| Aielyn said: 1. I don't believe that there aren't aliens. I simply have no reason to believe that there are. Without evidence of it, I will operate on the assumption of nonexistence, but I don't particularly believe that there aren't aliens. I don't just ignore the possibility that they do, however. Belief is, at its root, a state in which somebody considers something to be "known" in the absence of objective evidence. Atheism comes in many forms, and there are forms of atheism that constitute a belief... but atheism itself is not in any way a belief. It lies quite close to agnosticism, with the key distinction being that agnostics believe that you can't know, whereas atheists simply assert that it isn't currently known. I don't believe in any god, yet I also don't believe in no god. I simply operate on the assumption that there is no god for the same reason why I operate on the assumption that gravity won't suddenly invert and send us all hurtling into space, or why I operate on the assumption that there isn't about to be a nuclear holocaust in the next 10 minutes. I don't particularly believe that such a holocaust won't happen, but without any evidence to support the idea that such a holocaust will happen, I'll assume it won't for the sake of being able to live my life. I don't believe a plane won't crash when I decide to board it - there's a slim chance that it will. I don't get into my car to drive believing that I won't get into an accident. Life isn't black-and-white, it's a whole spectrum of not just shades, but colours. It is entirely possible to simultaneously not believe in something and not believe its opposite. 2. Being a scientific theory, "proven" is a nonsense term. One can prove nonexistence of some things because of logic - for instance, a completely omnipotent god cannot exist, because they would have to be able to create a rock that even they can't destroy (because they can do anything), but then they'd have to be able to destroy it (again, because they can do anything). Therefore, such a concept is contradictory, and such a being cannot exist... the solution, of course, being that complete omnipotence is a contradictory concept, and an omnipotent god would be bound by logic but be all-powerful beyong that. But when it comes to the universe itself, we operate on evidence, and there are three basic principles that get applied: Occam's Razor: With two explanations for the same thing, all other things being equal, the explanation requiring fewer assumptions is preferred. That is, one could assume that all signs of evolution were put there as some sort of grand deception... but that requires far more assumptions than evolution itself, which only requires that things we have directly observed be extended into the past as applying then, too. Extraordinary Evidence: When you have a large weight of evidence supporting something, you need to provide a large weight of evidence contradicting it in order to indicate it to be wrong. Otherwise, the logical conclusion is that there is merely something missing. For instance, if your model predicts that it will rain for 5 hours and 1 minute, and it rains for 5 hours and 2 minutes, it's probably just a minor influence you neglected (like, say, someone burning some wood in the area). To indicate that your model was completely wrong, you'd need to have it fail multiple times in a way that demonstrates a problem, with no indication of a reason for it. Evolution has a MASSIVE weight of evidence, and every time it has been challenged, it has met that challenge (for instance, people keep coming up with new "missing links", which keep on then being found - the first one, which Darwin didn't live to see but he did postulate the existence of, was the "missing link" between reptiles and birds - a few years after he died, I believe, they found the fossil of Archaeopteryx). Statistical Significance: Whenever evidence is collected, there is always allowance for error, and extensive statistical analysis. This allows us to determine what the chances are that something would be the way it is if the theory in question wasn't in action. For instance, genetic analysis of animals of various types allows us to observe genetic connections - strands of genes that are common between various animals, etc. As we have a solid number for the rate of mutation of genes (observed directly), we can determine how much of a change needs to have happened in order to match up genes more concretely. It's this same method that also allows us to determine the "genetic adam" and "genetic eve" - that is, the timeframe in which the male from which all human males are descended (that is, a shared ancestor), and similarly for human females. Interestingly, they're at completely different time periods, with the genetic eve naturally being further back. They were not the first humans, to be clear - just that other humans of the time of the genetic adam didn't end up having their Y chromosomes survive to the present day. With those three considerations in mind, evolution is as "proven" as one can get with physical things. Note that there were actually quite a few holes left to fill in Darwin's time... but it's been quite some time since then, and our ability to analyse has improved dramatically - we can now look at DNA code - in Darwin's time, DNA hadn't yet been discovered. And quite a few of the postulates Darwin put forward ended up being inaccurate... we've since corrected them. For you see, science adapts. It evolves, itself. When evidence arises that challenges something that science "believes", it analyses the evidence, it analyses the "belief", and determines whether the "belief" needs tweaking and/or discarding. Of course, the word "belief" in this context is being used only informally - the appropriate term would be "has strong evidence for". So when you say "Darwin said it wasn't proven", you're demonstrating your ignorance of what science is. |
