Re: [asa] STATEMENT ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY IOWA STATE

On 6/4/07, asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu <asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> wrote:

> > The house and garden variety, I'd assume. Certainly the DI and its
> > 'fellows' seem to have defined ID in a very particular manner.
> > It may be a good exercise to explore other ID concepts and how they
> > stand up as scientific alternatives or scientific extensions.
>
> So why not start with what the ID folks point to: SETI, identifying
> hominid/human fabricated tools, forensics that lead to a conviction
> vs. those that don't, etc.? Are any of these "scientific"? Why or why
> not? How, in principle, do they differ from the ID enterprise in
> molecular biology? What about Sagan's fanciful example in Contact--
> wasn't it something like the digits of pi communicating some message?

That's an easy one. For instance let's take criminology and forensic
sciences. Do they just state "science cannot explain this via
processes of regularity and chance" thus designed? Of course not. And
yet ID refuses to go into issues of motive, capabilities and
opportunities, for obvious reasons of course. Real science, rather
than using a pure eliminative approach, provides means, motives,
opportunities, collects physical evidence, collects interviews,
collects hearsay evidence etc.

Now when we find God's name encrypted in our DNA, ID may have a case,
but do not confuse ID with science, ID is fully based on an
eliminative approach, the set theoretic complement of regularity and
chance.
In fact, it is amusing to me how ID insists on one hand that ID adds
or even replaces methodological naturalism, while later the same
people argue that science already successfully applies ID methods in
criminology, archaeology and SETI.
Think about it, even though ID proponents have 'refined' their
argument by calling intelligence something which cannot be captured by
regularity and chance processes and other silly arguments, it is clear
that that which remains after we have eliminated some/all known
natural processes is not the supernatural necessarily but far more
likely our ignorance.

The problem with ID is that its method is extremely unreliable, and as
such it cannot even compete with the null hypothesis of 'we don't
know'. ID refuses to provide any positive arguments or explanations,
which is not surprising because appealing to an omnipotent force
explains anything and thus in the end really nothing.

Hope this clarifies my position on ID and why it is doomed to remain
scientifically vacuous.

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Received on Mon Jun 4 12:55:04 2007