Debating a Creationist, another forum blah blah blah, and he said this about "creation science"'s predictions:
That’s just it, nothing, creation is created. Nothing new will be created. That is exactly why I keep saying Show me, show me, show me. Because if it predicts anything, it is that you will not be able to show me any newly “evolved” species, and no one has.
Is that a valid hypothesis? "Nothing is created". Most hypotheses say that something will happen, they're positive hypotheses. But is a negative hypothesis workable? That would seem to be conflict with "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
What would be the best tack in attacking it, in other words?
He's full of shit. A testable prediction comes from the mechanism, not by arbitrarily plucking something out of thin air. In this case, creation theory is completely incapable of generating testable predictions because nobody even knows what the mechanism was. HOW did God create the species? What methods did he use? Once we know the methods, we can test them in the lab. Needless to say, this won't happen.
Meanwhile, the mechanism of evolution has been tested very thoroughly, so the pinhead creationists must fall back on pathetic evasions like "well, you haven't shown it compressing a million years of development into a single year for me", as if evolution theory predicts this being possible.
Remember one word: MECHANISM. A scientific theory's predictions must be shown to be derivable from its MECHANISM, otherwise they are just random garbage thrown together to suit whatever the creationist wants.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Either I don't understand the original quote, or it's entierly wrong.
New species are constantly being created, think bacteria swapping plasmids, becoming resistant to different antibiotics. What about HIV evolving from SIV?
On the point of the thread, the way one tests a hypothesis is to disprove the null hypothesis, i.e. if my original hypothesis is that bees preferentially visit red flowers, I would try to disprove that bees do not preferentially visit red flowers. If I can do this, I have supported my original hypothesis.
To apply it to this example, our friend would have to disprove that no new species have evolved.
