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.
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!
And irreducible complexity!
I answered in haste.
I do not consider Evolution as a valid point of view.
However, it has taken on many of the trappings of a fanatical religion. It is a materialist, anti-God religion. The "Theistic Evolutionists" are its Dhimmies.
Its most zealous adherents behave just like the Left. When they are caught in a false prediction, or if they are called to task on some of their more illogical, even irrational, assumptions and practices, they respond with schoolyard name calling, reductio ad absurdum, and character assassination. Just like the Left.
My personal observation is that a large part of the Evolutionist community, at least a large part of the VISIBLE Evolutionist communty, is Bolshevik in nature and tact. Unbelievers, heretics and converts to the other side are openly persecuted, censured, and CENSORED.
Neither Evolutionism, nor Environmentalism, nor Communism provide a milieu conducive to the fair exchange of ideas that exist outside predetermined sets of beliefs pertinent to their respective ideologies.
Rather than entertain the idea that the other side has any valid points to consider and address, the most common response of the Evolutionist-Environmentalist-Leftist zealot is to deny that their opponents have any valid points to consider. Instead, they dismiss their opponents as brainless morons, shouting them down with silly slogans, schoolyard name-calling, silly pictures, and reductio ad absurdum argument.
Here is some reductio ad absurdum for you. By the way, I have had evolutionists say to me that these points are pretty much congruent to their worldview.
Nice.
In another day and age, we would call it Nihilism and Hedonism.
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Produce a cambrian rabbit, a shark with a pelvis, find a centaur or a mermaid.
Any one of which will do nicely.
replaces God,
Actually, I don't find anything in the TOE that mentions God (or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, as a matter of fact).
defines all human behavorism
It covers most of it, yeah. And? ...
and declares there is no spirit and no heaven.
Again, I don't find anything in the TOE that mentions a spirit or a heaven.
Maybe you have a different Theory of Evolution? Or more likely a straw-man version of it?
You left out millions of years in that.
> Name one imperfect design!
Human eyes have a blind spot where the optic nerve meets the retina. Also, the image on the retina is "upside down", requiring an inordinate amount of processing power in the brain to straighten out and interpret.
Wisdom teeth, for which the human jaw is too small.
Having testes form inside the body, then descend, leaving two very thin and vulnerable holes in the abdominal wall.
Hip bones in whales.
Genes for teeth in chickens (yes, they exist).
The panda's thumb.
Wings on flightless birds.
You appear to be doing apologetics (defense of religion). That requires a different method, and it is certainly not the same as the scientific method.
If you would care to rephrase your post using neutral, rather than anti-evolutionary-loaded terms, and to stick to scientific arguments, I would be happy to address any points you might have.
Produce a cambrian rabbit, a shark with a pelvis, or find a centaur or a mermaid.
Any one of which will do it.
> Old earth is against scripture, the theory of old earth
> is adulterant to scripture and wrong.
The earth IS old. Approximately 4,500,000,000 years old.
So we are brought back to the 3 choices outlined before.
If I were you, I'd pick (1) and move on.
come on Coyoteman, thats ridiculous, some conjoured up no evidence junk as that? the knee and the lower back? Let me ask you this, how come the knee is designed for forward motion and that exactly where are eyes are directed, or the toes. why arent they on the back of the foot? How come the human hand has five fingers inwhich it is the most perfect of design for picking things up and even the length of each finger or that the arms are directed torward the front and that the hands are placed with the palms to the inside inwhich each hand accomodates to the inside in effeiciency how come the mouth is facing forward and just happens to produce sound for talking tasting and eating all these functions that are accomodated by being directed to the forward position! etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc...etc... The knee and the lower back as an idea of a bad design? Pure junk science hypothesis!!!!!
I am on yourside creationist! Just to let you know!
>>And irreducible complexity!<<
I'm not a biologist and have never particularly liked it or enjoyed it - too high of a memorization to understanding ratio for me - I prefer physics and chemistry...
So I can't approach that question from a point of expertise. My gut reaction is that like with chemistry and physics I suspect that development we don't understand is limited by how far man has progressed so far. I was just talking in Freepmail about my experience with God - it didn't include any previously unrevealed information about science.
Since those people with the most accepted accounts of personal experiences with God are not also known for advancing science, I suspect that God generally does not reveal science but leaves it to us to discover.
That's important because microbes (for example) weren't discovered until the 17th century so no matter how sincere the person was in writing down a book of the bible don't include knowledge of modern science - they likely could not have understood the concept of a billion years or atomic theory or DNA. That doesn't impugn them in any way - they were men of their time and place as am I.
It wouldn't surprise me if one of my grandchildren looks up my post and wonders how I could have been ignorant of some discovery that has yet to happen.
Darn, that was long winded - what I meant was just because something looks irreducible doesn't mean it is irreducible.
you realy should catch up voltaires! because those are all junk that you have listed! And if you want me to show you one by one that can be done!
> "Evolutionists" are generally doing science,
> which requires a particular method.
When I went to school, science was defined as what you could observe, measure and categorize with your five senses.
Scientific theories were posited to explain phenomena to which the abovelisted scientific method could not yet be applied.
Some of these theories have been affirmed, others have been falsified and fallen by the wayside.
Evolutionism, in spite of its many false predictions, tautolical methods, and myriad scandalous frauds, has a life of its own. In many places it operates outside of the scientific method, and is become more of a philosophy, a religion, than a science.
Its more vocal adherents augment that perception by their infantile behavior.
For consideration as a valid science, I would place Evolutionism at least a few steps below Cold Fusion, and perhaps one step above its stepchild, Environmentalism.
I don't have the time or inclination to discuss these things in detail.
If you are sincere, and really wish to explore the facts mitigating against Evolutionism, and to entertain them as things to consider by a thinking person with an open mind, then there are much better and more technical sources than yours truly, and you seem perfectly capable of conducting the research and compiling the results without my help.
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> because those are all junk that you have listed!
"Junk" as in abominably crappy designs, if in fact they were "designed"?
Yes, they are.
But if you're going to amuse me with some nonsense akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, I think I'd really like you to do it for the plumbing of monotremes.
Why does a duck billed platypus use the same hole for urination, excretion and procreation?
Did God leave the "design" for seperate genital and digestive tracts in His other jeans that day?
First of all because you supposedly comeup with something that we or any of us dont understand the exact function doesnt prove it unworthy! And as a matter of fact most things if not all that evolutionists have supposed in the past that certain functions were because of poor design has largely overtime been shown to be incorrect. The evolutionist has a very poor record of being right through out all of its history from Darwin on down! So I wouldnt be hasty in your remarks! Because evolutionists have time and time again have embarrased themselves, with there no evidence propaganda!
Do you Goose step.
Just proves creation. If evolution were true we would also talk from the same hole.
>>Scientific theories were posited to explain phenomena to which the abovelisted scientific method could not yet be applied. <<
That's really more like a hypothesis.
In math you can prove a theory and turn it into a theorum.
But in science a theory is different. Scientific American put it this way:
>>National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth.<<
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF
That's an important distinction
>>The success of science depends on an apparatus of democratic adjudication – anonymous peer review, open debate, the fact that a graduate student can criticize a tenured professor.<<
These mechanisms are explicitly designed to counter human self deception.
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