(December 30, 2019 at 2:01 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: So if phylogenies cannot be properly tested, that's a problem.
Sure, I mean nothing can be properly tested. How can you tell if a history book is accurate? We cannot replay history, nor time-travel.
How can we properly test gravity and prove beyond any doubt that it's not angels pushing planets.
And we can never tell if a phylogeny is accurate (except in special cases where we have made direct observations on the past, for example when culturing bacterial strains in the lab).
So all we can do is make observations on the present to infer the past, while cautiously leaning on the assumption that things proceeded in the past in a similar way to how they proceed in the present.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"