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To: donh
"Apparently, you and the enthusiastic author of this table haven't yet come to grips with what "falsifiable" means"

Well tell me which it is. ID proponents are told simultaneously that ID is not falsifiable and also that the evidence falsifies ID. Which is it?

62 posted on 11/01/2003 4:48:29 PM PST by DannyTN (Note left on my door by a pack of neighborhood dogs.)
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To: DannyTN
ID proponents are told simultaneously that ID is not falsifiable and also that the evidence falsifies ID.

That's partly because creationism/ID is not a well-defined system. Maybe someday it will be, but I'm sceptical.

Specifically, since no limits are placed on the hypothetical 'designer' (lotsa people equate this with the Christian God, Who has no limits), any observation, experiment, etc, can be 'explained' by saying "Well, that's just the way [the dseigner] did it". If you accept this, there is no way, *in principle*, that the hypothesis could ever be tested against the real world and possilbly discarded.

Behe (who is an evolutionist but doesn't accept abiogenesis) doesn't believe that "irreducibly complex" systems can, even in principle, be the product of evolution. What's been falsified are his specific claims that the bombadier beetle, blood clotting, and flagella are "irreducibly comlex". What's worse, he's never submitted a paper defining this term to any peer-reviewed journal, so it really hasn't had to run the gauntlet like legit science does.

My *guess* is that he knows it's substandard work, but that he likes the attention, honoraria, and frequent-flyer miles he gets from the lecture circuit. My *sense* is that he's more cynic than he is delusional. but I may be wrong, I certainly have never met the man.

81 posted on 11/01/2003 6:26:28 PM PST by Virginia-American
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To: DannyTN
Well tell me which it is. ID proponents are told simultaneously that ID is not falsifiable and also that the evidence falsifies ID. Which is it?

By all means, please point out which scientific papers in biology technical journals, or in "Science" or "Nature" suggests the falsification of ID? I have not heard of any such thing, and I pay pretty close attention. If ID, or the more sensible brands of creationism were falsifiable, we'd have been done with these silly bickerings over them long ago.

98 posted on 11/01/2003 11:34:45 PM PST by donh (1)
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