From: Susan Brassfield Cogan <Susan-Brassfield@ou.edu>
>Stephen Jones:
>>The real problem for atheists like Richard is that they seem to be unable
>to
>>even *imagine* that materialism-naturalism could be false. Therefore they
>>rush in on the slightest pretext claiming that ID has either been
>>falsified or
>>is unfalsifiable. It never seems to occur to Richard that ID cannot be
>>*both* falsified and unfalsifiable!
>
>I'm sure we will hear from Richard on this point, but I think that ID is
>outside of science on account of it being religion. It's an assertion. It
>can't be proved or falsified, it must simply be believed--or not.
Well, I wasn't going to dignify Stephen's post with a reply. But since you
ask, Susan... ;-)
Stephen is making a very common error. He's confusing two things:
(a) falsification of a hypothesis;
(b) showing that the arguments in support of a hypothesis are invalid.
I've certainly never said that the ID hypothesis has been falsified. What I
have said is that the alleged scientific arguments for ID (Dembski's and
Behe's) have been shown to be invalid.
As to whether I think the ID hypothesis is falsifiable, that depends on what
precisely the ID hypothesis actually is. If the hypothesis is "an
intelligent agent was involved in the origin of life on Earth", then I would
say this is not falsifiable, because we can never have 100% complete
knowledge of what happened in the past, so there will always be gaps in
which IDers can claim that an intelligent designer was at work.
Far from rushing in to raise the subject of falsifiability, as Stephen
claims, I rarely raise the subject, as, in my opinion, the falsifiability
criterion is overrated. In this case, it was Steven Crawford who raised the
subject, not me.
By the way, I note that once again Stephen has made the Freudian slip of
treating "materialism-naturalism" as the complement of ID, despite his
claims that the intelligent agent of the ID hypothesis is not necessarily
supernatural. ;-)
Richard Wein (Tich)
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