I've been thinking recently that I believe in the Theory of Evolution on about the same level as in the Theory of Plate Tectonics. I have grown up being taught that both are true, and I am capable of doing research in either field, or at least reading the literature to examine them for myself. I have not done so in either case, to any reasonable extent.
I am not swayed by the fact that some people consider the former (and not so much the latter) to be controversial, primarily because those people aren't scientists. I tend to be self-congratulatory about this fact, but then I think that I am essentially not interested in examining the evidence, but I am essentially taking it on faith (which the creationists are quick to point out). I think I have good Bayesian reasons to take science on faith (rather than, say, mythology that is being offered in its stead), but do I therefore have good reasons to accept a particular well-established scientific theory on faith, or is it incumbent upon me to examine it, if I think its conclusions are important to my life?
In other words, is it epistemologically wrong to rely on an authority that has produced a number of correct statements (that I could and did verify) to be more or less correct in the future? If I think of this problem as a sort of belief network, with a parent node that has causal connections to hundreds of children, I think such a reliance is reasonable, once you establish that the authority is indeed accurate. On the other hand, appeal to authority is probably the most famous fallacy there is.
Any thoughts? If Eliezer or other people have written on this exact topic, a reference would be appreciated.
I agree that understanding the extent to which natural selection generated things is easier nowadays than it was previously.
I'm not concerned here with logical disproofs of creationism, moreso with something like arguing that time spent {worrying that evolution by natural selection is significantly overrated} is probably misallocated, or arguing that people are privileging the question of 'Is evolution by natural selection a good explanation?' (I'm not entirely sure what my motivation is, but it feels like it's at least partly something along those lines.)
I also think that there's a lot of hard-to-enumerate background information available to a person nowadays that should be enough for a naturalistic reductionist to intuit that evolution will not arise from bolted-on complex mechanisms like creation, but rather from mechanisms like natural selection that are inherent to populations with a few basic properties that we have actually observed (e.g. finite lifespans that vary according to characteristic-environment interaction, inheritance of characteristics, etc.). It's possible you understand this and I'm misinterpreting the point at which you're challenging my argument, but I would very strongly disexpect somebody thinking like me along the lines of 'provable properties of populations under observed axioms' (or the probabilistic/continuous generalisation thereof) to be talking about creationism; rather, I would expect challenges to come in the form of other equally basic, low-complexity processes that arise from what we already know.
I'm not sure DNA/the exact method of inheritance is relevant; I would still consider it to be a win for natural selection if we had, say, Lamarckism/inheritance of acquired characteristics/epigenetics as a significant force.
Well, we have tons of observation that nature can be understood, and that the useful explanations do not involve gods or magic. So yes, it would be a reasonable prior expectation for the origins of species, too.