I find this 'God of the gaps' objection that Darwinists often raise when ever Darwin sceptics point to the simple fact that their theory doesn't have the explanatory content its advocates claim odd.Surely if competing explanations to any occurrence are being compared the relative feasibility the respective explanations must be up for consideration.
Thus no objection should be raised to an advocate of one of those competing theories attempting to demonstrate why its rivals are less feasible than the one he advocates.The issue is not merely one of gaps but of which explanation is best able to bridge these gaps or are simply not up to the challenge based on our collective experience and knowledge of the way things work.
This principle is especially important when investigating events that occurred in the distant past.One can conjure all sorts of engaging and plausible sounding narratives,but which of these best bridges the gaps.
For instance it's not inconceivable that a combination of chance and necessity could have produced some of the buildings,roads,furniture,boats or apparent works of art that are unearthed by archaeologists from time to time.Likely if someone put their minds to it they could construct a narrative outlining a possible,perhaps even seemingly plausible,series of events that could over the course of many centuries produce,say,an apparently well designed bridge.
Would it be unskilled pleading by advocates of the competing explanation that the structure is far more likely to have been planned and built by an intelligent agent or agents to point out those factors that make the competing hypothesis less feasible than their own.Would it be fair to caricature the design advocates' argument in the aforementioned example as being "complexity therefore human ingenuity" or would something like "apparent engineering sophistication therefore mindless random processes unlikely" be a fairer summation.
Likely there would be no objection to examining capacity of both these ideas to bridge our information gap in such a situation.
Is it consistent then to object when Darwin sceptics do essentially the same thing.
This principle is especially important when investigating events that occurred in the distant past.One can conjure all sorts of engaging and plausible sounding narratives,but which of these best bridges the gaps.
For instance it's not inconceivable that a combination of chance and necessity could have produced some of the buildings,roads,furniture,boats or apparent works of art that are unearthed by archaeologists from time to time.Likely if someone put their minds to it they could construct a narrative outlining a possible,perhaps even seemingly plausible,series of events that could over the course of many centuries produce,say,an apparently well designed bridge.
Would it be unskilled pleading by advocates of the competing explanation that the structure is far more likely to have been planned and built by an intelligent agent or agents to point out those factors that make the competing hypothesis less feasible than their own.Would it be fair to caricature the design advocates' argument in the aforementioned example as being "complexity therefore human ingenuity" or would something like "apparent engineering sophistication therefore mindless random processes unlikely" be a fairer summation.
Likely there would be no objection to examining capacity of both these ideas to bridge our information gap in such a situation.
Is it consistent then to object when Darwin sceptics do essentially the same thing.
