Theory and Practice

In response to On Conscience in Government by Lonewulf447:

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Personally I am not for the idea of teaching Evolutionism in class rooms to children while creationism isnt. As I have stated elsewhere in my journal, I dont believe that evolution has been proven in any way. but neither has creationists. 

Certain empiracle facts HAVE been proven like how old certain things are, suggesting that the world is older than what conservative creationists claim. In that regard then yes I believe that should be taught in school. School shouldnt be teaching children unproven theories or else then creationism should be taught there. 

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Following up Slepneir's comment to the above, I would emphasize that even figuring out how old things are is based in theory, not proof. Theories such as those concerning the prevalance of and rate of decay of carbon isotopes over geological time have a high degree of predictive power, but predictive power is not truth. 

Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom has just as much predictive power as it did before it was supplanted by particulate models of the structure and substructure of matter. Later theories couched in terms of valence and quanta may have more predictive power than Thomson's corpuscles, but that doesn't make them more true, just more useful.

The often neglected characteristic of a good theory however, and what makes evolution, in particular, so threatening to so many, is explanatory power. A more useful theory predicts things that a less useful theory can not. A more meaningful theory explains things that a less meaningful theory does not.

In this sense, the theory of evolution plays the same role as age-old fables in explaining "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and "How the Monkey Got His Tail". Here the purpose isn't to predict who will get spots or a tail next--it is not to satisfy our curiosity about how the world will be in the future--so much as provide for a coherent and consistent framework for understanding how the world already is in the present.

It is on this criteria, explanatory power, that evolutionism and creationism operate as equally viable candidates.

I will never forget the day my grandmother opined: "How do you know that God didn't create all those bones, fully formed in the ground, complete with radio carbon dating signatures, just to confuse the unbelievers?" 

Now, admittedly, Occham would no doubt wield his razor to cut away such a presumption as unnecessary fat containmating an otherwise lean theory. That admission made, we should also keep in mind the corollary to Sherlock Holmes' adage about truth being what is left after eliminating the impossible: we can't say God's fabrication of the geological record is untrue without first eliminating it as impossible.

Yet, while omnipotent genesis of entire strata of fossilized remains may sound highly improbable, and certainly is unnecessary to the useful functioning of the theory of evolution, it is not incompatible with existing theory, nor does anything in evolutionary, geological or indeed any other theory allow us to prove the impossibility of such a dues ex machina.

More importantly, allowing for such an absurdity does nothing to impinge upon the predictive power of those theories. Radio-carbon dating still gives the same essential result whether or not we interpret our results to read "this object is one million years old" or "this object was created by God so as to appear to be one million years old". Either way, the predictive power is quantitatively comparable.

Indeed, one could assert that God created the geological record for the sole purpose of prompting us to figure out the nature of the evolutionary process by way of examplars, and so bring us to an understanding of his work all the sooner. Again, this fails Occham's test, but neither can it be proven impossible.

No matter how powerful our current theories are for predicting the apparent age of prehistoric materials, those theories can never be proven. They are powerful and useful, so abandoning them absent more powerful theories would be folly, but theory should never be confused with incontrovertible fact.

Okay, I still need to respond to the substantive issues regarding the establishment of religion that were the primary subject of Lonewulf's post, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.