2014-02-05, 01:29 PM
Malthe Wrote:That is where science and religion really stand apart, that science is willing to give up on things that have been proven to no longer hold true.
It just so happens that even 150 years later the theory of evolution is still by far the best scientific explanation available. However to bring up a fun example, if you were to find rabbits in the pre-cambrian era you would shoot an absolutely enormous hole in the theory of evolution since certainly no mammals should exist in the pre-cambrian era.
If you were to find rabbits in the pre-cambrian era, the first thing that would be called into question would not be evolution, but the methods you used to establish that the findings are, in fact, pre-cambrian.
And even if it were proven without a shadow of a doubt, what would happen would be an adjustment to the theory. The principles of evolution would not have been refuted: mutation and selection are observable phenomena, not a theory, so they can't really be refuted. What would change is the timeline: someone would come up with a new tree, a new sequence, a theory that explains how life did start with unicellular organisms and evolve to what we have today, but in a way that allows for rabbits in the pre-cambrian, perhaps with a few more "missing links" than the current timeline has.
Yes, science has abandoned discredited theories before, and will do so again. But the paradigm of evolution is flexible enough that I don't see how it could ever be completely discredited.
Don't get me wrong, I am an atheist and a firm believer in the scientific method. But I am also aware that the basic premise, which I phrased earlier as "there must be a scientific explanation, even if we haven't found it yet," has to be taken on faith.