Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100 Joined: May 2006
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Quote | can ID produce compelling evidence and arguments to back up their theories? I think the jury is still out on that. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't get a chance to try. |
And who is stopping them from trying?
Besides which, why haven't they found evidence in the roughly 200 years since Paley?
What you're doing, Kevin, besides accusing falsely, is judging solely by "sincerity" of the IDists (which can be disputed, and has been), and not by the fact that science is interested in claims that at least potentially can be backed up by evidence.
As it happens, ID tries as hard as it can to avoid making reasonable predictions based on known design practice. It won't predict rational solutions to problems (like the mousetrap, vs. the highly modified organs and organisms that we actually see), it won't predict the novelty and/or extensive "borrowing" that real designers utilize, and it won't predict evident purpose. The sole reason that we can recognize for the lack of those predictions is that your "sincere" IDists know very well that these do not exist, and so refuse to make the entailed predictions, knowing that they will immediately be falsified by the evidence.
Furthermore, the only "predictions" they attempt to fob off onto the public are that "life is too complex to have evolved," a false dilemma. We detect design because we know what designers do (think and act rationally and purposefully), we do not default to design the moment that we can't explain something by known means. How would we even be able to hypothesize that evolution occurred if we had merely assumed that "God did it" when we didn't have a good explanation for life's diversity?
Indeed, IDists can try to do their magic as much as they wish. One problem is that they rarely do any science at all, and even when they do, they aren't really doing ID science because they have no testable hypotheses (since they refuse to produce hypotheses that can be tested, for those hypotheses failed long ago). Why is PCID, which was expressly invented to publish "ID research," languishes without any papers having been published in years? Obviously they can make or find outlets for any science or pseudoscience they choose, they just don't have any legitimate output.
The other problem is what we've already pointed out to you without you bothering to answer: ID isn't science in any way whatsoever, since it wishes us to get rid of the requirement to provide evidence. Need I remind you of what Dembski wrote long ago?
Quote | As for your example, I'm not going to take the bait. You're asking me to play a game: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position." ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it's not ID's task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.
http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi....152;p=3 |
Sure, Kevin, not connecting the dots makes ID into a real science (note the weaseling that allows some dots to be connected (selective treatment of evidence), while not treating cause and effect analysis as the only way to get to the facts, which is the case in classical science).
The problem we have with you and your chihuahua attacks and chihuahua whimpers is that you don't simply let such pseudoscientific nonsense be held by religionists and whatever they are at the Biologic Institute, but you insist that we grant such pseudoscience exceptions that have never been granted to similar pseudosciences. You wish to use gov't to force science to accept what is anathema to science--meaningless evidence-free religiously-inspired drivel.
But these things have been pointed out to people like you countless times, and you all manage to ignore everything of substance that you receive in response.
Glen D
-------------- http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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