Hawks
Posts: 14
Joined: July 2009
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Paul Flocken:
| Quote | | The distinction that we want you to take away is that a good theory in science constrains itself. Science tries to find and make "must" statements, not "could" statements. That is part of the art of falsification*. The hypothesis of common-descent-with-modification-controlled-by-natural-selection doesn't just suggest that "various animals have similar traits"**, it DEMANDS it. If evolution is true then "similar traits" MUST be true. The design assertion cannot make the same kind of statement. If common design then POSSIBLY "similar traits" but not MUST "similar traits". A designer is not constrained to having "similar traits" between his designs. It is the lack of any "musts" from ID that doom it to being "Not Even Wrong", to use Wolfgang Pauli's phrase, to not being science at all. |
I think that the words "must"and "demands" are too strong. Science is quite happy to deal with probability statements that, by their very nature, are not falsifiable (at least not in the sense Popper originally had in mind). For example, the traits of a bacterium will probably be extremely similar to that of it's parent - unless there was some horizontal gene transfer involved somewhere.
Of course, ID can say nothing at all here. ID would be quite happy with an ordinary stray cat giving birth to a klingon whose genetic material is silicon-based.
In bayesian terms, this gives evolution a higher likelihood than it does ID.
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