It’s the fourth point that’s the real killer – it’s an hypothesis that any of us could test in 15 minutes with a bit of browsing – but many people have real trouble grasping what it’s about and why it’s convincing. Hence the leavening of user-friendly stories.

Counterexample: the discovery of haemocyanin in stonefly blood. No other fly has this oxygen-carrying, but the water-living organisms from which they evolved nearly all do. It’s known that the stonefly respiratory system is very primitive so, based on the hypothesised ancestry, it was suggested that stoneflies might have this ancestral molecule. This turned out to be the case.

Counterexample: the identification of a vitamin C pseudogene in primates (including humans). No primate has a functioning vitC gene but, based on our ancestry from other mammals (who apparently did have vitC), it was predicted that there would be debris of a broken vitC gene still present in the human genetic code. A team of scientists then did the research and found out that there was indeed such a gene.

Counterexample: the fact that every “family tree” drawn with gene data from several species gives the same family tree for those species. You can try it yourself.

Evolutionary biology is capable of generating predictions as strong (if not as easily testable) as those in electronics. There are plenty of questions that evolutionary biology can’t yet provide a good answer to. But we don’t understand much about high-temperature superconductors either.

Personally, I studied maths at uni, so I think both sciences are for pantywaisters who can’t handle real logic There’s just not as much differentiation between them as you were suggesting.

I totally agree that the same uncertainty problem that I raise here is a problem for any other theory such as new earth creationism. I agree that things like natural selection and mutation are quite certain and will be key building blocks in the future. Evolutionary scientists should give themselves some time and quit trying so hard to defend it to the public. The hard physical sciences have had quite a long time of observable testable phenomenon to work with and even then there were periods of disagreement in many of these subjects.

(BTW I wasn’t trying to start a new theory of electricity in my previous post. Voltage is really equal to Current times Resistance. I shouldn’t be posting in the early morning when i have a cold!).

I would also be interested in reading your genealogy paper. Any chance of that?

I see the importance of your message in regards to people who are in danger of falling away from faith, because they are not completely certain, and the church just tells them “have faith, have faith.” Well, those people think that certainty is what they lack, but it isn’t so. They’re problem is that they are being told conflicting statements by their Christian brothers and sisters. “God gave us science, but it doesn’t mean what you think.” “God gave us scripture, but it doesn’t mean what you think.” “God gave us science and scripture, and they appear to conflict, but God’s message is eternal”, and on it goes. Faith doesn’t require certainty, but neither should it contradict itself, for a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, and so people fall away.

I just wanted to highlight this as well. Perhaps I’ll post on it separately, but what you say here relates closely to my own experience. Church leaders who don’t recognize the difficulties one my have with one doctrine or another can often respond with a sort of “apologetic of certainty,” i.e. don’t doubt or you’re lost, which will drive the person who is questioning away.

I eventually found my way back, but it was a difficult path, and I can tell you that the folks who empathized with doubts were much more helpful to me than those who exuded certainty.

So, I know my knowledge is partial. But, (to paraphrase Paul) when that which is perfect returns (Christ), that which is partial will be made complete. And that is the certainty that I wish to pass on.

[Nodding head] Yep! That’s it!

One has to answer two questions here, however. First is how much less certain is evolutionary theory, and what specific aspects of evolutionary theory are more or less certain. Common descent, for example, seems to me to be at the high end, while the sufficiency of mutation+natural selection seems to be somewhat lower. That mutation and natural selection occurs is higher, and is testable in the lab. The extent of its creative possibilities is a bit lower. But how much lower? That relates to the next question.

How does this impact our assent to the theory? Well, first we do have to ask just how much less tested any particular element of evolutionary theory is before we can answer that. But second, we would have to look at alternate explanations. Note that I said that all historical study is less probable than study of the present.

Thus any alternatives to evolution, or any objections to current views in evolution suffer from precisely the same difficulties. This is where certain creationists look just a bit silly, in my view, as when you announce that evolution is “just a theory,” inherently uncertain, and therefore we should accept their view.

What should happen instead is that we compare each individual theory and see how well it holds up. They are all historical in nature, and therefore all suffer similarly in terms of how they are tested. But in this case uncertainty is supposed to cause me to treat all views equally. (I’m not alleging this as your argument–rather, this is the view to which I was responding.)

Just as an example, evolutionary scientists were able to predict that they would find a creature like tiktaalik in certain strata, and then they did. What aspect of creationist theory–young earth, old earth, or ID–would make that same successful prediction?

So in my view while tiktaalik is discovered in the midst of quite a number of uncertainties, those uncertainties are more probably true than anyone else’s uncertainties, and by a substantial margin.

I don’t object to anyone pointing out the uncertainties in evolutionary theory, provided they don’t go on into a sort of historical agnosticism, or even further emerge from that agnosticism claiming that some form of creationism must be true because evolution involves uncertainties.

I may promote some of this discussion to a regular post to call greater attention to it. I would be very interested in engaging you on some of the material involved in your recent posts.

One note–Luke follows the LXX genealogies, which is where the extra name comes from. There’s some interesting aspects in the way the genealogies are arranged based on adding that name. I did a paper on it back in college, but haven’t really looked at it in detail recently.