Here’s a recent attempt to cast doubt:
What makes something science, or pseudoscience? The distinction seems obvious, but attempts at a demarcation criterion – from Karl Popper’s ‘falsifiability’ to Irving Langmuir’s ‘pathological science’ – invariably fail, argues Michael D. Gordin. …
Here, I will focus on determining what counts as a “pseudoscience.” Since being scientific is arguably the highest status our culture can assign to a knowledge claim, the contested boundary between things that we consider science and those other things that look like sciences but just don’t quite make it is especially fraught. The name for the puzzle in this context is the “demarcation problem,” a term coined by philosopher Karl Popper, and his proposed solution — the “falsifiability” demarcation criterion — remains the most famous
. Michael D. Gordin, “Making sense of nonsense” at IAI.TV
Philosopher and photographer Laszlo Bencze comments,
Not a good article. It claims that the biggest problem with Popper’s thought is:
“whether it parses the sciences in the right ways. Indeed, this is a test we want any conceivable demarcation criterion to pass. We want our criterion to recognize as scientific those theories which are very generally accepted as hallmarks of contemporary science, like quantum physics, natural selection, and plate tectonics.”
Hmmm. What does “parsing sciences in the right way” mean? As the next sentence explains, it means no more than never discrediting anything that is “generally accepted” as science like “natural selection”.
Goodness gracious. This is exactly what Popper sought to debunk. His entire philosophy was founded upon not trusting authority—that which is generally accepted—and examining scientific theories critically on their own merits both logical and observational. So far from carrying us “beyond” Popper, this article asks us to regress.
The war on falsification is like the war on math. Causes with nonsense or destruction at their heart cannot succeed while such values remain in place.
See also: The progressive war on science takes dead aim at math
and
Inference Review Did NOT Set Out To Make A Fool Of Cosmologist Adam Becker. Becker does not like Popper’s falsification.
as to, “parsing sciences in the right way means no more than never discrediting anything that is “generally accepted” as science like “natural selection”,
Well, it seems someone forgot to tell Prof. Larry Moran, via his championing of ‘neutral theory’, to never discredit natural selection as ‘accepted science’,
i.e. “‘Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance.’
So there you have it, Darwinists, who are familiar with the mathematics of population genetics, are now reduced to arguing that all the wonderful design, and jaw dropping complexity, that we see in biology is the result of pure chance with natural selection playing a very limited role, if any role at all,
Just how badly natural selection, (the supposed ‘designer substitute), has been ‘falsified’ by the mathematics of population genetics is touched on in the following article,
Thus, with Natural selection being tossed to the side, by population genetics, as the explanation for the ‘wonderful design’ we see in life, Darwinists did not accept such a devastating finding as an outright falsification for their theory, (as they should have done if they were truly being scientific), but instead are now reduced to arguing that the ‘wonderful design’ we see in life is, basically, the result of pure chance with natural selection now playing a very negligible role if any role at all.
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Even Richard Dawkins himself finds the claim that chance alone can build such wonderful design to be ‘absolutely inconceivable’.
In the following video Dawkins states that the ‘appearance of design’, “cannot come about by chance. It’s absolutely inconceivable that you could get anything as complicated or well designed as a modern bird or a human or a hedgehog coming about by chance.’
To put it even more bluntly than Richard Dawkins did, Jay Homnick states, “Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident… you have essentially “lost your mind.”
Contrary to what the proponents of neutral theory may want to believe, with natural selection being falsified as the supposed ‘designer substitute’, then the explanation for the design we see in life does not then become ‘well then chance must have done it all by itself’, but instead the explanation for the ‘wonderful design’ we see in life instead becomes what it readily appears to be to us. As Richard Sternberg stated, “things appear designed because they are designed.”
Of humorous note, and as Dr. William Dembski noted, the term ‘natural selection’ itself is an oxymoron:
News, falsifiability is an important test but not the only one. More broadly, we want empirical testability and adequacy, coherence and balanced explanatory power — neither simplistic nor an ad hoc patchwork. A tall order. KF
Sometimes supporting your own point of view falsifies another point of view. Intelligent Design claims that natural selection and any other blind and mindless processes are incapable of producing any bacterial flagellum. Therefore anyone capable of supporting the claim that blind and mindless processes are capable, they have falsified that claim and taken away a key argument for ID. It would be devastating to ID.