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To: unlearner
You have been saying my statement is logically flawed rather than lacking in supporting evidence, so your comparison does not identify why the law of gravity meets your requirement, but mine does not.

Good grief. The law of gravity gets use-tested every day, with a high potential for failure, if it is incorrect. It, in fact, failed the perehelion of mercury test, and was replaced with a better theory early in this century, and continues to fail interesting tests every day, that await explanation at the present moment. The law of gravity is fecund with tests that can and do fail, right now.

Experimentation is not a draconian boolean function as you seem to think. We call things sciences where we have a practical window of observation that allows us to run many tests, or make field predictions, some of which fail and some of which succeed. Our task is to put together a picture from this rich source of information. It is extremely rare (as far as I know, unknown) that one single test makes a definitive cut. ID fails to be a science, on the level that evolutionary theory or the theory of gravity is a science simply because there's no practical, routine way for us to examine it.

Trying as hard as I could to even make out what your contention is, for the last half-hour has yielded me nothing but a headache, from trying to gobble a 90 cent bag of words to get at a 1 cent idea. If ID were a significant science, you could tell me what test I could run tomorrow, with a reasonable budget, to see how good a predictor of events it is. If you cannot meet this challenge, you do not have a science worthy of being mentioned in high school textbooks.

2,772 posted on 12/27/2005 12:21:13 PM PST by donh
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To: donh
The ID label has many disinterested and disagreeing proponents. There is no cohesive, singular ID proposition other than that design of a particular object is recognizable by distinguishing attributes.

What I have been discussing is my simple, ID based hypothesis concerning the possible mechanisms that result in life originating. I am not describing a historical event. I am describing a process. There is little to describe because life has never been observed originating whether naturally or by being assembled.

My hypothetical statement is "due to complexity and interdependence new living things can only arise from nonliving matter via intentional (i.e. intelligent) assembly."

Not every view in the ID camp is verifiable or falsifiable. But my assertion is both.

When scientists are finally able to find any way of creating life, they will be putting my hypothesis to the test, whether intentionally or not. If they discover a mechanism of self assembly, it will falsify my statement. If they intelligently assemble a living organism, it will support (not prove) my hypothesis.

Abiogenesis is not falsifiable. It might be verifiable. The difficulty of verification is unpredictable. Either way, abiogenesis does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis by the most commonly accepted standard of demarcation.
2,778 posted on 12/27/2005 1:52:25 PM PST by unlearner (You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.)
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