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.
wow. u r all .... something. just not sure what.
id is a philosophy/ideology, evo is a scientific theory. apples and oranges. get over it.
and who designed the designer, or how has it come into being? has it naturally evolved?
postulating a designer, you will run into the reductio ad infinitum fallacy
> You lost me right at this point.
Indeed, and you just proved mine.
.
The author should have said parenthetically (see previous paragraph).
I think Sober has it wrong. The problem with ID as a scientific theory is that it makes no predictions. Take his example that the statement that an intelligent designer created the vertebrate eye entails that vertebrates have eyes, which is an observation. Vertebrates having eyes is not a prediction of that statement, it is baked in.
Alternatively one could view this lack of predictiveness as a lack of explanatory power.
You seem to have a problem with scientists conferring and peer reviewing their work?
Checking and double checking and testing hypothesis is how you get to a sound answer.
Or, you could wave a few snakes and claim its a miracle. Or beat a drum and wave a stick at evil, or summon the sun god and make a sacrifice to ward off bad intent....
Or you could read the Bible.
Yet the Panda survives when 99.9% of all species are extinct, not too bad.
The human body itself proves we where designed, and by an engineer no less, for only an engineer would run the sewage waste system through a playground.
Ot the Koran, or the Talmud, or the Baghavad-Gita, or whatever the hell else.
Otherwise, you're just engaging in "my god can beat up your god." That gets real boring real fast.
FOTFL
You got it all wrong. My (God)trumps all other (g)ods. Get it? Besides, all other gods require acts to be accomplished in order to get to wherever they are supposed to go. Those that follow those other gods never know whether they have done enough. Pretty depressing if you ask me.
I assume you are referring to the "religious consensus" that marks the mindset of evolutionists, who, by the way, hold their theory to be unquestionably true and correct, and thus unfalsifiable.
1. America is not perfect.
2. But people sometimes say it is.
3. You can't trust that America is any good at all. SOCIALISM NOW.
1. Evolution can't explain where all of existence came from.
2. But people sometimes act like it does.
3. You can't trust that evolution explains anything at all. INTELLIGENT DESIGN NOW.
Just seems like a familiar argument, that's all.
I thought that was his point. What am I missing?
I see the problem as an insistence that God is a very personal Creator, almost a human figure. God by any religion's definition is an all knowing all powerful mystical being whose nature and power are beyond anything we can imagine. That God created the enormous universe you make reference to, and that God set it in motion in whatever mysterious ways and for whatever mysterious reasons, we cannot begin to understand.
So if I want to look at evidence and science, my conclusion is that scientists and some faithful are both missing the boat. Scientists can't disprove God with a microscope nor should they try, and the faithful can't prove their version of God with analogies involving potholes.
Whatever we are, whatever the universe is, and whatever God is, these things have an undiscovered reality which exists beyond our ability to debate what makes theories work.
Just my thoughts.
I always think of you as challenged.
Bump for laughing later ...
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