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Is ID unscientific?

voodoochile said:
If religious foks would stop trying to force religion into science...
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What don't they try to force religion into? Science, government; can religion ever recognize its own boundaries?
I think not, because by its own definition its authority is boundless.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
ID avoids the questions about who the designer is, how he works, where he is, whether he is supernatural or natural, and so forth,
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So does SETI. :)
 
voodoochile said:
Again, another excellent point. There isn't a single fact that disproves evolution in all the time people have been looking. Not one. In fact, the more we learn, the stronger the TOETNS becomes.
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In fact, this is why evolution is scientific but ID is not.

For evolution, there are countless number of potential observations that would disprove it (heck, the creationists acknowledge such because they claim it is disproved)

Now, try to envision even one observation that would disprove an intelligent designer? There isn't one. There is not a single thing that could be observed that could not be explained as arising from an intelligent designer. A non-falsifiable hypothesis has no use in science.
 
pgwenthold said:
In fact, this is why evolution is scientific but ID is not.

For evolution, there are countless number of potential observations that would disprove it (heck, the creationists acknowledge such because they claim it is disproved)

Now, try to envision even one observation that would disprove an intelligent designer? There isn't one. There is not a single thing that could be observed that could not be explained as arising from an intelligent designer. A non-falsifiable hypothesis has no use in science.
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It's impossible to test for god under the current definition. Any all knowing all seeing all powerful creature could intentionally alter the results of any test to verify it's existence. Since according to the religions of the world, god does not want to be proven to exist - because it is supposed to be about faith - one can only assume that god would not allow the test to prove its existence.

Now if the designer was a highly intelligent alien, again, there's that little problem of their location. If they aren't in this universe, proving their existence is going to be damned difficult...
 
Dogwood said:

The hypothesis is non-falsifiable. There's no condition you can set that can't be answered with "Maybe the designer wanted it that way."
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You hit the nail on the head right there with the "non-falsifiable". If the claim is non-falsifiable then it is not scientific because there is no way to test it.
 
Ok, let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. We've had some posters saying that ID isn't scientific because it is non-falsifiable. But we've also read in this thread that "there isn't a single fact that disproves evolution." Is evolution non-falsifiable as well?
 
stealpick said:
Ok, let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. We've had some posters saying that ID isn't scientific because it is non-falsifiable. But we've also read in this thread that "there isn't a single fact that disproves evolution." Is evolution non-falsifiable as well?
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No. Evolution is non-falsified, but utterly falsifiable.
 
Marquis de Carabas said:
No. Evolution is non-falsified, but utterly falsifiable.
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For example, the discovery of an animal with utterly incompatible biochemistry would probably falsify evolution, at least with regard to that particular animal. Scientists would probably posit independent origin for that animal, possibly extraterrestrial. Similarly, a true chimera (an animal that combined parts from several different animals, such as a mermaid, a gryphon, or a centaur) would falsify evolution.

On the other hand, evolution is getting harder and harder to falsify, because the easy tests that were available a hundred years ago have all already been done, and evolution has passed with flying colors. For example, one "problem" with Darwin's original formulation was the lack of any apparent mechanism by which traits could be passed from parent to child (with modification). This problem might have provided a means to falsify evolution. However, the rediscovery of Mendel's genetic theories provided such a mechanism and, incidentally, supports Darwinian evolution.

More generally, there are a lot of other predictions that have been made that could have falsified evolution -- for example, Darwin himself predicted, based on the similarities between humans and African apes, that the ancestors of humans would be found in Africa. Again, this provides a potential falsification -- but evolution passed the test with flying colours.
 
stealpick said:
Ok, let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. We've had some posters saying that ID isn't scientific because it is non-falsifiable. But we've also read in this thread that "there isn't a single fact that disproves evolution." Is evolution non-falsifiable as well?
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Of course it is... easily!! The reason for that is evolution theory has actual observable hypotheses, whereas intelligent design does not. Suppose paleontologists were to discover fossilized skeletons of Cro-Magnon man dating from 10 or 100 million years ago, evolution would not have an answer for that. Perhaps it would have to be greatly adjusted or even abandoned. However, in the great expanse of time since The Origin of Species there has been no discovery not explainable by evolution.
Of course, such a finding would not be suppressed in the scientific domain, unlike how any challenge to the premises of religion is treated by religious people.
 
stealpick said:
Ok, let me play devil's advocate here for a moment. We've had some posters saying that ID isn't scientific because it is non-falsifiable. But we've also read in this thread that "there isn't a single fact that disproves evolution." Is evolution non-falsifiable as well?
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Evolution is falsifiable. Let me give you an extreme and somewhat silly example.

If a perfectly normal cat...
through perfectly normal means...
gave birth to a perfectly normal...
penguin,

this would be very bad news for evolution. Evolution go bye-bye.

But you can't use the same example for ID or something even more absurd, because it can always be said that the designer may have designed it that way through means we can't detect yet.

The predictions linked to by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos above are disqualified because of that. ID cannot predict anything, because nothing is defined concerning the abilities, motives or limitations of the designer.

"Why are knees so poorly made if the were intelligently designed?"

"We cannot understand the motives of the designer."

But we're supposed to assume that designer wanted "specified complexity", "rapid appearance of complexity in the fossil record", "re-usage of similar parts in different organisms", and "function for biological structures"?

Why?

How are any of these things predicted by the assumption of an intelligent designer? And if we can somehow justify these assumptions, why shouldn't we also expect to see perfect designs, without flaws, and repeated errors?

Ahhhhh. Because we cannot know the motives of the designer.

File under "moves in mysterious ways" I guess.
 
stealpick said:
But we've also read in this thread that "there isn't a single fact that disproves evolution." Is evolution non-falsifiable as well?
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Try substituting "gravitation" for "evolution" here. See how far you get.
 
Great thread. As a *fan of ID I would have to say that there would be little to gain by including ID in school curriculum or attempting to discover anything about the origins of life from ID. ID is an attempt to answer a question with a question. It solves nothing but simply presents a problem as if it can't be solved. That problem, how do complex systems arise from non complex materials or how does one get order from chaos (insert misapplied 2nd law of thermo dynamics)?

Having spent a good portion of my life in defense of ID and having read a lot of materials on ID I have to say that I have concluded that ID offers little of anything scientific.

It is interesting and I think it is stimulating to discuss it philosophically.

*I accept evolution completely and do not believe that ID proves anything. Along with Hard Problem of Consciousness it is an interesting point of thought (god of the gaps, we are running out of gaps).
 
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