Title Author Date

Idea for an article Korthof, Gert Jul 12, 2003

Dear Henry,

You say that it takes a lot of faith to believe in evolution. You should
have said "evolution is an inference from the data". And indeed it takes a
lot of data and a lot of analysis to come to the conclusion that evolution
explains those data. There is nothing wrong with that. Common descent is a
theory about the past. If a theory explains data with events in the past,
the evidence is necessarily indirect. Since the evolutionary explanation
also uses processes and mechanisms operating now, we can do laboratory
experiments.

We don't need time-travel to establish whether mutation and natural
selection operates in nature. Everybody can check that (with a little bit of
training). You don't need a lot of faith, but you need a lot of data,
statistics and logic.

Further you say "there are many holes in the theory of evolution". Of course
there are many holes. You know, science is not finished yet. If it was
finished we could close universities today. It is scientific progress to
replace "the unknown plan of creation" with everyday causes that we can
investigate. If you propose the unknown and unknowable plan of creation as
an explanation for the data, then you are going back to pre-Darwinian times.

We cannot put God in a test tube. Never. You wrote "admit what the theory of
evolution does not know". Indeed many scientists are not interested in
problems that cannot be solved in the next 10 years. Indeed some scientists
exaggerate the performance of the theory of evolution and claim it explains
everything. You wrote "state the holes". Fine. And what next? Are you
interested in biological problems that have been solved by evolutionary
biologists? The holes of the past? Are you blind to the progress that has
been made? Ask yourself: Did Darwin regress to a theory of earlier times, or
is "the design inference" a regress to pre-Darwinian times (Paley)? It is
right to ask questions to others, but please do ask questions to yourself.