Does ID follow the scientific method?

Again I ask. Does a test need to be complicated to be vaild and useful in determning truth or even possible truths, Yes or No?Dawn Bertot

Ok lets say chance and order are opposites. To the naked eye they are a coin toss can only be heads or tails and there is no way to predict what the toss will be. So one would think coin tossing has nothing to do whit order though throw a coin long enough and a pattern emerges a 50:50 pattern the more times you throw it the closer to 50:50 it gets so there is some order in coin tossing. Was there a will needed to toss the coin in a 50:50 pattern or did the coin fall in a 50:50 on its own and would do the same in a random vibration generator.I would say order in the coin tossing spawned on its own our will for it to land on heads or tails in a 50:50 ratio had NOTHING to do whit it. After the big bang spawned matter order as we see it is only a natural occurance, atoms rubing one a nother causes static electricity, static electricity pulls the first few together, when enough are together their mass atracts more trough gravity when enough are atracted the first stars are borne all fallowing simpla natural laws. Evolution also follows the same natural laws after the first cell was borne it was only natural that mutations accured, and by the same chance as the coin toss some of those mutations benifited the cell to have a better chance at survival and mythosis, the more time you have the more mutations accure the more mutations acure the grater the chance of a benifitial mutation, benifitial mutations have a better chance of being passed on because the offspring have a better survuval chance of those that do not have this mutation. All of it following natural laws and order spawning from chance i see no need for a desighner willing dissorder to become order. Correct because we have TONES of CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence, And some normal evidence too. ID has no evidence only an assumption based on flawed logic.

Hi Dawn,The topic of this thread concerns whether ID follows the scientific method. What you need is at least one example of ID research following the scientific method. When you return, please address your discussion to the topic.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Wow! Spectacularly off-topic. Only the fact that you've been a member less than 24 hours keeps me from suspending you for a week. See you tomorrow.Edited by Admin, : Grammar.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

That is a quaint use of the word "logical".It would be wrong even had you said "empirical", since we often see order without design. Of course we can. How else do people practice forensic science or archaeology or paleontology or taphonomy or, dammit, history?Perhaps the first of sciences was the interpretation of animal tracks: the ability to look at a set of impressions in the sand, and say: "two hours ago a gazelle ran this way pursued by a lion". As ineloquent as your speech sounds, yes they do. Just as our ancestors could identify a gazelle as the source of impressions in the sand. Once again, I would point out that the people who actually detect order are scientists. Creationists just sit on their bottoms and talk nonsense about order. It is indeed another thing. And it has been done. This is, of course, not true. As I have pointed out, you guys haven't got so far as framing a testable hypothesis yet, let alone testing it. Until you try, your claims to follow the same methodology as science are naked nonsense. If Intelligent Design is not about design in some way, then you guys have chosen the wrong name for your ideas, and it is not I who have done most to misrepresent your position.

Maybe this is why it is so difficult for IDers to characterize their "science."There are dozens to hundreds of different major denominations of Christianity, and they all have major differences among themselves.It is not surprising that they can't agree on what ID should entail.And what makes this problem worse is they aren't really pursuing ID as a science. They don't have to come up with a working method, any real hypotheses, any tests that could be applied, or a cohesive theory. When pushed they make things up that sound like science, but not all of them make up the same stories. That's why Dawn and Buz don't have the same approach. And most of them have very little familiarity with science in the first place (when you already know all the answers you don't need to study science).That's why we can't get any decent explanation of ID and it's use of the scientific method.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

No i think he is yust making stuff up as he goes along so he does not haveto admit the truth that id is not science. Edited by frako, : No reason given.

Watching Dawn make more than 2250 posts of total gibberish, that even the IDists on EvC do not seem to understand, makes me wonder what the heck his purpose is. He goes on and on about order and law and logic, and now, harmony (and of course, that no one can know anything about past events). I still do not have a clue what these terms mean to him.I think he believes that everything in the Universe is designed, so there is no way to tell the difference between natural and designed. But now he has switched his view and seems to be saying that there is no design???? Illogical.It is funny to read his posts out loud, but that does not capture the hidden humor of all his misspellings.Wouldn't it be great if he hooked up with the IDists at the Discovery Institute? They would go even nuttier trying to communicate with him!

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

Yeah, except he doesn't know what science is either.

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What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty PythonYou can't build a Time Machine without Weird Optics -- S. Valley

Not sure if this is directed to me or to admin, but I'll respond to it. The following are bits from my message 97 that were on topic. To clarify (and take this a little further) were Jerry Coyne and Allen Orr, authors/biologists that Behe referenced, out of line by making reference to "biologically reasonable"?

Admin. I shall see what he has to say about your excerpts. They contain a number of errors that I think are worth correcting. That is certainly a test that we might apply to any ID hypothesis sufficiently concrete to deserve the name "hypothesis".

Marc9000's excerpts include hypotheses and proposed experiments and seem on topic.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

With Percy's permission ... Which is one of several ways that it resembles a snowflake rather than a Chieftain tank. What of it? Again, your point is obscure unless you believe that naturally occurring things don't start or stop, in which case you're wrong. Perhaps you could explain what significance you wish to attach to these quotations. I proved that you were wrong about that at the same time that I pointed out that these discoveries were not "recent and new". Remember?What's "recent and new" is that creationists started being wrong about non-coding DNA. Presumably because it took several decades for the facts about it to percolate from scientists to creationists.The fact that creationists finally got round to taking a half-assed interest in what real scientists had discovered decades earlier does not entitle them to any credit for those discoveries.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Hi DB. Let me try a change of emphahsis. Let's try a real world example and see how your stated methods compare with the scientific method as I am advocating it.REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
My computer won't power up. I press the 'On' button and absolutely nothing happens. I press it again. Zip, nada, nothing. My computer is but a lifeless lump of metal and plastic. I can hear the fridge humming so I know that there isn't a power cut going on. It occurs to me that I should check that the PC is actually plugged in at the wall socket. I heave the desk out of the way and take a look. It is plugged in. Damn. It is now looking likely that I will need some potentially expensive repairs to my computer but I won't give up just yet. I decide to make sure that the power cable itself is not the problem. I have a spare so I swap over the cables and try again. Still no signs of life. I start to prepare myself for the lengthy and expensive process of taking the PC to get repaired but decide to try one last thing. I unplug the computer from the wall socket and plug it into a different wall socket. Hey presto the PC revs up into life!! The beautiful sound of spinning hard disks is music to my ears. It appears that despite it being against all the odds the problem lies with the wall socket rather than the computer. I decide to double check this by plugging in a stereo to the potentially faulty wall socket and do indeed find that the radio is as lifeless as I would expect. I call an electrician.SCIENTIFIC METHOD - FORMAL ANALYSIS
Evidence: PC appears to have no power
Hypothesis 1: Power cut
Test: Audio check that another electrical appliance is still working
Result: Fridge is powered on
Verdict: Hypothesis 1 refuted. New hypothesis required.
Hypothesis 2: PC not plugged into power source
Test: Visual check
Result: Computer is plugged into power source
Verdict: Hypothesis 2 refuted. New hypothesis required.
Hypothesis 3: The power cable is faulty
Test: Replace power cable
Result: PC remains lifeless
Verdict: Hypothesis 3 refuted. New hypothesis required.
Hypothesis 4: Power socket is faulty
Test: Try different power socket
Result: PC powers up
Verdict: Hypothesis 4 verified
Prediction derived as a logical consequence of hypothesis 4: No electrical appliance plugged into the original wall socket should receive any power
Test: Plug stereo into the faulty wall socket
Result: Stereo fails to receive any power
Verdict Hypothesis 4 has been verified to the point where it can be reliably described as a tentative conclusion
Tentative conclusion: The wall socket is faulty and an electrician is needed.Obviously I did not consciously think through my computer problem in this formal "hypothesised" manner. The point is that we ALL use the scientific method ALL of the time without even thinking about it. Because in the absence of ALL of the evidence it is the only method of narrowing down the possibilities and reaching reliable (albeit tentative) conclusions.THE CHALLENGE
Can you show how you would use your ID methodology to solve the simple real life example above? ID methods are fundamentally different because there is no testing of hypotheses. No. ID methods are fundamentally different because there is no testing of hypotheses. See above example. The answer is - ID methods are fundamentally different because there is no testing of hypotheses. I look forward to your response to the example above.

Biologically reasonable quickly swerves away from any ‘scientific method’. Reasonable to whom? To those in the scientific community who are mostly atheists, or to the general public (that funds them) who are mostly religious? Snowflakes are not life, and have nothing do with an interruption of the evolutionary process. The fragility of life (easy death) can interrupt an evolutionary process. An exploration of starts and stops in this case means an examination of time frames involved in the development of a biological system. Development in a continuous manner, or a necessarily discontinuous one. Discontinuous as in long periods of time when nothing happens, increasing chances of death of a developing system, either by a predator, or by extreme temperatures. Life on earth exists in a very narrow temperature range. Dead partially developed systems do not continue to evolve. He describes scientific procedures that are, or may be, of varying degrees of interest to different people, depending on their worldview. Explorations of specificity between components, or continuous/discontinuous as he describes, follow the scientific method. They are not religious in any way. The initiation of their exploration can be accused of being religious, but the studies themselves are not. You gave your opinion, but you didn’t prove anything. As I said, another thread. I only touched on it here to highlight the obvious — questions and challenges to any theory are likely to be more involved when they come from those who are most interested in challenging it. Atheists would be less likely to challenge the junk DNA mindset than would IDists, because it goes along with purposeless naturalism more than with a purposeful designer.