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To: Right Wing Professor

"You seem to think I'm a devoté of naive falsificationism."

I'm not either. But the person who started this thread was. I was pointing out why that is a bad idea, and, under such a view, their theories have already been falsified.

Often times in crevo debates there is a lot of posturing on the evolution side about falisification, but in reality the demarcation arguments have completely failed. You can agree or disagree with creationism, but to use a demarcation argument to say that one is under the realm of science while the other is not is counter to the current understanding of the philosophy of science.


213 posted on 03/06/2006 9:56:09 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
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To: johnnyb_61820
Often times in crevo debates there is a lot of posturing on the evolution side about falisification, but in reality the demarcation arguments have completely failed. You can agree or disagree with creationism, but to use a demarcation argument to say that one is under the realm of science while the other is not is counter to the current understanding of the philosophy of science.

Whose philosophy of science? Only postmodernists and Feyerabend would say that there are no demarcation criteria; even postmodernists would argue that they are, but that they're purely social. Are you seriously claiming there is no way to tell the difference between Velikoskyism, geocentrism, and modern astronomy; between necromancy, astrology and science; between YEC and science, etc?

I said I was not a naive falsificationist. I'm certainly not a pomo. Evolution could be falsified, but only by an accumulation of contrary evidence, accompanied by major explanatory failure and a better alternative theory. And does ID meet the criteria of a scientific theory? Nope. Not as long as the claim is made that the nature of the design or of the implementation of the design is out of bounds, Given X caused Y, 'what is the nature of X?', and 'how did X cause Y?' are the next important questions. You can't claim those are not scientifically answerable questions, and still maintain the first is a scientific statement. "Something smart did this, but we can't say who or how" isn't science. It lacks explanatory power; it isn't experimentally testable, and it contains unjustified premises.

221 posted on 03/07/2006 5:29:21 AM PST by Right Wing Professor
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