 I was just watching the recorded excerpts from this weekend's Magic Sandwich show. And I was struck by how much harder it is to expose the arguments of creationists as flawed. When you can't pause the video feed and search your own reasoned argument, then move on to the next point. Instead, the style of casual discussion, informally moderated, leads to a lot of interruptions and miscommunicated points. It also allows people to slide by logical fallacies without stopping to address them. So when I heard Venomfang X discussing how evolution had not been completely proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, and how this created a gap to place magical creationism into, I knew he would skate by this fundamental flaw. Listen to this clip. So any person looking at them would have said, you know, from our understanding of how it takes for someone to grow up, we'd look at them and say they're at least 30 years old or whatever, however old we may think they are, but they're actually only minutes old. Just like he created you, me, and everyone else, fully grown, to look like the universe was only three minutes old. No. It's a different metaphysical worldview, and there's no way you can disprove it. Well, that's the point. If this is possible, if it's possible, and yes, I am taking advantage of it because if there is a possibility that what I'm saying is true, then it means there's also a possibility that you're wrong. And if there is a possibility that you're wrong, that means you haven't proven beyond any shadow of a doubt your position. Science never proves anything. It is incapable of removing the shadow of doubt, and Thunderfoot correctly identifies why that is multiple times. It's because science is based on inductive logic. This is such a key point in an understanding of science. Science isn't about truth with a capital T. If you're looking for big T truth, you'd better head to the philosophy section of the library. Science only deals with inductively useful models. As an example, consider the history of models of planetary motion. We first have the Aristotelian system of perfect spheres, which was good as a general explanation, and was accepted as scientific truth to model how the stars moved. The Greeks however observed the wanderers or planets behave oddly, so a new model based on Ptolemy's circles within circles was proposed and accepted. Then the Ptolemaic model of geocentrism worked somewhat, and it was accepted as scientific truth because it was pretty good at explaining the current observations. It wasn't until new observations were made that the Ptolemaic system couldn't accommodate that scientists began looking for a better system, more in line with experimental observation. Today we have a fairly accurate model that can predict where planets will be a million years out, and explains a broad range of phenomenon, but it's still not capital T truth. It's just a highly predictive, highly useful model. Evolution is very similar. At one time, scientific truth was the Ptolemaic system of original, perfect animals, mixing into half-breed hybrids, which is essentially what Sean believes in. It's very intuitive, but it fails to explain a number of observed phenomenon. So a better, more predictive model is common ancestry and heritable change over time, aka evolution. How likely is the common ancestry of all life? Well all known living things use similar genetic codes, share a basic biochemistry, and even share non-functional sequences. Let's apply the two models. Sean says that this could be the result of a common designer, given the appearance of similarity, but not the actual common ancestry. The scientific theory, evolution, says that these commonalities, especially in non-coding sequences, are the result of common ancestry in the process of genetic drift and accumulation of change. Both are explanatory for the observed data, but here's the real catch. Which of the two is predictive? We can use evolution to predict genetic changes in response to environment, or what the effect of antibiotics will be on resistance, or the consequences of an ecological change. On a macro level, we use evolution to explain the likely origin of genes, but we can also use it to predict the function of a sequence based on homologies across hundreds of millions of years. We can use it to predict the consequences of a loss of genetic diversity, or to determine the degree of inbreeding in a small isolated population. It forms the basis for a field of genetics called pop-gen or population genetics. It gives mechanisms for the development of the stages of embryonic development, helps us to predict how best to manage our domesticated crops and animals, and how best to preserve the genetic diversity of endangered species. Arbitrary intervention by a supernatural agent may be the big T truth, and I have no way of ruling that out completely. It could be that reality is an illusion, and the whole world is a sensory construct designed to fool you. All of these are possibilities raised by philosophers, and I have no easy answer to them. However, the very arbitrary nature of Sean's hypothesis makes it useless in science. It lacks that most coveted property of scientific ideas, falsifiability. No matter what observation we make, Sean's hypothesis is always supported. God done it is always explanatory after the fact, but never predictive in advance. If it can't be falsified, it's not science anymore. It's not that science is incompatible with religion. It's that religious explanations that invoke ad hoc mechanisms after the fact are not scientific in the modern sense. We fit the model to the observation, not the observations to the model. I don't think any of this will impact on Sean. I don't think it's an open issue for him. If he were being really honest, he would simply state, I have a prior commitment to a particular interpretation of my holy scripture, and I view the world through that filter. It would save us all a lot of arguing and drama, but it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. Thanks for watching.