Guido, allow me to clear up a slight misunderstanding on your part about predictions.
Ramoss said:
ID does not make any predictions. It does not have any explanitory powers. It can not be tested.
to which you answered:
Guidosoft writes:
What? Are you serious? [...] There are predictions made by intellegent design.
Such predictions are:
Junk DNA will be found to have a purpose.
Organs that seem to be useless will be found to have a purpose.
You must know that when scientist speak of predictions, they do not claim to know what will happen in the future. They do not make what you might call 'prophetic' predictions, like those you find in the bible.
Instead, what they mean by 'prediction' is that they want to test a theory by conducting an experiment and they want the theory to tell them
beforehand what result can be expected, if the theory is correct. They also want to know what result would indicate that the theory is
not correct.
Let me give you an example. Suppose my theory is that the die you hold in your hand is loaded. To test my theory, we will conduct an experiment: we will throw the die six-hundred times and jot down the results. And here comes the important bit: I predict - or rather, my theory predicts - that one of the faces will come up more often than others.
I am not sure which face it will be, but it might for instance be that 6 will occur more often than 1 through 5. An unloaded die would give us approximately a hundred occurrences of each face. So, if the 6 comes up a lot more than a hundred times, then your die is probably loaded and my theory is supported by evidence. But if all faces come up about a hundred times each, then your die is probably not loaded and my theory is bunk.
So you see, a scientific prediction is not some kind of prophecy that we have to wait for to come true, but it is an expectation of a result, that we can start testing actively and immediately. It is the kind of prediction that would make you exclaim: "O yeah? Well, we'll see about that!"
The predictions of ID you mentioned, on the other hand, are of the prophetic kind. We cannot test them other then by sitting on our bums and waiting for them to come true.
Scientist are not generally known for sitting on their bums.
This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 02-Dec-2005 10:41 PM
"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." - Richard Dawkins
™ Version 4.2
