What a choice…
I’d have to go with the latter being worse. Political maneuvering is to be expected of politicians. Ignorance of fundamental facts, and an apparent unwillingness to address that ignorance is scary.
Will you all put down your philosophy 101 texts for a second and think? In principle intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. All I have to do is stir up some prebiotic soup, zap it, find life in it, and there you go. If I can manage that, I’ve falsified the central thesis of intelligent design. Which is that life *could not * have arisen *except by * the intercession of a higher intelligence.
Didn’t we do this a while back, and you agreed that NS was, in fact, falsifiable? Your assertion that to falsify it one would need to show that there is no other pathway for allele frequency variation is complete nonsense (in fact what you describe would be total affirmation, not falsification); you just need to show that there is a single example of an allele frequency variation failing to correlate with the increase/decrease in reproductive potential arising from its corresponding characteristic.
Furthermore, I can’t find any reference to Eugenie Scott stating that “Darwinism” is unfalsifiable, although these appeals to perceived authority are tiring in the extreme. What I can find, when I search for such statements, are a hundred mirrors of some crappy polemic written by one William Dembski in which he seems to take rather personal aim at Ms. Scott (and not even he makes the claim you do). Do you happen to have a cite for Scott’s admission that “Darwinism” is unfalsifiable?
Regarding the question of scope, you yourself (given your recent thread regarding the provability of quantified statements) should realise the difference between NS and ID. ID’s basic statement has an existential quantifier (“there exists some organism whose complexity is such that it could not have arisen through intermediate stages without the help of an intelligent designer”), NS’s is universal (“for all species whose physiology is described by alleles, the frequency variations of their alleles over time will correlate with the benefits in reproductive potential conferred by those alleles”).
Their respective complements are therefore universally and existentially quantified, respectively. I must examine every single organism in existence and prove that it is not irreducibly complex in order to falsify ID. You must merely find one example in which NS does not hold, and out the window it goes. You have admitted the latter in the past, and I’m perplexed to see you beating the same drum again.
No. They are saying that natural processes cannot explain simple reproducing organisms. The ones I’ve heard concede that once you’ve created an organism which can “evolve” - i.e. can reproduce, mutate and be selected for - then evolution is sufficient to explain all organisms since.
Clearly, that is in principle a falsifiable proposition.
As you put the statement, yes, that is falsifiable. However I do not believe that it’s a true representation of the typical ID proponent’s position. From Intelligent Design Network (first hit on Google, bolding mine):
This, to me, suggests an existential quantifier, and when one examines the ultimate aim of the ID theorist (to necessitate the existence of a creator), it is apparent that he needs find only one irreducibly complex organism to satisfy his goal. He is therefore able to hop from organism to organism, saying “well how about this one?” Refutation is possible on a case-by-case basis, but exhaustively eliminating every organism in the universe is an impossible task.
I agree that showing a reproducing organism arising naturally would put a massive dent in ID, and would in all likelihood kill it off from a pragmatic perspective, but it would not, philosophically speaking, falsify it. It would falsify the statement you present, but I don’t believe that is what ID actually says. If you can find a cite for a prominent and mainstream ID theorist who formulates his beliefs in the manner you describe, I’ll happily retract, though. I have, however, gone to several other major-looking ID sites and found the exact same formulation (to the word) of the theory that I quoted above.
To say I share your frustration with the mixing of Evolution and the origins of life is an understatement. By mine comes from two directions. Yes the Creationists would like to conflate the two issues, for obvious reasons. But I find that some from the other side attempt to use the scientific validity of natural selection to discount the possibility of extra-natural influences in our beginnings.
The problem stems from what natural selection shows and what it might indicate. It shows that organisms can change over time by adapting to pressures imposed and opportunities availed to them by their environment, also by chance mutations. Most people would agree with this.
It indicates that we might have evolved from one single cell. In my experience the problem arises when some advocates of “evolution”, particularly some atheists, look back in time and unravel the course of natural selection to look at the beginnings of life. Their thinking seems to go something like this:
• natural selection fully explains how organisms change over time (provable)
• since there is a full scientific explanation, any mention of God’s role in the process is superfluous (claim-true)
• since organisms do change over time–which we can prove scientifically–all changes to all organisms over time must therefore be the product of the natural world (claim-unprovable)
Now this would be fine if they siimply changed “must” to “may”. End of debate. “May” admits that this part of evolutionary science is theoretical, meaning it may or may not be true. The greatest benefits of this are 1) it is honest, 2) it doesn’t imply that evolution negates the possibilty of a “higher order”, and 3) it keeps people thinking! Maybe the "answer’ resides in some notion of ID, maybe within natural selection, maybe elsewhere. But at least kids are not being taught (intentionally or unintentionally) that the issue has been fully decided and they needn’t waste any time thinking about it.
If Evolutionary Science was taught within the limits of science everything would be fine. But when it is used as a tool to explain the origins life, it, too, takes a leap of faith. (Eventually we get to the Big Bang and the question of a primary cause, but that’s for another thread.)
It’s late. I’m tired. I hope this makes sense.
I responded to someone who wanted to apportion 20 minutes of the total time to ID. If you cannot follow a conversation, then don’t butt in.
And yet, here you are.
The aliens who created us designed frogs to eat flies. That’s why you don’t see frogs eating tomatoes.
That doesn’t make sense. You are not going to allow the instruction. You are not going to provide the materials. You aren’t even going to allocate the time. How is it that the student will have any access or any time if you intend to fill it all with your own stuff?
But you and other flamers have created the notoriety.
You are one bold son of a bitch. Bold with your ignorance. You will lose to the IDers because you do not understand their theory. When they make their case to the public, you will be seen as a liar. Not one of your statements is true.
Then why address your post to me? Why not begin your post with something like, “To my audience”? What I hate about all this is that you people are destroying science. You have made it indistinguishable from religion. The battle you have chosen to fight is not scientific, but political. And you will lose.
That’s not what we’re talking about here. And you’re equivocating about falsification. To say that an hypothesis is falsifiable is not to say that it is false. It is to say that there is a way in which the hypothesis could be proved false if indeed it were false. It is subjunctive, not disjunctive. The previously mentioned epistemic claim that it is raining outside is one example. It may or may not be false, but it is falsifiable.
Yes it is. You have stated that natural selection is not falsifiable, a position you have explicitly recanted in the past:
Colour me confused, but those look exceedingly contradictory to me. Which is your current opinion?
I am well aware of this distinction, and fail to see where I made any equivocation of the two concepts (particularly since if I had, I would have been stating that NS is false). To examine whether a proposition is falsifiable, one must examine what would be necessary in order to falsify it, which is what I did. To falsify NS, you would need to find one contradictory example. To falsify ID, you would need to show that everything is a counterexample. One is possible, one is not, as you rightly demonstrated in your recent pit thread. This is not equivocation, and says nothing whatsoever about the likelihood of actually finding said counterexamples.
No. It appears you are correct. She has reversed her position, and my old source (a debate she had with Gish) is no longer even online.
In order to explain it to you, you would have to understand the difference between “B is true” and “If A is true, then B is true”.
Not everything. Only specific things (dead-ends). It’s no different than showing that laws of motion work one way at ordinary speeds, but another way at light speeds. You don’t say that laws of motion are not falsifiable simply because you must examine more than one thing.
I am aware of the difference, thank you. However, in the debate I linked to, you appeared to have accepted that the conditional was in fact possible, which was rather the point of the entire bleeding thread. Is it now your position that the experiment you described is impossible, and if so, why did you not bring this up in the other thread?
Now it is you who are equivocating; you are talking about the falsification of two separate propositions, not the examination of multiple cases for a single proposition. A proposed law of motion is falsifiable because you only have to show one thing disobeying it for it to be falsified. And there are not two different sets of valid laws. Newton’s laws are more than falsifiable, they are in fact false. They are merely a near-perfect approximation at all but relativistic speeds. Einsteinian mechanics, as far as has been observed, model motion at all speeds; we could use them for everything, but we use Newton’s equations at low speeds because there is no need for relativistic precision when calculating how long it takes to get to Denver.
Since you’re aware of that difference, you might also be aware that “not possible” and “possibly not” are not the same. My position is unchanged. No metaphysical theory is falsifiable. (Falsifiability is itself a metaphysical theory.) But an epistemic theory is. Darwin’s Finch is very careful to state specifically what he means by terms he uses, like natural selection. But as used by the OP, it means an irrefutable tautology that explains evolution. A theory is not scientific by virtue of its explanatory power, but by virtue of its risk at being wrong.
But that’s what you’re doing here. You’re failing to differentiate between natural selection the mechanism and natural selection the framework. Same same with ID, except that you reverse it. You say that NS the M is testable, while ID the F is not. That is classic equivocation.
So you’ll attack an unrepresentative formulation of NS in order to declare it unfalsifiable, while with the same breath accusing those disputing ID of misrepresenting their opponents? Well, okay, I guess. But when you bang on about science and epistemology, it seems bizarre that you then go on to attack what you have acknowledged elsewhere to be something other than the actual scientific position. And for that matter, I don’t see how you can tell which way the OP is using the term “natural selection”. He merely said it doesn’t address the emergence of basic life, which indeed it does not.
Please express the mechanism of ID in the form of a logical proposition, then, for I do not believe that I am doing what you accuse me of; if I am, it is unintentional. I am using the formulation of ID that ID proponents themselves use. It is not my fault that they formulate their proposition in an unfalsifiable form. Were they to commonly formulate it as (say) uglybeech has done, I have already happily condeded that it would be falsifiable. But they don’t. So I don’t see why I should.
The OP’s use of the term was for the sole purpose of writing a political screed. He has no understanding at all of either NS or ID as his subsequent posts proved. Natural selection may apply to more than just biological organisms. That’s why computer models of NS work. And in fact, the principles of NS are relied upon in general by AI programmers. Sexual selection is not the only component of NS. Ecological selection may account for biogenesis. It is reasonable to assume that life might have begun wherever and in whatever circumstance the ecological conditions allowed it.
There is no “they”. It is not the case that a hive-minded collective exists that is making pronouncements from on high. These are not ICR hacks. There is no reason to hate them.
No, I’m thinking you’re the one not following. You responded to someone who wanted to apportion 20 minutes of class time to ID by drawing a comparison to a man who was interrogated by the Inquisition and had his work banned by the Pope. And it’s a stupid comparison. You don’t seem to see the difference between not being taught something and being forbidden to study something; your replies to Diogenes just reinforce this.
Underwhelming and nearly non-sensical. Let me assure you that I’m not a proponent of evolution because of any high-school indoctrination. I’m a proponent of evolution because I’ve seen, on my own time, the bullshit that come from Discovery Institute wunderkinds like Dembski.