Posted on 02/22/2007 6:22:34 PM PST by Boxen
In a thought-provoking paper from the March issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology , Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin) clearly discusses the problems with two standard criticisms of intelligent design: that it is unfalsifiable and that the many imperfect adaptations found in nature refute the hypothesis of intelligent design.
Biologists from Charles Darwin to Stephen Jay Gould have advanced this second type of argument. Stephen Jay Gould's well-known example of a trait of this type is the panda's thumb. If a truly intelligent designer were responsible for the panda, Gould argues, it would have provided a more useful tool than the stubby proto-thumb that pandas use to laboriously strip bamboo in order to eat it.
ID proponents have a ready reply to this objection. We do not know whether an intelligent designer intended for pandas to be able to efficiently strip bamboo. The "no designer worth his salt" argument assumes the designer would want pandas to have better eating implements, but the objection has no justification for this assumption. In addition, Sober points out, this criticism of ID also concedes that creationism is testable.
A second common criticism of ID is that it is untestable. To develop this point, scientists often turn to the philosopher Karl Popper's idea of falsifiability. According to Popper, a scientific statement must allow the possibility of an observation that would disprove it. For example, the statement "all swans are white" is falsifiable, since observing even one swan that isn't white would disprove it. Sober points out that this criterion entails that many ID statements are falsifiable; for example, the statement that an intelligent designer created the vertebrate eye entails that vertebrates have eyes, which is an observation.
This leads Sober to jettison the concept of falsifiability and to provide a different account of testability. "If ID is to be tested," he says, "it must be tested against one or more competing hypotheses." If the ID claim about the vertebrate eye is to be tested against the hypothesis that the vertebrate eye evolved by Darwinian processes, the question is whether there is an observation that can discriminate between the two. The observation that vertebrates have eyes cannot do this.
Sober also points out that criticism of a competing theory, such as evolution, is not in-and-of-itself a test of ID. Proponents of ID must construct a theory that makes its own predictions in order for the theory to be testable. To contend that evolutionary processes cannot produce "irreducibly complex" adaptations merely changes the subject, Sober argues.
"When scientific theories compete with each other, the usual pattern is that independently attested auxiliary propositions allow the theories to make predictions that disagree with each other," Sober writes. "No such auxiliary propositions allow … ID to do this." In developing this idea, Sober makes use of ideas that the French philosopher Pierre Duhem developed in connection with physical theories – theories usually do not, all by themselves, make testable predictions. Rather, they do so only when supplemented with auxiliary information. For example, the laws of optics do not, by themselves, predict when eclipses will occur; they do so when independently justified claims about the positions of the earth, moon, and sun are taken into account.
Similarly, ID claims make predictions when they are supplemented by auxiliary claims. The problem is that these auxiliary assumptions about the putative designer's goals and abilities are not independently justified. Surprisingly, this is a point that several ID proponents concede.
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Sober, Elliott. "What is Wrong with Intelligent Design," The Quarterly Review of Biology: March 2007.
Since 1926, The Quarterly Review of Biology has been dedicated to providing insightful historical, philosophical, and technical treatments of important biological topics.
Sorry my friend the but if you are nauseated you should use Peptobismal or quick posting responding to topics the involve evolution or creation.
The debate about whether the earth is 6-10k years old was over 100 years before Darwin published "Origin of Species".
It is, therefore, not an "evolution or creation" question.
It's an unsupported myth vs observable reality question.
Well, maybe it is the same, that way :)
Maybe you'd like to reopen the old argument about whether the earth moves about the sun or the other way 'round, as long as you're opening up debates that biblical literalists lost centuries ago?
Well, by their own statement, the designer is too complex to have come about by itself--who designed the designer???
That sort of logic would prevent the Chevy engine from having necessarily been designed as well and amounts to an exercise in arguing from the realm of metaphysics into the realm of reality, which is a known logical fallacy.
Sorry to see you have such low opinion of yourself. ;-)
However, I did not make an argument, merely an observation. Also, I didn't intend to be clever, but quite on point to the question posed. Intelligent design is not intelligent, but it is a cowardly way to promulgate a valid point of religious faith while attempting to hide behind pseudo-science.
> but it is a cowardly way to promulgate a valid point
> of religious faith while attempting to hide behind
> pseudo-science.
These are precisely my thoughts about Evolutionism.
And I used to be an Evolutionist.
.
>>What by the dating methods of man. Fossils date the rocks, rocks date the fossils, wow that is science.
Or do you mean by the flawed methods of decay dating that assume that the material that is dated was pure at one time, that assume that the decaying magnetic field does not have an effect on the decay rate of the elements.<<
You would think that if a magnetic field changed the rate of of decay that we would be able to the decay rate in the lab since we can produce magnetic fields many times stronger than the earth.
Trivia: Decay was very confusing to me until I learned about the proton and neutron drip lines. The forces that hold the nucleus together are in balance based on mass and charge.
If you have too many protons you have too much charge for the mass (the proton drip line) if you have too many neutrons you have too much mass for the charge and you fall below the neutron drip line.
Basically the forces in the nucleus need to be balance for the atom to not decay and heat or magnetism doesn't compare with forces from the protons and neutrons so the decay rate is constant unless you do something nuclear, like shoot in extra neutrons.
I doubt very seriously that what I posted precisely matches your views on evolution. I'm sure you didn't intend to make the mistake you made in your response to me. Or do you really mean to say that evolution is a VALID "religious" point of view? (I'll leave aside the fact that it isn't a religion at all.)
Nothing about an old earth or evolution proves, tends to prove, or INTENDS to prove that there is no God. Nothing about an old earth or evolution is an attack on religion per se.
To frame the debate in those terms is ridiculous, stupid, and bordering (very narrowly bordering) on the insane.
To the extent that your holy books contradict observed reality, one of three things is true:
1) You do not understand your holy books.
2) Your holy books are wrong.
3) Both (1) and (2).
A prime example is those who (disregarding the sage advice of Augustine to inquire of astronomers about astronomy) insisted that Copernicus' theory on the motion of planets was "against scripture".
Don't follow their ridiculous example.
Name one imperfect design! In the early 1900s evolutionists use to make claims that there were all kinds of vestiages of sorts and they have long been shown to be false. From the appendix to well we have a tail bone so that must mean we at one time had a tail, no evidence junk science, thats all evolutionist ever come up with!
Who in the world are you kidding?
1) Knee.
2) Lower back.
(Do I get any change?)
Scientific journals are overwhelmingly biased for the the propaganda machines of evolutionists!
>>You may ask how do I know God is real, well it would be because men saw him and wrote about him, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John just to name a few. There were also those who did not follow the teaching of Jesus who saw him and the miracles and resurrection.
I would also have to say that nature speaks of organization that could not come from random acts of chance, symbiotic relations is one great example, how you can believe a flower decided to have insects move the pollen to propagate the species is beyond me.<<
For me, it was seeing the organization that helped me be ready but it was only through a personal experience with God that I believed.
An evolutionists would open the hood of a car and say in his arrogance, the wind lightening and happenstance put it together! Talk about mytho-logical!
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