> Cliff:
>
> >You seems to be protesting the irregularity of history. Why should
> >history have to be smooth and gradual? Eukaryotes appeared suddenly
> >and so did the Cambrian fauna. The evidence implies that these organisms
> >did not form gradually. The challenge for science is to discover what
> >happened and to explain how it happened.
>
> Not quite. According to the NAS, "it is the job of science to provide
> plausible
> natural explanations for natural phenomena." This means, as one biologist
> has put it, "Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such
an
> hypothesis
> is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."
This would only be true if it was claimed that the evidence pointed to a
*non-naturalistic* intelligent designer. What evidence, however, *could*
point to a non-naturalistic designer, as opposed merely to a naturalistic
one. Arthur Clarke's dictum that sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic works the other way, too: Any magic would be
indistinguishable (to us) from sufficiently advanced technology. This is why
there can be no evidence for non-naturalistic explanations in science: There
is always a means of converting the non-naturalistic explanation to a
naturalistic one. If necessary, this can be done by the same means that the
non-naturalistic explanation is arrived at: We can simply *postulate* a
suitable naturalistic alternative, introducing as-yet-unproved forces and
entities as needed to make the theory work. Since no non-naturalistic realm
is required, and since the explanations are otherwise equivalent, the
naturalistic version of the theory will *necessarily* be more parsimonious
than the non-naturalistic one; it will *always* have at least *one* less
conceptual "entity" to be proved. Non-naturalism is thus simply, as I've
pointed out before, superflouos and a violation of the Occam's Razor.
I challenge anyone to produce an *imaginable* "package" of ordinary
empirical data that would logically require non-naturalism as the *better*
theory.
> Thus, science does
> not take up the challenge of discovering what happened. It merely
attempts
> to find the best naturalistic explanation. Whether such an explanation
truly
> describes what happened is something science does not address.
>
> I think this type of confusion is close to the heart of all the political
> dispute
> concerning origins. On one hand, we exclude ID for methodological
reasons.
> Fine. But then we teach scientific origin explanations as if they are
> objective
> accounts of what happened. But those conclusions do not follow once
> we exclude one class of explanations for a priori methodological reasons.
I suspect that the biologist you quoted *meant* by "intelligent designer"
one that is not-naturalistic, as is indicated by the last few words of the
quote. But, as I've pointed out, an intelligent designer could also be
naturalistic, which would bring it at least marginally back within the realm
of science.
However, it is true that science *does* exclude non-naturalistic
explanations, but that's not science's fault. It's the fault of the nature
of empirical data, and of the nature of *possible* explanations that can be
empirically tested. In this respect, non-naturalists logically *cannot* do
any better than naturalists, because of the limitations of empirical data
(*including* such data as that of religious experiences, mystical
experiences, and the like).
We *have* to exclude them for methodological reasons because there is no way
to make such theories testable. Whatever we say that an non-naturalistic
intelligent designer might do, we can also say that a *naturalistic*
intelligent designer could do. This means that, insofar as a
non-naturalistic theory *is* testable, it is testable only because it is a
superset of an equivalent *naturalistic* theory. The specifically
*non-naturalistic* aspect of it is not testable (nor is it needed).
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