Well, I think you are giving them too much credit, but like I said, I’ll use different terminology. I believe that some of the people in this thread are just too invested in their own biases to seriously consider any theory that isn’t atheistic or that they consider crazy religious stuff.
It’s the same type of “hard science” people who eschew anything that is “untestable”, yet get all upset when other people have differing moral views (which are equally untestable).
He’s right - a degree in stupidity from clown college does make one more interesting.
No, they say anything untestable isn’t science. There are plenty of other things. Hard scientists like sex too. Even soft scientists. 
Good grief, you don’t have the grace to admit that you have no idea what you are even defending. So now that this digression is over, what do you think of the OP and the actual practices of intelligent design apologists?
I don’t believe you.
No, seriously. I don’t believe you are correct. You are CLEARLY biased on the matter, and so have no credibility as a reporter of the structure of his arguments.
But even if you are correct (blind pigs and acorns, and all that) - you still have failed to demonstrate that one useless philosophical speculation instigating other useless philosophical speculations actually connects up to something “useful”. Notably, you strongly implied (as much as asserted, really) that ID was a building block to developing the scientific method. Which I think is a load of crap. Despite your proud unsupportd assertion.
Not all philosophy is useful. For example, solipsism isn’t useful. Last thursdayism isn’t useful. And neither are the other forms of ID (or whatever we’re calling it.)
(Yes, solipsism and last thursdayism are ID-type theories.)
Again, look how stupid you are.
Your lie was that you’re not opposed to ‘materialism’. Attacking people for not accepting magic as a valid scientific hypothesis and not accepting untestable claims as anything other than quaint ideas is simply a puerile attack on ‘materialism’ with some silly semantic gamesmanship being played.
Yeah, and yet here we’ve been talking about Dembsky and the Discovery Institute. Now either you’re relentlessly stupid and missed that when you attempted to pick a fight, or you’re just a trollish idiot who decided that even though we were all discussing a clearly defined anti-scientific piece of claptrap, that you’d like to conflate it with theistic evolution and pick a fight anyways because you’re opposed to reason and the scientific method and have pretensions of competency.
Comprehension. Read for it, jackass.
Wrong, yet again.
Empiricism stretches back to ancient times. Muslim scholars around the 11th century had already realized that we needed a rigorous system of experimentation, proof and refutation with which to sift ideas. About a century before Bacon, Jacopo Zabarella was working on refining Aristotelian investigative methodology. Brahe’s solid investigative methodology was also, likewise, roughly a century before Bacon. Roughly two decades before Discourse on Method, Instauratio Magna began refining the European understanding of proper investigative methodology.
Did Behe invent the term, or was his concept hijacked by the creationists? I thought the former, and they, finding a real scientists somewhere outside a Bible college with a concept that has religion at its heart (even if hidden) quickly slapped the name on their same old crap and tried to pretend it was science now.
The importance of Descartes’ work doesn’t mean we should teach The Matrix in science class.
Just to add to this, empiricism and the scientific method are very, very different things. Sextus Empiricus was already talking about the problem of induction in the 2nd century AD. It sounds like our friend ivn is living in the kind of Pyrrhonian hell Sextus Empiricus describes. And if he isn’t, well, that’s because he has biases just like the rest of us mortals.
Hey man, the Matrix is fiction! That means it’s true! And meaningful! Don’t you know!
(To complete this properly I’d have to slap you with unmerited insults, but I can’t bring myself to.)
Edwards v. Aguillard was in 1987. That’s around the point at which Pandas and People had their search-and-replace and cdesign proponentsists nonsense going on. Around 1992 the “Wedge strategy” was formulated, in part in concert with Behe. About a year later Behe first presented his ideas on “irreducible complexity”. The Discovery Institute backed their coterie in 1995 partially due to the “The Death of Materialism and the Renewal of Culture” that went on. About a year later Behe became a member of the Discover Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.
Rather embarrassingly for him, Behe was later taken to pieces on the witness stand for the Dover trial where Behe admitted that his psuedoscience was so sloppy and overly broad that it would admit astrology as a scientific theory, among other bits of woo.
Behe was pretty much always their man.
Behe didn’t publish until the mid 90s, well after the term was established as code for creation. For example, it had already been used in the textbook Of Pandas and People.
Point.
I didn’t mean to imply that empiricism was the same as the SM, but that it rather clearly served one of its precursors in a much more tangible (and useful) way than whatever ‘intelligent design’ ivn claims (with no quotes and no cites) Descartes was influenced by.
His concept was creationist from the beginning. It makes the evidence free claim that there are features of biology that evolution can’t explain, without actually coming up with any such features. While it may not say “therefore God” that’s clearly the point of it. Why else make up an “explanation” for a nonexistent problem?
Completely agree and I did not think that you were confusing the two. I think that ivn perhaps is, and I thought it just bore mentioning. He is so quick to tilt at his scientism windmill that he is getting somewhat confused. The arguments of George Berkely contra Newton are interesting and useful if you are studying the history of mathematical controversy, but they sure as shit aren’t useful if you are trying to do math. This simple difference seems to elude our fellow traveler.
I looked at the Wikipedia entry, and see the term predates Behe by a bit. So Behe ripped it off from the creationists, and ivn is even wronger than I thought.
The thing is, if ivn wasn’t so very ignorant and smarmy in his ignorance, we could’ve had a decent conversation… not that there’s all that much to discuss.
Most of us would readily agree that science cannot speak on matters of faith, and faith cannot gainsay facts or logic.
I’d wager that the vast majority of Dopers would readily agree that we can’t prove or disprove any God or Gods since their very formulation places them outside the bounds of proof and refutation. And that, for much the same reasons, beyond the realm of faith concepts of God or Gods have no predictive, explanatory or elucidative power about any honest inquiry into facts.
I’d also wager that more than a few would agree that one of the hallmarks of woo is that it attempts to open the door wide enough for a bit of necessary epistemological doubt and then uses that crack to slip in a tap dancing invisible orange elephant. That those who can’t support their position with logic, reason, or scientific analysis have to attack logic, reason and the scientific method themselves so that there’s no valid opposition to their claims left… so that “these are the facts and this is the process that we can use to winnow valid conclusions from invalid ones” is seen as equally valid to “this is what I saw in dream/invented/ thought sounded neat, and therefore it’s an alternate theory.”
Tell me more about this elephant.
I think you’re projecting. There is nothing atheistic or anti-religious about scientific method. A hypthesis is either testable or it is not. if it’s not testable, it’s not scientific. Religion has nothing to do with it, and the fact that you see science as some kind of atheist conspiracy is another strike agaianst your own credibility.
Can you name a single untestable, NON-religious idea which is accepted as a scientific hypothesis or theory?
What other kind of science is there but “hard” science? What kind of science isn’t testable?
What the fuck do “moral views” have to do with fucking ANYTHING?
The way I like to put the whole epistemological doubt wank job is that they know they can’t compete on a level playing field, so they try to deny that the playing field even exists.