Any good scientific theory is subjectable to testing. Theories that cannot be tested are merely speculation or wishful thinking. In testing for design, three things must be established, contingency, complexity and specification. The flow chart below shows how the testing process works. It is called the explanatory filter8:
e.g., Penrose Tiles can't.
My neighbors name is Penrose. Their flooring was manufactured.
I had a glance through that material and couldn't see anything that looked like an experiment that would have the potential to falsify ID. If ID is consistent with all possible observations then it is perfectly useless. Anyone else see it?
There's nothing there resembling an actual "theory of ID", perhaps you could quote it for us.
It contains their idea of what testing a scientific theory means:
Yes, indeed it does, but the problem is that "their idea of what testing a scientific theory means" is completely flawed. You can't make something scientific by "redefining" science in a way that makes your bogus proposition look valid for a change. But the IDer's keep trying. Case in point:
TestingNo, sorry, thanks for playing. I'm tempted to dismantle that poppycock myself, but someone has already done so in enormous detail, and far better than I could:
Any good scientific theory is subjectable to testing. Theories that cannot be tested are merely speculation or wishful thinking. In testing for design, three things must be established, contingency, complexity and specification. The flow chart below shows how the testing process works. It is called the explanatory filter:1. Is it contingent? If No, then it is produced by necessity. If Yes, go to 2.
2. Is it complex? If No, then it is produced by chance. If Yes, go to 3.
3, Is it specified? If No, then it is produced by chance. If Yes, go to 4.
4. It is designed.
The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignoranceAbstract: Intelligent design theorist William Dembski has proposed an "explanatory filter" for distinguishing between events due to chance, lawful regularity or design. We show that if Dembski's filter were adopted as a scientific heuristic, some classical developments in science would not be rational, and that Dembski's assertion that the filter reliably identifies rarefied design requires ignoring the state of background knowledge. If background information changes even slightly, the filter's conclusion will vary wildly. Dembski fails to overcome Hume's objections to arguments from design.
Read it and weep. The authors examine this "design inference" from every angle and show why it's enormously fallacious from start to finish. It's a magnificent example of utterly demolishing the dishonesty of the "ID filter", and demonstrates why it's piss-poor epistemology (i.e., pseudoscience).
A few additional observations: The flowchart has "Is it complex?" as one of its decision nodes. This is utterly vacuous. Things are not either/or, complex-or-not-complex, they have varying *degrees* of complexity. Just how "complex" is the precise breakpoint on that goofy "Is it complex, yes or no?" decision node? What retarded gradeschooler thought up this nonsense? Oh, right, Dembski.
Furthermore, how do you determine "Is it contingent or not, yes or no?" Answering such a question for any non-trivial case would require complete ominiscience -- is Dembski claiming the IDers to be God himself now? Because that's the only way you could confidently answer "no" and move on down the flowchart for any moderately complex subject.
And so on. As usual, the ID "science" is found to be a mish-mash of fallacy, snake oil, hand-waving, and embarrassingly elementary errors which most junior-high students wouldn't be ignorant enough to make.
As you can see, they do not believe God could have created a universe where all that was, is, and will be is necessary.
They don't think God could do that? Fascinating.
They believe that anything that is simple can be produced by chance, but complex things, e.g., Penrose Tiles can't.
And they're wrong in that conjecture. If they learned more about actual science, instead of just repeating age-old creationist fallacies dressed up in fancy language, they'd know this already. In any case, evolution doesn't proceed "by chance" alone, as you falsely imply.
From this starting point, it doesn't seem like sce to me.
Could we have that in English?
Dembski's so-called explanatory filter is flawed for several reasons but the most fundamental is that it cannot differentiate between a designed phenomenon and one due to unknown natural causes.