Science, Uniformity, and Causality

Scientific Method

 

 More and more I see "scientific" articles that would better fit under the category of "science falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20). Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines science as:

sci·ence: 1 a: possession of knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding b: knowledge attained through study or practice 2 a: a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study b: something that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge c: one of the natural sciences 3 a: knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws esp. as obtained and tested through the scientific method b: such knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : Natural Science 4: a system or method based or purporting to be based on scientific principles

 Simply put science is based on hard science and takes observable, empirical, measurable evidence and determines if it is a reasonable scientific theory and can become a scientific natural law using the scientific method. The scientific method can NOT prove a scientific fact it can only tell you if you have a reasonable theory. The hierarchy of how universally true something is can be broken down into the following.

   1. Scientific Fact
   2. Scientific Law
   3. Scientific Theory
   4. Scientific Model

 The scientific method can be broken down in to the following steps.

   1. Observation
   2. Proposal of a question or a problem
   3. A hypothesis or educated guess made - Model
   4. Scientific experimentation
   5. Theory formed - A hypothesis with a high degree of probability
   6. Scientific natural law (If the theory is shown to be valid on a universal scale)

We can now use these steps of the scientific method to see what they tell us about evolution.

1. Observation

We exist.

2. Proposal of a question or a problem

How did we get here?

3. A hypothesis or educated guess made

We evolved from nothing, to dirt, to single cells, to multiple cells, to fish, to amphibians, to reptiles, to mammals, to humans.

4. Scientific experimentation

 Now we have a problem. When dealing with evolution (Cosmic, Chemical, Biological, or other) we have never observed, tested, or repeated any of the "scientific" models including the Big Bang, origins of planets and stars, origin of life, and higher animals being produced from lower animals. Since evolution does not even pass the first step in the process it is still in the stage of a scientific model of how someone thinks it may have happend. No one has ever done an experiment that made life come from non-life or a lower creature turn into a higher creature and without that empirical evidence evolution can not leave the hypothesis or model phase.

 When reading articles always look for if they mention what testing they have done to verify that evolution happened. They may look at it, measure it, weigh it, map what layer it was found in, or count the radiation coming from it but that does not prove anything about its origin.

 The reason there is often so much confusion with calling evolution a theory or a model is because most people that talk about the subject (professors, researchers, television specials) have a background in science and not in philosophy. People that are well versed in philosophy tend to keep track of the actual titles of fact, law, theory, or model better because it is crucial to putting things in a reasonable order in your mind.

 For evolution to be included in science it would need several things to be repeated in a laboratory and observed, including:
 - Creation of something from nothing
 - Creation of life from non living chemicals
 - Billions of beneficial mutations that produce increased genetic complexity
 - Bone structure naturally change from one "kind" of animal to another "kind"

 Just like a crime scene is not open to using the scientific method because the crime has already happened and it is in the past we have to leave the operation science field and enter the origin science field. Origin science is used when the events in question have already happened and are not occurring over again so no direct observation is possible. This is often considered a science of the past. Two methods can be used to logically decide what has happened in the past if the scientific method does not apply.

   1. Principal of uniformity or analogy (If something happens in the present and causes the same effect as seen in the past)
   2. Principal of causality (Everything that has a possibility of not happening must have had a cause to make it happen)


 If you are a crime scene investigator and are called to a store where overnight somehow a window broke and the cash register disappeared would you say, "Last night I was reading a good book on philosophy and it described how things can happen without a cause so I don't think we need to look much further here because this was probably just a random phenomena and won't happen again". Of course you would not. Seeing the scene here may remind you of another broken window and missing cash register that you have seen or heard about that was the result of a burglar so you deduce that someone broke in and stole this one because you know things like this have happened in the past. The principal of uniformity states that because we can observe the effect that happens because of a cause in the present we can reasonably assume that those same causes happened in the past to observe the effects that we did not see happen.

 The Uniformitarian view claims that everything that is happening now is exactly the same as it happened in the past, slow, gradual changes. They see layers of dirt and small rivers flowing through large canyons and assume that it took many many years for those layers to form and just as many years for that river to errode it into a canyon. The Grand Canyon for example is just one way to show an error in their logic. They all seem to forget that since the river enters the canyon at 2800 ft above sea level and leaves at 2500 ft above sea level, yet the canyon is almost 1 mile deep in places. It should not be that difficult to realize that rivers only flow down hill. The river could not have carved that canyon. The Grand Canyon (along with many other canyons and the Bad Lands) are washed out spill ways left over from a major catastrophe.

 You can do actual empirical measurements of Grand Canyon (measure it, watch the erosion rate) and make calculations using a Uniformitarian viewpoint and conclude that a little water took a lot of time to carve that canyon, but that does not mean the same processes that are happening today have always been happening in that exact same way.


 Typically the principal of uniformity will be used to try to give causes for effects, but the causes are always something that happened long ago and far away and today it is not possible to reproduce. For evolution to be considered a scientific theory it needs to be repeatable, testable, and observable today. Since it is not, it is still a model or hypothesis.

 Remember that a scientific law is the next most plausible thing since we can not prove a scientific fact so things like the Laws of Thermodynamics are much more based on science than any theory or model. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all the energy in the universe is changing to a less usable form. Since the amount of energy is decreasing that means that at some time in the past there was more usable energy. What was the cause of this energy? Nothing causes nothing to exist by itself. Nothing always comes from nothing. What caused everything to exist? We are full of highly organized genetic information. What caused that to organize?

 It is also not possible for anything to exist for an infinite amount of time because it violates the Law of Causality. Causality states that you can not have an infinite number of finite events occur because it will never reach infinity, the number will just get larger and larger. Take add up a set of numbers (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+.....) and a set of odd numbers (1+3+5+7+9+11+......), what set is larger? You may say that they are both the same size because they go on forever however they can not go on forever because they had a beginning and as long as there was a beginning it is not an infinite set. It is the same if you add today to yesterday to the day before and the day before on and on as back as far as you can go. You will never get to infinity, you will get to a thousand to a million to whatever number but never infinity. Every effect must have a cause and that means that each 'caused event' has a chance of not happening. The result of today means that the sun went down yesterday and the earth kept spinning. The result of a person lying on the ground with a knife sticking out of them means that they were stabbed. The result of a complex human with a sense of morality and justice and a genetic code more complex than all the computer programs ever written means it did not happen by chance. The universe can not be eternal or self existing. There has to be something outside of the universe that caused its existence.