Posted on 12/05/2005 4:06:56 AM PST by PatrickHenry
The leaders of the intelligent design movement are once again holding court in America, defending themselves against charges that ID is not science. One of the expert witnesses is Michael Behe, author of the ID movement’s seminal volume Darwin’s Black Box. Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University, testified about the scientific character of ID in Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, the court case of eight families suing the school district and the school board in Dover, Pa., for mandating the teaching of intelligent design.
Under cross-examination, Behe made many interesting comparisons between ID and the big-bang theory — both concepts carry lots of ideological freight. When the big-bang theory was first proposed in the 1920s, many people made hostile objections to its apparent “supernatural” character. The moment of the big bang looked a lot like the Judeo-Christian creation story, and scientists from Quaker Sir Arthur Eddington to gung-ho atheist Fred Hoyle resisted accepting it.
In his testimony, Behe stated — correctly — that at the current moment, “we have no explanation for the big bang.” And, ultimately it may prove to be “beyond scientific explanation,” he said. The analogy is obvious: “I put intelligent design in the same category,” he argued.
This comparison is quite interesting. Both ID and the big-bang theory point beyond themselves to something that may very well lie outside of the natural sciences, as they are understood today. Certainly nobody has produced a simple model for the big–bang theory that fits comfortably within the natural sciences, and there are reasons to suppose we never will.
In the same way, ID points to something that lies beyond the natural sciences — an intelligent designer capable of orchestrating the appearance of complex structures that cannot have evolved from simpler ones. “Does this claim not resemble those made by the proponents of the big bang?” Behe asked.
However, this analogy breaks down when you look at the historical period between George Lemaitre’s first proposal of the big-bang theory in 1927 and the scientific community’s widespread acceptance of the theory in 1965, when scientists empirically confirmed one of the big bang’s predictions.
If we continue with Behe’s analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.
However, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation.
Physicist George Gamow worked out a remarkable empirical prediction for the theory: If the big bang is true, he calculated, the universe should be bathed in a certain type of radiation, which might possibly be detectable. Another physicist, Robert Dicke, started working on a detector at Princeton University to measure this radiation. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson ended up discovering the radiation by accident at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1965, after which just about everyone accepted the big bang as the correct theory.
Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren’t operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial — little more than a roster of evolutionary theory’s weakest links.
| When Behe was asked to explicate the science of ID, he simply listed a number of things that were complex and not adequately explained by evolution. These structures, he said, were intelligently designed. Then, under cross-examination, he said that the explanation for these structures was “intelligent activity.” He added that ID “explains” things that appear to be intelligently designed as having resulted from intelligent activity. |
Behe denied that this reasoning was tautological and compared the discernment of intelligently designed structures to observing the Sphinx in Egypt and concluding that it could not have been produced by non-intelligent causes. This is a winsome analogy with a lot of intuitive resonance, but it is hardly comparable to Gamow’s carefully derived prediction that the big bang would have bathed the universe in microwave radiation with a temperature signature of 3 degrees Kelvin.
After more than a decade of listening to ID proponents claim that ID is good science, don’t we deserve better than this?
Well, that statement was unexpected.
Then maybe you should listen more, and invent what scientists think from within the confines of your own imagination less. The grief scientists have with ID is not related to its likelihood, much as stealth creationists would like that to be so.
So since string theory is undetectable therefore it is considered supernatural just as God?
String theory has four proposed tests, and the deep traction entwined in the tracks of other scientific discoveries such as to produce a very large number of confirming publications in widely recognized technical journals. These tests seem likely to fail if string theory is wrong, & are coming on line; the first will be in 2010, if things stay on schedule.
(actually you may be closer than you think). As for your "put up or shut up" statement - that is illogical - basic Aristotelian logic demonstrates absence of data is proof of nothing.
Proof is not at issue, and since it isn't, we do not run science on the basis of aristotalian logic. All we can do in science is increase or decrease our confidence in a theory, and that occurs when a viable experiment succeeds or fails, regardless of what Aristotle thinks.
Like it or not - deny all you like - your definition of science and the definition of materialism are identical.
Utterly braindead hogwash.
I don't doubt you do not fully understand your definition of science is rooted in the dogma of Materialism - but it is. Your concept of science starts with a material assumption. That is the dogma of Materialism. Science should not start out with any a priori assumptions other than man exists and is capable of rational thought. Understand that neither you nor science has proved all that exists is material therefore holding an assumption like that is dogma - not a scientific conclusion.
This is, I think, your third repeat, with even more words and less sense, of an obviously pathological misunderstanding of the basic epistimology of science--please don't feel invited to repeat this tedious nonsense yet again. Science is not based on formal philosophical materialism, and it operates with all manner of ad hoc "a priori" assumptions. Even for this forum, this is quite an impressive load of pretentious jibberish.
Reputable scientists take facts as known and then posit ID theories based on them. Why is this intellectually invalid?
And the specifics of the theory And the doable tests proposed to verify these specifics are what? Don't bother to clarify, just point me to the writeups of the results.
Not testable or falsifiable, like Darwinism?
There is no branch of science that has even remotely suffered and survived more potentially falsifiable tests than Darwinism. It happens most every time a prof sends out his students to a dig whose location is based on analysis of existing data.
I find it interesting that many ancient civilizations record a great flood that happened in the earliest time of man, from the Cherokee nation to the Myans.
The word used in the original text can mean both world wide and a certain area. The more interesting revelation of that time is the fact that before the flood it had not rained on the face of the earth. According to scripture everything was watered by a mist that rose from the ground.
This time according to science was pre-man. Yet the Bible clearly states that it had not rained until the flood at the time of Noah, so man was present earlier than science records. Pre-flood there had been no rainbow. So evidently this flood marked a great change in earth's atmosphere.
Science has had to correct itself many times, not so with scriptures. Eventually science falls in line with them and it's silly to ignore that fact.
One thing we know for certain – if science follows donh’s “definition” of science – science is guaranteed to never learn anything beyond the material world. If you never look – you are certain to never find.
Tell that to donh.
Like who. All I remember reading in this thread is that ID ain't a science, which, until it manages to propose a doable experiment, is plainly obvious.
Pay closer attention (BTW: please state the doable experiment to test natural selection or are you claiming natural selection is not science):
Sentator Bedfellow(674): In that light, simply demonstrating a potential pathway for the evolution of the flagellum is sufficient to refute claims that it is impossible
<1/1,000,000th% (648): Darwin wrote in a manner where he posed objections to his ideas, then refuted them.
Thatcherite (547): Part of the problem that those of us on the evo side of the debate is that we see the same canards and easily refuted weak arguments for creationism/ID coming at us again and again.
Thatcherite (547): The same Freeper posting the same refuted argument again and again in a thread
Thatcherite (547): An evo refutes an argument, and then sees it pop up again from the same poster in a later thread as if the refutation had never happened
Thatcherite (547): Argument by lucky dip, where a Freeper posts a succession of arguments and as each one is refuted just goes back to their favourite creationist website for more, ad nauseam within the same thread. Don't they realise how stupid this makes them (and by extension their religion) look?
dread78645 (302): And [irreducible conplexity is] throughly refuted by the SETI folks at Berkley.
LVD: Well, that statement was unexpected.
Then maybe you should listen more, and invent what scientists think from within the confines of your own imagination less.
I think you will have a very hard time proving a majority of scientists think ID is true. Sounds like you may be inventing what you think scientists think from your own imagination. BTW: how do YOU know what scientists think - are you a mind-reader?
No, I'm just a curious sort, likd most scientists, and, like most scientists, try to keep up with current problems that have made the news--chiefly the problem of early advent of life, and several specific large-scale mutational clock anomolies--and, I suppose, a handful of the problems and evidences Fred Hoyle brought up.
One would think these items would be familiar to ID proponents, but I am constantly surprised to see that they are not--until I remember what the actual motivation of a stealth creationist is.
As I pointed out earlier, the actual detailed mechanisms of early life being investigated by actual scientists of the likes of Woese and Wolfram are inherently more interesting to the technically minded. ID or not ID is just an over-sensatonalized, minor bump in that road.
You couldn't have this more wrong. In 1700, practically every scientist was what we would now call a creationist. As science corrected itself, it moved away from this position. One highlight along the way happened in 1831.
Adam Sedwick, religious to the core but a scientist as well, apologized for having dogmatically held on too long.
Having been myself a believer, and, to the best of my power, a propagator of what I now regard as a philosophic heresy, and having more than once been quoted for opinions I do not now maintain, I think it right, as one of my last acts before I quit this Chair, thus publicly to read my recantation.That's OK, Adam! Saying that in 1831, you're still 175 years ahead of one Miss American Pie.We ought, indeed, to have paused before we first adopted the diluvian theory, and referred all our old superficial gravel to the action of the Mosaic flood.... (Sedgwick, 1831, p. 312-314)
The trend is not your friend. How do you justify standing the chart on its head and pretending the down arrow is an up arrow?
I see that you have the same sort of myopic problem with the word "refuted" that you have with the word "materialism".
First of all, Just because a single argument is refuted (which, in science, by the way, does not mean the same thing as in formal aristotalian proofs) does not mean that ID is refuted.
Probably the most definitive "refutation" in science is the Michaelson-Morley experiment, which put to sleep the notion of an ether through which light waves traveled. However, the experiment did not "refute" ether. It is still possible ether exists, but we haven't detected it as yet. In my opinion, your mind has been poisoned by too much aristotalian logic, performed without adequate respect for its limitations. Science does not operate on the same definitive basis as do logical imperatives in a formal proof.
Second of all, the assumption of a direct conflict between evolutionary theory and ID, such that an argument against evolutionary theory is automatically an argument for ID, is an incorrect assumption. ID and evolutionary theory are not at all obviously engaged in a death-struggle.
(BTW: please state the doable experiment to test natural selection or are you claiming natural selection is not science):
Please state the doable experiment to test galactic astronomy...or do you think galactic astronomy is not a science? When was the last time you created a supernova in a laboratory?
What's "theoretical science"?
This is the definition of materialism:
Not even close. For an avowed aristotalian, you seem to have an extra-ordinary amount of trouble delineating the proper sets in this discussion. Science concerns itself with things that can be detected. Science does not claim that the things it can detect are the only things that exist. Philosophical materialists claim that only what you can detect, exists. Ergo, scientists are not philosophical materialists. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Do I actually need to state this in formal syllogisms for you to get it?
However, if you find flaws with the research content of the following, please post them:
Please see the link at 680 (very long)
Cordially,
Tell that to donh.
Whose side of this argument are you on? Did I not just finish saying science is not a materialist enterprise?
That was then, this is now. As science has learned alot more than in the 1800's or 1900's, it has begun to conform more with scriptures. Don't deny it.
The Big Bang, the spontaneous appearance of certain species, polar ice melts, red tide, fish kills, global warming, light being the fundamental kick start, etc. It's silly to ignore the future, scriptures dictates, for the earth.
There are many examples of continuous occupation of Native American residential sites 4,000-5,000 years ago, when most authorities would place the flood.
Even more telling, we have continuity of mtDNA across some 11,000 years now; through some of the newly discovered markers in haplogroup A, a migration can be traced from Alaska to the southern tip of South America which spanned 11,000 years. By the pattern of the markers in the mtDNA experts can tell the direction of the migration. This can be cross-checked by radiocarbon dating.
We really haven't been looking for it, of course. We haven't thought of anything cool for it to do. Before Michaelson and Morley, we thought it was the medium light waves were waving IN. If it had been that, it would have shown up. It didn't show up, so it isn't that.
We may yet need an all-pervading invisible fluid to do something. If we do, we will know from the function we assign it how to detect it. Then, as in the 1880s, we will look for it again, and perhaps find it. Or perhaps again it WON'T show up and we'll rethink.
It has nothing at all to do with trends in science.
"Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy.
Of course, there is geologic evidence of rainfall before 4004BCE.
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