Testimony is Evidence

[bennyboy]

I don't believe that they would allow me to dismiss their evidence quite so easily.  I've tried before with the story of evolution.

I'm with you on this point. Much of the science of evolution seems to be the telling of an evolutionary narrative: what pressures the scientists suspected leading to particular phenotypes showing up, and so on. If they can make a narrative that seems to work, this seems to be taken as sufficiently strong. A common example Christians use is the evolution of the eye. I don't think we have a lot of fossils of evolving eyeballs, and yet the narrative of photo-sensitive cells evolving through various contexts into workable eyes seems compelling enough.


That being said, though, fossils are real things, and evolution provides a robust view on how that observable information should be interpreted. The God idea doesn't really tie things together in a very compelling way in my opinion. Fossils are for sure evidence of things that existed, and the only interpretation is about why they existed or how they are related. Religious experiences are not good evidence of things existing, because while I can look at the fossil you've dug up, I cannot examine your moment of religious inspiration or whatever.