Re: Today's blogs 2

There is a small problem with your claim. I specified "not yet testable."
Testability changes. Electron microscopes can image things that ordinary
light microscopes cannot, though scanning light microscopes produce
images beyond the half-wavelength limit. When I studied zoology, there
were no phase microscopes, so currently routine observations were
impossible. In other areas applicable to biology, there are many other
techniques that are being developed. You assume that the same applies to
design--we just don't have adequate tests. But all our actual inferences
to design require us to recognize that we know the pattern and at least
something of the means beforehand. With my memory for names I do not
recall who it was. But about the time Piltdown man was "discovered," all
kinds of "tools" were being discovered. This chap was skeptical. He
brought in a collection of flint nodules, put them in a sack, stamped on
them, and pulled out duplicate "tools." ID thus tacitly begs the
question, for it requires the assumption that there IS a designer. ID is
dead when it has to admit that perhaps we don't yet know enough about the
range of natural processes to exclude ALL of them. Irreducible complexity
demands that we KNOW all possible natural means so that they can be
excluded. There is no parallel to string theory.
Dave

On Thu, 26 May 2005 08:32:48 -0500 Josh and Kristy Bembenek
<jbembe@hotmail.com> writes:
I found the following to be an interesting point:

Current demonstrable scientific predictions begin 10^-43 s after the Big
Bang. This does not mean that anything presumable earlier is not
scientific, only that the science has not yet been confirmed. The same
holds for the Higgs boson. It has not been detected where some
theoretical considerations place it. But this does not mean that there is
no such particle or that the theory has to be dumped in favor of
something new. It may be that the theory needs to be tweaked to predict a
heavier particle, or that a new parameter needs to be considered. I note
that the search goes on. What a GUT requires has not yet been determined.
If I adopted your claim, string theory and M-theory would be outside the
bounds of science, as would probably be events falling under
deterministic chaos. But what is not yet testable does not have to be
metaphysical rather than scientific. I think you occupy an extreme
position

The progress of Iders actually giving us evidence or observations to back
their claim notwithstanding, what if God actually implemented information
in Nature, such as genetic information? If God was responsible, and
information is not reducible to chance in Nature (although I guess there
will always be *some* chance of any given event happening randomly...),
then the claims of ID are not metaphysical either, but actually just as
scientific as string and M-theory (although I don’t know how each of
these would be empirically determined.)
Received on Thu May 26 15:47:27 2005