Jonathan McLatchie on: Is intelligent design “science”?

_{Denyse O'Leary

October 19, 2015

Intelligent Design, News}

Share: Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Flipboard; Print; Email

With Bobby Conway.

A friend has written me (O’Leary for News) to complain that the question is a dud. Friend, I sort of see what you mean.

Putting it that way (is ID “science”?) reifies science in a way that distorts both the question and any possible answer.

The question should be, Does ID provide accurate accounts of the origin and nature of life forms? Does it answer questions in a way that leads to greater knowledge and more avenues for exploration?

If it does, but still isn’t considered “science,” well, so much the worse for science.

Science is first and foremost a methodology for discovering accurate information about our world. It is not supposed to be a philosophy in competition with other philosophies.

Indeed, philosopher Feser’s impatience with the ramblings of would-be philosopher (but in fact cosmologist) Larry Krauss can be partly understood in this light: What business is it of Krauss’s whether other scientists are militant atheists like himself?

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments

ID can be scientifically tested and potentially falsified. The design can be studied. That means ID has all of the hallmarks of science.Virgil Cain_{October 20, 2015
October
10
Oct
20
20
2015
03:32 AM
3
03
32
AM
PDT}

As Dr Behe said:
"Now, one can’t have it both ways. One can’t say both that ID is unfalsifiable (or untestable) and that there is evidence against it. Either it is unfalsifiable and floats serenely beyond experimental reproach, or it can be criticized on the basis of our observations and is therefore testable. The fact that critical reviewers advance scientific arguments against ID (whether successfully or not) shows that intelligent design is indeed falsifiable. In fact, my argument for intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In Darwin’s Black Box (Behe 1996) I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can’t be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process. To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven." - clipped from: Confirmation of intelligent design predictions http://reasonandscience.heavenforum.org/t1659-confirmation-of-intelligent-design-predictions
bornagain_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
06:52 PM
6
06
52
PM
PDT}

“Life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously,”,,,
That's absurd! Plant Life started 2 days after Earth was formed and animal life 2 days later.awstar_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
06:47 PM
6
06
47
PM
PDT}

bfast at 1 nice find, needs own thread.
Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago—much earlier than scientists thought - October 19, 2015 Excerpt: UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago—300 million years earlier than previous research suggested.,,, "Twenty years ago, this would have been heretical; finding evidence of life 3.8 billion years ago was shocking,",,, "Life on Earth may have started almost instantaneously,",,, The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of the inner solar system that formed the moon's large craters 3.9 billion years ago.,,, "The early Earth certainly wasn't a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that," Harrison said. "The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.",,, The researchers, led by Elizabeth Bell,,, identified 656 zircons containing dark specks that could be revealing and closely analyzed 79 of them with Raman spectroscopy, a technique that shows the molecular and chemical structure of ancient microorganisms in three dimensions.,,, One of the 79 zircons contained graphite—pure carbon—in two locations.,,, The carbon contained in the zircon has a characteristic signature—a specific ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13—that indicates the presence of photosynthetic life. "We need to think differently about the early Earth," Bell said. http://phys.org/news/2015-10-life-earth-billion-years-agomuch.html
bornagain_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
06:39 PM
6
06
39
PM
PDT}

Is intelligent design “science”?
Isn't Steven Meyer's whole argument based on the same "science" as Darwin used? If ID is NOT science, then neither is Darwin'sawstar_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
06:38 PM
6
06
38
PM
PDT}

Amen. Science is just a methodolgy. Its not essence of conclusions. its about humans suring up conclusions. Yet the methodology must be accurate and have enough data to work with. Science is a verb and not a noun. Its used as a noun far too much. science is used as a other word for conclusion and so evolutionists, some, say opposing evolution is opposing science. Creationism only opposes the conclusions and, should, the methodology competence. YEC and ID are both science in much of what they do.. In fact evo bio is not science.,Robert Byers_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
04:51 PM
4
04
51
PM
PDT}

New article needed. See: http://phys.org/news/2015-10-life-earth-billion-years-agomuch.htmlbFast_{October 19, 2015
October
10
Oct
19
19
2015
04:28 PM
4
04
28
PM
PDT}

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Leave a Reply