Darren New wrote:
> It explains pretty much everything, and it's used on a daily basis 
> world-wide to make drugs and other predictions.  People have used the 
> theory of evolution to figure out where to dig for new species, given 
> the genes of (IIRC) deer and whales, finding the Missing Link between 
> the two when mammals went back into the water.

The theory of evolution doesn't even try to explain pretty much 
everything, nor does it claim to do so.  It appears to be a fairly good 
descriptor of what is occurring, but it is not static; as such you can't 
really say that at any given point it explains an arbitrary phenomenon, 
as tomorrow a new piece of evidence might require the theory to be 
altered, making the previous version no longer what's being used to do 
the explaining.

> Sure, it might be wrong, but then maybe the world really *is* flat, too, 
> and maybe there's no gravity it's just the earth sucks.

Mathematically, it is entirely possible to represent the world as being 
flat.  It's even sometimes handy.  (Maps come to mind.)  Does it make 
other calculations that are far more elegant with the earth being an 
oblate spheroid impossible, or merely more difficult and complex? 
Besides, the earth does suck.  XD

> It really doesn't make sense to say "Gee, everything we've done for the 
> last 50 years has worked flawlessly, and everything we've predicted has 
> come true. But maybe we're doing things ALL WRONG and there's some 
> COMPLETELY DIFFERENT theory that would explain every experiment and 
> observation every biologist, geneticist, doctor, and nurse has made over 
> the last 50 years, *and* includes spontaneous generation of life?"

But it is incorrect to say that everything we've done for the past 50 
years has worked flawlessly.  Mistakes are constantly being made, and 
accepted, and tested to see why they happened.  Further, it is 
absolutely necessary to include spontaneous generation of life unless 
you want to argue that life has always existed up to and including 
immediately after the supposed big bang wherein particles that we call 
real came into existence...a bit spontaneously, come to think of it. 
All the data we have indicates that things haven't been the way they are 
right now forever, therefore it had to start at some point.  Science 
attempts to answer how; religion and philosophy attempt to answer why. 
They are not mutually exclusive notions.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-empyrean

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