Vox Day Takes On PZ Meyer,"The Fowl Atheist"

Vox Day and PZ Meyer have been going at it for a while on the subject of evolution as science. Vox subscribes to a view that is close to mine, which is that evolution does not get held to the highest standards required of the physical sciences, to wit, experimental replication. And that real biology owes nothing to evolution in its dizzying charge forward. PZ defends evolution with his understanding of scientific methodology and philosophy of science. It's best to read the discussion in full, but here are some of Vox's comments which I liked:
Vox:

” When an astrophysicist or an economist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is usually that the hypothesis is incorrect. When an evolutionary biologist gets a prediction based on a hypothesis wrong, his consequent assumption is always that the hypothesis cannot possibly be to blame, there must be some missing factor that has not been properly taken into account. If evolution by natural selection has not taken place, then evolution by some other mechanism must have taken place; the logical conclusion that the core hypothesis is simply incorrect and evolution did not take place is seldom, if ever, considered an option.”

The deifying of evolution is a result of Philosophical Materialism, which is a rational fallacy. The functional materialism of science does not in any way predict the necessity of total materialism as a philosophy much less a worldview, regardless of the poverty of logical understandings of the Philosophical Materialists (who generally are also scientismists). But evolution cannot be questioned under Philosophical Materialism, and anyone who does is attacked and punished by excruciating peer pressure which is asserted by the likes of PZ who attaches a lot of name calling and other juvenilia. In the world of evolution, there are individual facts, and the connecting "facts" are made up, extrapolated from “mountains of evidence” all of which does not provide any absolute proof of the extrapolation other than circumstantial. The extrapolation is declared True. But there are hitches, such as the inability to justify abiogenesis. Even the concept of “life” itself is frequently denied, because it cannot be justified under materialist rules of reality. So life has no essence, as declares Materialist/Evolutionist Massimo Pigliucci. Materialism requires denying the obvious when the obvious gets in the way of the narrative.

Again, Vox:

” PZ's answer is completely irrelevant. There is zero evidence that abiogenesis ever took place, robustly imagined mechanisms for it notwithstanding. To claim that because there was no life before, but there is now, ergo abiogenesis occurred, is the very sort of philosophy that science has largely come to supplant. Evolutionists tend to wisely punt on the logically-dictated abiogenetic foundation upon which their materialist assumptions rest, but there is no reason anyone should permit them to do so. It's rather like economists who attempt to leave debt out of their equations. The numbers may all add up nicely without it, but leaving out the most important element tends to call the entire model into question.”

That abiogenesis had to have happened is again predicated simply on the Materialist Fallacy: there can be no other answer – By Definition (regardless of how erroneous the definition). And that is as anti-science as one can get, even if one tries to define it as "science" in order to justify one's erroneous Philosophical Materialism.

There's more; read it over at Vox’s place.