The Discovery Institute has a nice post today entitled Intelligent Design is Empirically Testable and Makes Predictions. Go read it – here’s the intro…
Among the many, many errors in Judge John Jones’ Dover vs. Kitzmiller opinion is the charge that intelligent design (ID) makes no empirically testable claims (see pp. 66 ff.). Similarly, other ID critics assert that intelligent design makes no testable predictions.1 In fact, intelligent design fulfills both criteria since it makes numerous empirically testable predictions.
Seeker, didn't you claim to once be a molecular chemist, or at least studying to be one? Surely you got far enough along to realize what does and does not constitute likely proof. The article you link to is really lacking here.
The whole argument rests on irreducible complexity, which is — as far as I can see — the cornerstone of ID theory. But we don't have to look very far into the past to see how untenable these sorts of claims really are.
The landscape of science is littered with bogus theories that rested on the assumption that something was positively too complicated to be explained by mankind. Before the discovery that light was actually electromagnetism, scientists often stated that it was simply an uncomprehensible fact of the universe, that light was light. When it was first postulated that light was actually the same thing as magnetism, some people laughed their heads off, but of course, they were wrong.
You can't substitute one mystery for another and claim that it is a viable theory. This theory of irreducible complexity is testable, inasmuch as it can be proven wrong by actually reducing complexity, but that doesn't make it good science. It's not good science at all. It's really, really poor science. It's science that makes claims based on what we don't, even in spite of historical lessons to the contrary.
I'm not suggesting that you have "faith" in science's ability to ferret out the exact path of life's development. It might happen, and then again it might not. Obviously there are some very strong theories, which you don't subscribe to, and that's fine, but why are you agreeing to these pseudo-scientific claims about supernatural explanations?
Even as a Christian you must realize that, if God did create the world as we know it, that he's done a remarkable job of not making things irreducibly complex. If He really is the author of the Universe, he's made basically everything be understandable by mankind. Even in cases where we don't understand some phenomena, we at least have reason to believe that it operates in quantifiable contexts, and that further studying will shed more light on the subject.
Why do you think that He would make such a special case here? And don't you think that there's a lesson to be learned when every other time a religious group has claimed that "God" is the direct force behind something, they turns out to be provably wrong?
I agree that the article is not the greatest. However, I think that the ID argument is more complicated than a simple God in the gaps thing.
What they are asking is a good question – IF there was a designer involved, how would we determine that? Also, macro-evolution can not claim to be authoritative or true as long as it proposes a mechanism that is statistically impossible, all the while claiming "one day we will have an explanation."
But again, ID is just a little fish. Creation science is more full-orbed, and has much more science behind it.
Again, as a creationist, I am not actually trying to establish God in science, nor am I trying to replace mysteries of the nature with faith.
What I am trying to do is loosen evolution’s stranglehold on science, since i believe it to be false. It does not fit the data (fossil record), it is incredibly unlikely (statistically zero), and it’s predictions are poor (vestigial organs, junk DNA, etc.).
In short, it is poor science. I also think that to reject creation science because of it’s starting point (all created at once) is foolish, because that is merely an assumption (by nature unprovable), and if we look at it’s predictions and how well it fits the data, it is more credible, in my mind.
After getting my B.S. in biochemistry, and then researching the evolution/creation debate, I was miffed to find that I had been duped into believing that evolution was a fact. This not only contradicts the data at many points, philosophically, my teachers had failed to separate empirical findings from philosophy of science and primary assumptions – that is, evolutionary thinking kept me from being able to discriminate between philosophy of science and science – because they are comingled in the mind of evolutionists, in part because for them, it MUST be true.
So intellectually, I have rebelled because of the dishonest scholarship of evolutionists. And I do to this day because of their dogmatic overconfidence and patronizing and illogical superior attitudes. Long live the rebellion!
“Evolution won’t explain the flagellum” isn’t positive testability. It’s just a criticism of another theory. Why is basic science so difficult to grasp for those people?
I agree with you there. This claim may be true, but arguing from lack of evidence is only half of the picture. If a design was involved, how can we test that?
I personally don't see ID as much of a science, but rather, it should be seen as a statistical challenge to evolution's incredible claims.
Creation science, however, has many testable claims.
Both of those points are excellent. (creationism & testability; ID as extrascientific & probablistic countervailing factor)
Yeah, ID has to be careful how it presents itself. If it suffers from the same myopia as evolution, that is, not being able to separate its science from it's philosophy of science and assumptions, it will be easily dismissed as pseudo-science.
It also has the problem of not being a complete theory of origins (unlike creation science) – yet people often think it is claiming such, even though it is actually compatible with evolutionism or creationism. Mostly, I think evolutionists are trying to keep religious superstition out of science (good thing), but unfortunately, they make no distinction between that and their, or creationists' foundational assumptions, which *can* be atheistic or deistic in nature. It is perfectly scientific to assume certain foundational things, even if deistic, as long as your science can back up the predictions that such a model makes. This is not an easy argument to make, but I'm sure someone in some book has articulated it better.
If it were true that ID makes testable claims, then the article would include one, but it doesn’t. Instead it says things like “Behe’s argument is testable” — but Behe is not ID, and an argument is not a claim.
Offer up an empirical statement that is entailed by ID and is not entailed without it, or admit that you and ID and DI are full of crap.
And I offer the same challenge to “creation science”. The claims you make for it either aren’t entailed by it, are entailed without it, are not testable, or are false.
A quote from the first post:
"Even as a Christian you must realize that, if God did create the world as we know it, that he's done a remarkable job of not making things irreducibly complex. If He really is the author of the Universe, he's made basically everything be understandable by mankind."
"irreducibly complex" does not mean inexplicably complex.
what it means is that if parts are removed from a system then the system cannot function and has no other purpose. In other words, the system could not have evolved.
A system can be "irreducibly complex" and still be understandable.
Nice distinction