Arjay.. quite correct in my view.. yes, we should indeed be exploring the intricacies of the natural world.. many are. I don't see belief in God as Creator as a barrier to exploring the minutest particle making up matter.

Interestingly there is a bloke called 'Hicks' who came up with the idea of a "Hicks Photon"... when he first postulated it, he was ridiculed as some kind of nutter :) (by his peers in the science field) Now..they have constructed a 27km long tube/accelerator thingy to confirm or refute it. The point of mentioning him of course is simply to show that in the sciences there is a lot of 'orthodoxy' and any upstart can be called a heretic pretty jolly fast.

BUGSY.. when assessing raw data, I can understand that one might prefer not to bring 'Creationist' biases to the process. But of course if the scientist was a believer in God, he would not see it as 'bias', rather, he would view the atheist as being biased.
The person of faith, is often a person of experience, having seen or experienced the power of God in his/her life, it is for such reasons that we view 'it could not be God' as 'bias' :)

Pericles.. you might do well to note that also.

Interesting, Boaz, but I'm not entirely sure what point you are attempting to make.

>>Interestingly there is a bloke called 'Hicks' who came up with the idea of a "Hicks Photon"... when he first postulated it, he was ridiculed as some kind of nutter :) (by his peers in the science field)<<

Let's start with the fact that it's Higgs, not Hicks, and Boson, not Photon.

That's Higgs Boson, not Hicks Photon, Boaz.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/origins/cern/ideas/higgs.html

Apart from that, you had none of the facts correct. As usual.

Higgs - who is a Pom, by the way - was never "ridiculed as some kind of nutter". The closest he got to "ridicule" was the rejection of one of his early papers. Apart from that, which happens to every scientist from time to time, he was a perfectly normal particle physicist.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/19750

That perfectly normal particle physicist bit may be a contradiction in terms, of course, but still doesn't put him in the ridiculed by his peers category.

Incidentally, the Higgs Boson is familiarly termed the "God Particle", because it is the final piece in the Standard Model, the widget that gives the universe its mass.

Higgs doesn't like the name, as he is atheist.

And of course, he may still be wrong, which would be a bit of a chuckle. But that's science for you. Always willing to test the theory, and damn the torpedoes.

But hey, I may have been unfair, Boaz.

Tell us more about this Hicks guy, and his Photon.

The notional date for the use of scientific method is 1760 [The Great Divergennce]. Here, developments since the Renaissance (C 14-16)and the rediscovery of esoteric Ancient Greek philsophy (from Spain) combined to provide a foundation for scientific method.

The Chinese applied ad hoc experiment and the Muslims [who had ocupried Spain] retained much of the knowledge of the Ancient [Attic] Greeks.

In the eighteen century, the West combined these sources and progressed much morer rapidly than did other civilizations.

The Dark Ages had passed and the Church was loosing its its monopoly on the interpretation of knowledge. Secularisation of knowledge led to the estiblishment of non-religious Academies in England and the Continent.

"'Historical' and other sciences (including sciences like medical science and ecology) often employ 'natural experiments' or 'quasi experiments' to observe phenomena that are predicted by the hypothesis- the hypothesis is either invalidated and updated or supported. This happens in evolutionary studies all the time."

It happens in studies of natural selection. It does not happen in studies of evolution.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/evolution/dinosaur-experiment.html

"A conclusion must necessarily update the hypothesis and propose a new one depending on the data."

There is absolutely no need for a conclusion to propose a new hypothesis if it falsifies the old one.

"Your assertion that "evolution" isn't falsifiable is absurd, nearly all (I say nearly as I am not aware of 100% of all the theories and cannot be absolute) parts of the theory (and there are many!) are testable (within logistical constraints) and falsifiable."

Again, that was the reason for my distinction between evolution and natural selection. How many times do I have to repeat this? I have offered to elaborate on this if you don't understand the distinction. You cannot lump a bunch of theories together and pretend all are scientific because most of them are.

"Also, I think you are getting your definitions in a twist: Natural History is definitely science. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_history"

There is only so much you can get from wikipedia. It does contradict itself if you try to sort out this issue over a lot of articles.

freediver, I think at this point you have to define what you mean by "evolution" or "the theory of evolution" and why it is (or which parts are) unscientific, because I am having trouble finding your definition of it on your site. This is only because we may not be talking about the same thing here (it is a BIG subject).

You quote from Wikipedia on your site, I has the impression that you thought it was a useful reference. My mistake.

Natural selection refers to those parts of the theory that can be experimented on. Evolution refers to those aspects that go beyond natural selection, including beneficial mutation, universal common ancestry, natural history (humans evolving from 'apes') etc. I mention it briefyl in the first article.

http://www.ozpolitic.com/evolution/evolution-not-scientific-theory.html

I will expand on it and maybe add another article when I get time.