PH's posse will be thrilled w/ this article.
But be sure of one thing: 'falsifyability' must be philosophically accepted a priori as being 'true' for 'science'.
Popper's argument, though it can be argued is logical, is nonetheless a starting point that must be accepted by faith. You have to trust that 'science' MUST be defined this way, in order for it to 'be' science.
The problem is this: ID searches for causes. Evolution, good for explaining certain things that appear to be 'caused' does not sufficiently grapple with other things that are 'caused.
ID provides an alternate cause ... and an argument presenting that it is not falsifyable is not really an argument.
For Marx attracted followers and his 'theories' were tested ... and proven false. Freud has been utterly deligitimized ... because much of what he wrote proved to be, in practice, false.
But both of them got an audience.
Funny ... ID is the only non religious body of thought I have ever seen which is been so vociferously attacked and being denied an audience.
How can it be any more robust that Marxism and Freudism ... what is being risked by letting it be falsified, like they were?
One of the problems with the Origins of the Species, is biologists hava a CRAPPY definintion of what a species is.
Then the theory is elevated to a fact, shutting down all rational discussion.
ToEs like Natural Selection have not shown much utility up to this point in time. Definitions are changed, exaggerated claims are made, without any real utility, it is strictly not very useful.
It is not a very important theory.
It certainly hasn't been in history.
DK
I'm getting so tired of seeing people making statements like this. ID is not getting attacked in order to deny it an audience. It's getting attacked because its proponents want it taught as science, when it is not science. I personally would have no problem if the ID'rs were trying to have ID added to social studies or philosophy curriculums, where it belongs. ID's own proponents are the ones denying ID its proper audience.
It does no such thing. It simply assumes a supernatural cause, without definition or attempt to understand its mechanisms, and decides that everything the observer is intellectually unequipped to understand is automatically a product of that supernatural cause. (And please, don't trot out the "Xenudidit" nonsense, or you'll have to tell me how Xenu was created, and how the creator of the creator of Xenu was created).
In what way is it scientific to assume that an unsolved problem has no solution?
ID, in practice has proved to be false but, there's a sucker born every minute.
Funny ... ID is the only non religious body of thought I have ever seen which is been so vociferously attacked and being denied an audience.
Funny... perhaps. Non religious? Sorry, but you can't fool me with that bit of doublespeak.
Why is this so hard for anti-Es to understand. There is no philosophical demand of truth, only of utility. It is very clearly useful that a scientific theory make testable predictions. While there are many aims of science, the major one is to control future outcomes. A "theory" that permits no deductions is useless for that.
You make a lot of other errors too. For example, ID doesn't "search" for causes and that Marx's and Freud's "theories" are rejected because of testing.
So does ID -- and it's getting laughed off the stage, and rightly so.
Funny ... ID is the only non religious body of thought I have ever seen
ROFL!! Yeah, pull the other leg now, liar:
And if you were honest, you'd admit that what really honks you off is that your *religion* is not being allowed to be taught as science. Come on now, you believe the "designer" is the God of the Bible, right? Just like 99+% of all the other "IDers". "ID" is just creationism dressed up in a Trojan Horse with a sign on the side that says "science".
which is been so vociferously attacked
It has been "so viciferously attacked" because it is grossly dishonest and fatally flawed, and because it has viciously attacked science with lies and propaganda. It deserves as much abuse as Michael Moore gets, and for exactly the same reasons.
and being denied an audience.
Horse manure. Please stop posting lies. It gets to much of an audience that it's being overwhelmed by the volume of the critical response it has earned. The only thing it is being "denied", and rightly so, is being treated as a science, when it's not. It's being rejected from science journals, and rightly so, and it's being rejected from science classes in schools, and rightly so.
The same goes for astrology, too, but you don't hear them whining about it all the time.
No it doesn't. In fact ID positively and relentlessly REFUSES to search for causes, or even speculate about causes. It restricts itself to "inferring" only the (alleged) effect -- the presence of "design" -- but won't say a word about how (or when, where, etc) that design was caused or instantiated.
In actual practice Freud has been shown to be very useful.