You don't have the right to do that when the topic of discussion is precisely opposed to your generality.
Incorrect. What the IDers are left with after their few falsifiable claims have been thrown out (because they *have* been falsified) is indeed unfalsifiable. Pshaw. You cannot have missed the logical contradiction in your claim. It's either possible to formulate falsifiable hypotheses for ID, or it's not. You say it's possible. The rest of your statement is, therefore, bluster. And then you go on and say it a different way:
There's no contradiction here. "ID" is a mish-mash of claims that have been proven false, *and* claims which are unfalsifiable.
Hmmm. Since falsifiability is allegedly the standard by which "science" is found, I fail to see how you can persist in your comments.
You don't have the right to do that when the topic of discussion is precisely opposed to your generality.
Really? How so?
[Incorrect. What the IDers are left with after their few falsifiable claims have been thrown out (because they *have* been falsified) is indeed unfalsifiable.]
Pshaw. You cannot have missed the logical contradiction in your claim.
There's no contradiction, for the reasons I already described.
It's either possible to formulate falsifiable hypotheses for ID, or it's not. You say it's possible. The rest of your statement is, therefore, bluster.
You are yet again missing the point. It is possible to formulate falsifiable hypotheses for "ID" (using the phrase "ID" in the broad sense), when those hypotheses are very specific and narrowly defined. (That's not just for "ID" -- hypotheses in general must be narrow and specific in order to be properly testable and falsifiable).
*HOWEVER*, "ID" in the way it's usually meant by "ID proponents" is neither specific nor narrow. It's the nonspecific, broad postulate that "design" was "somehow" involved in making life and/or other aspects of the Universe. Some IDers also claim that it's possible to make an "ID filter" which can objectively "detect design". Neither belief is specific or narrow enough to be testable or falsifiable.
As I have *previously* pointed out to you *more than once* now:
Instead, as we are quite clear to anyone with working reading comprehension (admittedly, this leaves out a lot of "IDers"), is that the "Intelligent Design postulate" (as held by the Intelligent Design movement) which hypothesizes that there was "design" in the formation of life as we know it is, in its current state, utterly unscientific and untestable. It consists of nothing more than the postulate (it doesn't even rise to the level of "hypothesis", much less "theory") that: some (unspecified) form of (unspecified) intelligence added some (unspecified) amount of (unspecified) "design" into life on Earth at some (unspecified) time(s).The only testable "ID" hypotheses I've seen involve "HUMAN intelligent design", as in the case of your genetically-engineered pig example, because this involves *known* quantities (human abilities, human techniques, human goals, a recent timeframe) which can make the hypothesis specific enough to be testable. But that's not what the "ID" folks want to try to prove. They want to establish the existence of NONHUMAN design. So just pointing out that *human* design can be tested for does *not* do a damned thing to help your case, because *you* want to try to "test" for design by UNKNOWN agents working in UNKNOWN ways with UNKNOWN abilities using UNKNOWN techniques on UNKNOWN parts of UKNOWN organisms at UNKNOWN times for UNKNOWN purposes. How, praytell, do you propose to test for or falsify *that*?
This position is, indeed, unfalsifiable. It's too freaking flabby. It's indistinguishable from "and then a miracle occurred". It's as useless a "hypothesis" as, "unicorns were involved, somehow." In fact, "unicorns magically waved their long eyelashes and 'poofed' design into life on Earth" fits *very* comfortably into the ID (non)hypothesis, beacuse IT'S SO FREAKING NONSPECIFIC.
If we find "X" in living things or in the DNA, by gosh, that matches "ID" because the "designer" might have wanted it that way. If we find "*NOT* X" in living things or DNA, by gosh, *THAT* matches "ID" too, because the "designer" may have decided to do things *that* way too!
I repeat -- untestable and unfalsifiable.
And then you go on and say it a different way: There's no contradiction here. "ID" is a mish-mash of claims that have been proven false, *and* claims which are unfalsifiable.
Hmmm. Since falsifiability is allegedly the standard by which "science" is found, I fail to see how you can persist in your comments.
Easy -- because my comments are accurate. The core postulate of "ID" is totally untestable and unfalsifiable. Meanwhile, "IDers" have at times made claims *not* part of their core postulate which have been easily falsified, because they were wrong. For example, Behe's argument about "irreducible complexity". It's fatally flawed. And the fact that his argument was testable doesn't mean that the "ID postulate" is testable either, because Behe's comment wasn't even *about* "ID" itself. Even if he had succesfully identified something that couldn't be explained by evolution (and he didn't), that *still* wouldn't be actual evidence *for* ID.
Okay, let's cut to the chase here: If you disagree with my assessment of "ID" (and I am hardly alone, the vast majority of scientists agree), there's an easy way you can prove us wrong: State "the ID hypothesis", and describe *exactly* what procedure you would use to validate it and/or falsify it. Remember, proper scientific validation requires that your hypothesis makes *specific* testable predictions, which logically follow directly from the postulated hypothesis, distinguish it from the predictions of alternate theories, and the more types of predictions, the better.
Here's another little challenge for you: If you think that "ID" (NONhuman ID) has advanced to the point where it deserves to be treated as a valid field of science (instead of just a possibility), you're going to have to list for us the research findings which have already validated "ID". Where are your *results*?
I'm sorry to have to inform you that having a "maybe this happened" notion is *not* enough to qualify something as science, and not enough to make it worth teaching in science classrooms. Ultimately, you have to have *results* establishing the validity of you notion first. The IDers don't.