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well now wait a minute.
there is a clever bit in this argument from the id/creationist set: the relativizing move.
that they don't seem to be terribly adept at using it is a good thing, in my view, but that is a separate question.
"scientific fact" is being thrown around here alot and in many of the situations it's being used to refer to, you aren't talking about a "fact" so much as your talking about the result of modelling that is based on procedures that are agreed upon by one of another sub-community within the sciences...most cosmological statements lean on such models. so for that matter to most statements concerning paleontology. so do most statements concerning the theory of evolution. it doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it also means that unless you qualify the notion of "fact" you aren't saying anything.
for example...one of the arguments that's been coming out of complex dynamical systems work has to do with the limitations of darwinian notions of evolution, which are rooted in a notion of species as a natural kind, so a type of object--an assumption which doesn't really obtain for living systems in a coherent way---c-d-s theorists have been working out (fragmentary) models that cause a quite basic reconsideration of what a living system is and along with that a quite different picture of evolution has started to take shape, one that does not require the vast durations that darwin attributed to the process simply as a function of the metaphysics (the conception of species as a natural kind) that shaped how he understood change to happen. c-d-s type modelling presents an image of living systems which are far more mutable, far more adaptive, than does the darwinian model. one implication of this is that evolution is in a sense normal and that the transition from one kind to another perhaps not as big a Transition as darwin might have suspected...another way of making the same point; it is simply not the case that a "fact"--including a scientific fact--is free-standing, not theory-contingent, not a model. this characterization of a "fact" as free-standing might hold for trivial matters--but most of science is a combination of data gathering, analysis and patterns of inference--and in the context of patterns of inference, it is naive to assume that somehow or another when one puts on a lab coat that one leaves one's cultural baggage behind. the obtains for very basic things---for example the effects of naming, the effects of using nouns, which impose separation between phenomena (particularly in english) which in turn impact on what is observed and how it is observed, complicating questions of interaction or interrrelatedness by imposing (arbitrary? other than arbitrary?) separations. this at the level of category usage, quite apart from observation--category usage conditions what is observed.
so the fact is that there is a cultural consensus around scientific investigation that leads folk outside the various modes of operation that are lumped together under the name "science" (which is another category effect) to impute types of validity to statements that may or may not have it, and to put aside the procedures that shape the construction of such statements, and to grant all types of scientific results, from the most theoretical to the most basic results of work in mechanics (say) with the same type of validity. most of what is happening in this thread is a demonstration of the reach of that cultural consensus. you see it in the unreflexive repetition of these validity claims, sanctified (and i use this word deliberately) by the ritual invocation of the legitimating word "science"...
so in these respects there are problems...
this doesn't at all mean that i think therefore that the way the id/creationist crowd uses relativization arguments is interesting, nor do i think that their crackpot theories are worth much. but this because i find the arguments incoherent.
the paradoxical effect of these id/creationist campaigns has been to push the status of the sciences back into some imaginary realm of the uncontestably objective, which is an indefensible position.
no reason to fall into that trap. particularly if there's no reason i can think of to take id/creationism either seriously in itself, or a necessary result of a certain degree of curiousity driven skepticism about what the sciences are, what they do, how they do it, and the types of claims about the world that they generate.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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