Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 16:55:33 +1000

From: <u2210

I think something that is very important to remember is that when it comes to non-religious, or at the very least, scientific matters, it is not possible to “prove” anything. The essence of science, and indeed why many consider it a much superior system of knowledge than any other, is that it recognises what it does not know. It’s like what Socrates said – wisdom is knowing that you don’t. Science does not deal with truths as religions do. The best that science can do is show that certain things are not true.

The best way that I can demonstrate this is by using an example from Karl Popper: if every time you travel around a bend in a river, black swans are what you always see, does that mean that next time you do so you won’t see a white swan? We always see the apple fall from the tree towards the centre of the Earth, we can show in numerous ways that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but when the apple then decides to fall upwards, and that light speed barrier is somehow breached, science changes to incorporate this new piece of evidence. Simply watching the apple fall X number of times is not enough to “prove” that it will always happen and that it is a universal truth, and a real scientist will never claim it as so. However, a scientist will try and make educated guesses as to why the apple will fall, and using other evidence rationally deduced from what she perceives, show if this is plausible. If not, then that’s one theory less that is true and one step closer to an understanding of gravitation.

This brings me to another important point- as brilliant as Newton was in coming up with the law of gravitation and others, and as much accepted his theories were by others at the time, he was shown to be wrong by Einstein many years later:- space-time is curved, and not straight. In other words, all the scientific knowledge that we have gathered at any time is only at best provisional. Perhaps someday in the future, much that we assume today to be true as the “immutable laws of the universe”, will similarly be falsified.

Bottom line is, you can’t “prove” anything, (except in mathematics – see Sophie’s World for a crash course in philosophy and what I mean), let alone evolution. However, the evidence is strong to suggest that it happens. Evidence about actual changing of species does exist – I can’t remember the exact species, but there’s an apple maggot around now that didn’t exist a couple of hundred years ago, that evolved from another species as apples were taken around the world and different seasonal patterns.

Basically, there were some individual maggots that matured much faster than the rest as befits genetic variation. In their original area, this was often a disadvantage because their food source would not have bloomed yet, and their genetic line have been carried down as the young could not be laid. When the maggots were taken to other areas with different seasonal patterns, these precocious maggots were the only ones that survived because they were the only ones that could breed and lay their eggs at the right time. Several hundred years later to today, and the two species of maggot are marked different. Obviously in breeding patterns, but also in things such as size, colour, behaviour. More tellingly, they can no longer breed with each other. They, over a period of a few centuries and as a direct result of a change in environment, evolved into a whole new species (I apologise for the vagueness – I’ll post all the details of the maggot as to species, origin, time periods, etc tommorrow).

And so, it can thus be shown that evolution can happen. Does it show that it always has? No. In tandem with fossil records that show step by step changes of species from apes to homo sapiens (ie. just about one feature changing at a time between species until the final result – us), it obviously strongly suggests it to be so, but does not preclude the possibility that God really does have a sense of humour and planted the fossils and the whole maggot episode to test our faith. Nor does acceptance of evolution to be a reality preclude the possibility that it too is simply another part of the Lord’s ineffable plan, as a method he used in order to create humankind and the world around us.

If you’re still reading all this, I’d like to reward your efforts with a nicely rounded conclusion, but in truth I’m not quite sure what I’m saying anymore. If anything, I guess it would be this – science and faith are not mutually exclusive, and anybody that claims to have proven the non-existence of God is [stupid] that doesn’t know [anything] about science. So there.

Slartibartfast

PS In case anyone was interested, I am not religious.