Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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Voice Coil has this response to Timaeus in moderation:
| Quote | Timaeus:
You write well, but in the end make assertions that either evaporate upon scrutiny or may be seen to be time-worn creationist rhetorical devices.
"Evaporation" characterizes the fate of the thesis you articulate in response to the departed Zachriel, in your several posts above:
Zachriel @ 24:
| Quote | | Intelligent Design is not specific enough to yield clear entailments. Indeed, that’s why Intelligent Design Advocates hardly ever bother with the messy details of biological research. |
You prefaced your position that only a cinematically detailed model of evolutionary events will compel your assent with the following:
Timaeus @ 24:
| Quote | | I agree that scientific theories should deal with “messy details”. The difficulty is that neo-Darwinism is not in a position to lecture anyone about this, as it is so barren of messy details itself. |
But you subsequently contradict yourself in 72:
| Quote | ID’s job isn’t to provide detailed pathways, because ID isn’t a historical theory of origins. Neo-Darwinism is a historical theory of origins. It thus commits itself to the explication of detailed pathways. To the extent that it cannot deliver such pathways, it has failed by its own lights.
ID is committed only to showing that living systems have informational properties that cannot be explained by chance and necessity alone, but require the input of intelligence. If it can show this, it has succeeded by its own lights. |
Baldly, unequivocally, you here state that only evolutionary biology is subject to your (arbitrary) demand for cinematic levels of detail (and 500 page treatises); intelligent design is a theory that articulates no levels of detail whatsoever, and should not be asked for any "by its own lights." In short, you agree that scientific theories should deal with "messy details," but advocate a viewpoint (that of ID) that does not, and indeed, cannot. I suggest you take the next short step: ID is not, and cannot be, a scientific theory.
Your documentation of several domains in which ID offers no significant empirical entailments is thorough (in 86, above):
| Quote | | Some ID supporters accept macroevolution from molecules to man; others accept only limited macroevolution, mixed in with supplementary miracles; others reject macroevolution entirely. Some ID supporters allow a limited role for Darwinian processes. Some ID supporters are young earth creationists. Some are old earth creationists. |
To note that ID is neutral with respect to these hugely significant questions vis the history of life is to note that it offers no entailments and hence is useless as a guide to empirical research relevant to these questions. This is almost precisely the point made by Zachriel: Scientific theories must generate clear entailments that, by modus tollens, specify messy details that are subject to empirical investigation, ultimately providing dispositive tests of those entailments. ID addresses no such details, as you unequivocally state in 72 and document in 86.
Zachriel's observation does honor a distinction that you subsequently blur, resulting in a mischaracterization of what evolutionary biology demands of itself. To revisit his statement:
| Quote | | Intelligent Design is not specific enough to yield clear entailments. |
You respond with your hypocritical demand for detailed findings, not clear entailments, a subtle dodge. What current models in evolutionary biology provide that ID does not, and indeed cannot (by your own "lights" above), are testable empirical entailments, entailments that motivate and guide research worldwide. THAT is what an empirical science requires of itself, and by its own lights evolutionary biology meets that demand, as there are huge literatures documenting efforts to articulate and test such entailments. Whether that process will ever culminate in cinematic levels of detail will be a contingent fact, given the reality that such detail is extremely difficult to recover for events that occurred millions or billions of years in the past, and indeed must always reflect inference rather than observation.
Lastly, it is worth noting that you have already in essence stated, in another thread, that there is NO level of detail that can logically compel your embrace of evolutionary biology, and that your demand for such details is therefore disingenuous. In that thread Zachriel cited the well-documented evolution of the mammalian middle ear as an example of a detailed description of the stepwise evolutionary emergence of a complex, and indeed irreducibly complex biological system. Your response was a side-step to the observation that it is logically possible that the homologies from which that stepwise evolutionary event is inferred could have arisen by means of "common design," and therefore state that his response assumes the conclusion that this was in fact an evolutionary emergence. But this response is equivalent to the also logically possible response of "last Thursdayism," one that could be offered even if details with resolution down to the an unbroken succession of specific genetic events and transformations were supplied. Even given that level of detail, you may still maintain that "common design" accounts for the observed homologies, and that assent to evolutionary biology is not "logically compelled."
In short, you aren't really interested in details at all, and your call for cinematic detail is a calculated rhetorical one, only, a time-worn bit of creationist obscurantism. |
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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