Holy crap, Greg Bahnsen was so awesome. I just started on Side B of one of his tapes in his History of Western Philosophy: Modern series. The side started basically at the end of one of his arguments (since it's side B), but it stands on its own. I'll reproduce it here because it's so awesome:
"Alright, so survival of the fittest suffers from a similar defect, in that it proves not to be a testable hypothesis at all. Because it's just an outlook that says, "Well, the survivors must have been the fittest ones". Oh, and how do you know that? "Well, because they survived". So the circle's complete. It's nothing but an ideological tautology. It's a vision of the world. Alright? It's a certain conception of how the world works. But it's not a conception that's been built up from factual analysis, and it's not a conception that can be tested by empirical facts. And this is the philosophical refutation of evolution as a scientific view."
Keep in mind that he is not necessarily saying that natural selection doesn't happen. He is saying that evolutionary theory can't be claimed to be supported on a purely scientific basis.
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
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