangible, and measurable.
So, natural selection alone does not bring about the change of a fish into a squirrel. However much that a shark who is plucked out of the ocean and dumped into the forest might
wish to produce offspring with squirrel features (quad-chambered heart, lungs, fur, claws, bones etc), it just can't pass on what it doesn't posses the genes for.
So conflating natural selection with the idea of one type of animal (species) turning into an entirely different type of animal (another species) over time, even over hundreds of generations, is a badly incomplete argument. (And that's leaving aside the reality that the 'species' concept is a purely human-imagined philosophical construct. As humans, we like to compartmentalize the world in our minds even when the world itself does not fall nicely into such tidy 'boxes'.)
The REAL issue for evolution of 'species' comes about from the questionas to where NOVEL traits arise during the process. Traits must exist before natural selection can act on them. Where do they come from?
The usual ideas put forward are
-mutation (random changes in the genome caused by cosmic rays, weird chemicals, whatever)
-genetic drift (by random chance a new combination of genes occurs that has not occured before that causes a new expression of an existing outward trait)
-founder effects (essentially an argument that a certain amound of inbreeding accelerates genetic drift and over a short number of generations natural selection operates more severly by allowing the increased likelihood that recessive traits will be expressed more often than in a large population)
Of these, really, the only one that actually creates something entirely NEW in the DNA pool of the 'species' is mutation.
I don't think you'll find too many folks saying that mutations don't exist, or aren't real, or aren't tangible.
Evolutionary theory is really just that a combination of natural selection acting on an existing genetic pool plus mutations = changes in organisms over time viewed through a anthropogenic filter called the 'species' concept.
Is this convincing? No question to my mind that Nat Sel is real. No question that mutations can randomly create new traits.
However, mutations occur in a number of forms. Some result only in very minor changes in the DNA and others cause massive changes in large sections of the DNA at a time. Generally, small changes in DNA result in relatively minor changes in the outward expression/appearance (phenotype) of an organism. Wholesale changes in DNA usually result in quite marked differences.
None of this means that these changes will be actually beneficial to the organism. Usually, in a complex system like a living organisms, random changes result in a breakdown. Try randomly rearranging 10 components in your car's engine and see how often you end up with an improvement in gas mileage. In medical terms, many mutations have been described. Very few of them result in a benefit to the organism. (Sickle cell anemia is perhaps an exception to that rule although even that can be debated).
So, let's think about evolution in the long term. For organisms to survive and adapt to a changing environment they need to have a tendency to mutate. On the other hand, if you mutate, your fitness almost always goes down and natural selection will wipe you out. So, there is intense selective pressure to NOT mutate when the envirnment is reasobaly 'stable', but if your species does not mutate quickly and often when an environmental disruption occurs you'll likely be wiped out by natural selection in a short period of time...
what to do, what to do...?
Now. Line this up against the fossil evidence. The is strong evidence that massive disruption (asteroid impact etc) leads to massive extinction events of many species. Followed shortly thereafter by massive diversification of the critters that did manage to survive then a long period of relatively stable community structure. The timescales involved for this diversification (or adaptive radiation as it is called) are incredibly short
in geological terms.
This pattern had leads many evolutionists to abandon the classic darwinian idea of slow change over immensely long timeframes because it just doesn't match with the fossil record. On the other hand, classic darwinian advocates mock their opponents with their inability to explain how organisms evolve so rapidly in short time periods, then stay essentially unchanged for millions of years thereafter. They point to the clearance of the Amazon and ask why the forest songbirds aren't evolving before our eyes when their habitat dissappears? Why would the evolution of NEW traits occur rapidly in short bursts but then stop for long periods of time?
I think both sides raise excellent questions that we currently cannot answer.
And for full disclosure, yes, I do believe in God. And yes, I think we were created (in a sense). However, I also believe that trying to interpret the mechanism of creation from the bibilical account are doomed to failure. I think the closest anyone has come to labelling my school of thought is to say I believe in the
'finely tuned universe' theory of creation. That is, God created the material universe so carefully that it could only 'unfold' in a certain way (God not being limited by the hysenberg uncertainty principle after all
). All the rest of the details about evolution and how we came to be is interesting, but not remotely an issue to be concerned about in terms of challenging my faith. Which is the difference between science and faith. Scientific theories can be proven false, or accepted as true until some contradictory observation comes along. Faith cannot be objectively tested (proven false).
And for the record, no, I don't believe that the earth is only 10,000 years old. And yes, we quite probably did 'evolve' biologically. But there's an awful lot of questions that remain unanswered, and pieces of evidence that are seemingly contradictory. And history has shown that the currently accepted theories of science will probably be mocked in the universities in the new few hundred years.
And let me just clarify before anyone accuses me of somehting I didn't say: the Fine tuned universe theory is NOT scientific. It is not testable. It is entirely a matter of faith.
That doesn't mean, however, you have to be illogical, irrational, uneducated, or stupid to believe it. Or, IMO, to believe in God. Unfortunately, it just seems that way when you listen to fundamentalists and Republicans
And I did not check the bottom option simply because, while I believe in 'God', I expect that my inner conception of what 'God' is like is undoubtedly far too limited to be accurate enough to say that it is the only true 'God'.
