Jkrebs
Posts: 590
Joined: Sep. 2004
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Aha - nullasalus brings up a good point in his response:
| Quote | | What are you defining ‘a scientific argument’ as here? I’m not arguing that you can’t make reference to scientific knowledge to bolster or attack a design claim, or even a philosophical claim for that matter. But I don’t think such arguments are themselves ’science’ - I guess you could say I go by the falsification standard. How do you falsify the claim that FSCI patterns don’t arise from non-intelligent sources? Watch one spontaneously develop in nature? But even if you did, how do you know you didn’t just witness an intelligence creating the FSCI, either in a front-loaded way or through some kind of intervention? |
I asked Behe this same type of question at a conference one time, and got a side-step for answer: what if we set up an experiment with lots of bacteria cultures, such as has been done by Lenski, and we found that a very novel pathway evolved. How would we know that it hadn't been designed right there in our petri dishes? In the absence of any knowledge whatsoever about any limitations of the designer, who is to say that he didn't step in and design the result in ways that just look like a plausible evolutionary set of genetic changes over multiple generations?
So nullasalus is right: there is no way to falsify the generic design inference because it has no empirical specifics.
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