From: MikeBGene@aol.com <MikeBGene@aol.com>
>Why must we posture? Yes, I realize that the critics of ID think
>anyone who proposes ID is either intellectually, psychologically,
>or morally troubled. Thus, it is easy for them to equate Dembski with
>an Atlantis proponent. But I thought you agreed there were grounds
>for suspecting ID. What naturally follows a suspicion is an investigation,
>unless one is unwilling.
Only if one has some idea of how to conduct such an investigation. No-one
has yet come up with a practical programme for searching for evidence of ID.
>If an astrologer could convince me that there is
>good reason to suspect our behavior is determined by the stars/planets, and
>could come up with ways to either strengthen or weaken that suspicion,
>I would have no trouble providing research funding for that person.
Well, assuming the atrologer could convince me there was a reasonable chance
of producing a useful result, positive or negative, I would agree.
(The size of the reasonable chance and the usefulness of the result that
I would require would depend on the sum being asked for.)
>We humans tend to have great trouble giving a serious and open-minded
>hearing to ideas that are both contrary and quite foreign to the way we
>believe. But keep in mind that there are several scientific assumptions/
>claims that may seem so different from astrology only because we have
>become conditioned to see them differently. For example, consider the
>following claims:
>
>-Life arose from non-life by purely non-teleological mechanisms
>
>-Life once existed in a form far more simpler and less sophisticated
>than the bacterial state.
>
>-At one time, life did not require DNA or proteins
>
>-Random mutations and natural selection were the primary mechanisms
>for the evolutionary origin of every biological feature seen on this
planet.
>
>-X (X being any biological feature that arose a very long time ago) was
formed
>by random mutations and natural selection.
The significant difference is that these claims are being investigated by
scientific means. Even if origins of life research can never prove that life
originated one way or another, it's still useful because it's increasing our
knowledge of biochemistry.
>While all of these claims are widely held in the scientific community, all
>of them also have very little/no evidential basis. That is, contrary to
>Steve's
>claim about the conservative nature of science, there are many claims
embraced
>not reluctantly, but as a function of the game rules of science. Yet we
come
>to think that the belief in a non-teleological origin of life/biological
>feature
>is inherently more supported than something like astrology not because
>we can point to gobs of evidence in one case (and not the other), but
because
>the same zeitgeist that is trying to censor the Polanyi Center from
academia
>is
>the one that taught us how to view the world.
I deny that the last two claims "have very little/no evidential basis". Of
course, we don't have evidence for *every feature*, but, in the absence of
hard evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to extrapolate the only
mechanism that we do know about to the cases that we can't study.
I would agree that the first 3 claims are not supported by scientific
evidence (though there may be a limited amount of evidence supporting the
*possibility* of life originating in ths way). These claims are rightly
treated as being speculative. But they're reasonable assumptions, based on
parsimony. I would recommend a teacher to teach that "it's widely believed
by scientists" that life originated in such a way; not that it *did* do so.
Richard Wein (Tich)
See my web pages for various games at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~tich/
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