Correct, and I made that same point as well earlier in the thread. The question isn't whether SETI is a scientific theory, but whether it would be a valid scientific exercise to attempt to determine whether a signal we might discover through SETI is or is not of intelligent origin.
No, they're statements of theories.
No, they're not theories or representations of theories. Ask any scientist.
Evolution makes the claim that *all* present earth life descended from prior life and so on back to some universal common ancestor.
And ID makes the "claim" that there definitely was intelligent intervention in the process of speciation. But the fact remains, neither theory is considered absolutely proven, and theories, despite their absolute "claims", get revised all the time. So it's really only a question of probability whether or not a given theory accurately describes reality.
I made the claim that ID isn't a scientific theory then concluded that because it isn't, it need not be constrained by the forms of a scientitific theory. How is that circular?
Because you're using as your assumption the very assertion that's in dispute here on this thread.
Ask him what? Whether the statement "energy is conserved" is an absolute one? Whether it is a statement made by at least one scientific theory? What is it you're objecting to?
Because you're using as your assumption the very assertion that's in dispute here on this thread.
Nothing circular in that. It's only circular if I use my assumption to prove itself which I have not done.
And ID makes the "claim" that there definitely was intelligent intervention in the process of speciation.
But, unlike the claim of evolution, there are no testable predictions of this ID claim because there are no deductive consequences.
So it's really only a question of probability whether or not a given theory accurately describes reality.
Only if you're using probability in a non-technical sense. Technically, you can't have a probability without a complete specification of the dynamical process and the development of scientific theories is very much an art.
You're wrong in a deeper sense too. We *create* these theories to accurately describe reality so I'd say, in your non-technical sense, that it's very probable that an orthodox scientific theory accurately describes reality.
And a final point here. I'd say empirically that we should always expect scientific theories to be proven false eventually and so we should never think of a scientific theory as being knowably true.