Teleological Science?

Greetings Eclogite and welcome to EvC. I have to agree with you there, but then Deism has always seemed a little pointless to me. Certainly, if one were to discover evidence of ID, it would seem logical to keep an open mind about the identity of the designer. Now this I disagree with. There may be a tendency to only observe what one desires to see, but any good scientist is aware of this tendency and makes an effort to be as impartial as possible. This tendency is by no means any kind of hard and fast rule. If scientists looked only for evidence that backed up the consensus, there would never be any instances of sea-change, such as in the case of Helicobacter pylori and peptic ulcers. Taken from here.The scientists in this case weren't looking for a bacterial cause of ulcers, it wasn't even on their radar. They simply followed available leads and went where the evidence led them. When new and compelling data became available, they changed their thinking. They initially faced a good deal of hostility from the medical establishment (to its shame) but eventually the new thinking won through; Dr.s Marshall and Warren received the Nobel prize for their efforts.Science, properly practised, need not consider every possible explanation at every possible instance. The truth will out if one follows where the evidence leads, with as open a mind as it is practically possible to maintain.No evidence currently exists for ID (with or without capitalisation). To insist that scientists should consider ID-based explanations implies that they should also consider other evidence-free concepts, such as fairies, ancestor spirits or witches. After all, if they didn't consider witchcraft as a possiblity, they might miss the subtle signs of witchcraft that might be right under their noses, right?It's not possible to consider every contingency imaginable. One must simply follow the data. Actually, I can think of a few more;3) No-one is looking in the right places.
4) No-one is looking in the way.
5) No-one is clever enough to interpret the data correctly.You could tag the word "yet" onto all of those reasons as well. If ID has any veracity whatever, it will become apparent, via the scientific method, sooner or later. There is no need to change how science is pursued. I can only echo Stile; I would love to see this evidence of teleology. I haven't seen any myself.

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Mutate and Survive

None of which comes even remotely close to to proving your point about scientists needing to bear every possible theory in mind. You don't even address this. My Helicobactor pylori example refuted your argument, but you have chosen to ignore it.BTW, Kuhn who? I don't know who this is. If you are going to suggest that some outside source agrees with you it is only fair that you give a link, or at the very least, enough information for people to follow up on. Stile, not Stiles.But you have failed to demonstrate that anyone involved in the process of discovering plate tectonics followed your method. Plate tectonics took a long time to become accepted because the evidence that supported it was a long time coming, and came from many fields. I fail to see how this is even relevant to your argument. Of course they might, so might anything. To demonstrate teleology in nature, you must demonstrate that they are designed, not just might or maybe. You may think that something looks designed, but that might just be because you haven't worked out the real answer yet.

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Mutate and Survive

It is implicate in your argument. If scientists must consider teleology as an explanation for anything they study, then why should they disregard anything at all? As I asked before, should scientists consider the possibility of witchcraft in their work? If they must consider an idea such as teleology in nature, then why not fairies, or some other phenomenon, for which the evidence is on a par with teleology. It is merely the inevitable logical conclusion of your argument. Unless you are suggesting that scientists should consider absolutely everything, then you need to provide some reason why teleology should be considered above, say, voodoo.The reason that some theories are given more consideration than others is very simple; evidence. There is no evidence for teleology. If there were, it would be considered. Since there is not, it is ignored. If you can find some evidence for teleology then it would be taken into account in science. Until then, it remains on a par with witchcraft and rain dances. Teleology has had its day and science has moved on to considering ideas that are actually useful. What the majority of scientific work actually entails is the making of observations. This doesn't require the acceptance or rejection of anything. There is little point in questioning the prevailing paradigm unless one has an observation that seems to contradict it. Contrary to what you seem to think, the search for such observations is the very bread and butter of modern science. Thanks for providing the reference. I would dispute that Kuhn's work is as well known as Origins though. I just popped both titles into Googlefight, and Kuhn's book came out with a mere 1,850,000 results, compared to 7,410,000 for Origins.Here is a quote from 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', where Kuhn is discussing paradigm shift;

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First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem solving activity that has accrued to science through its predecessors.

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Teleology is very far from passing these tests, especially the first.As for plate tectonics, it is a very poor comparison to modern science; all this happened many years ago and the standard of scientific work has been refined and improved since then. Well, is that your position? If so, you must recognise that it is not possible to consider all possibilities at once. We must necessarily concentrate on the most useful concepts. The line has to be drawn somewhere; this is not dogmatism, it is practical necessity. They rejected it because they lacked key pieces of evidence that would allow them to make cohesive sense of the idea. From the wiki article on plate tectonics;

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The discovery of radium and its associated heating properties in 1896 prompted a re-examination of the apparent age of the Earth,[3] since this had been estimated by its cooling rate and assumption the Earth's surface radiated like a black body.[4] Those calculations implied that, even if it started at red heat, the Earth would have dropped to its present temperature in a few tens of millions of years. Armed with the knowledge of a new heat source, scientists reasoned it was credible that the Earth was much older, and also that its core was still sufficiently hot to be liquid.

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Before information like this was available, the plate hypothesis lacked crucial details of evidence that it needed in order to make it credible. Without the knowledge of radium, the theory seemed to have a serious hole in it. Still, it was nonetheless pursued, just as you suggest that left-field ideas should be. It was pursued because, whatever the problems with the idea, it did have evidence in its favour. This is where your comparison between plate tectonics and teleology breaks down. There just isn't any evidence for teleology. The two examples are not equivalent.What is important about both the example of plate tectonics and H.pylori is that they were both accepted eventually. They were not stopped, merely delayed. You are quite right in pointing out that stubborn adherence to an existing paradigm is one of the potential flaws in how science is carried out, but insisting that scientists consider outdated and useless hypotheses in order to counter it is absurd. Scientists must keep an open mind and be receptive to new explanations, but if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out. You say this as though there were any such suggestions. There aren't. If I'm wrong, please point out where these "suggestions" can be found. You have yet to demonstrate that lack of interest in teleology lies at the heart of modern science.Bottom line; should scientists retain an open mind? Of course.
Should non-evidenced concepts such as teleology be considered in the everyday work of research scientists? Not unless you are willing to consider every conceivable non-evidenced hypothesis. Unless you can provide a reason to consider teleology, it will continue to be listed amongst the infinite number of ideas that are not considered, from teleology to time travel.

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Mutate and Survive

Hi Brad,I shan't pretend that I was able to follow your discussion of genetic coding etc. I'm afraid you lost me there.What I will say is that if you want to look for evidence of teleology in nature, then be my guest. What I object to is the suggestion made by eclogite that scientists ought to be looking for it.As you say, we cannot entirely rule out teleological explanations, but we do not have convincing evidence of design in nature at present. Indeed, all the observations of biology seem to be entirely consistent with a purposeless universe. Until real evidence for design in nature is found, I see no reason why professional scientists ought to be obliged to give this non-evidence based concept any kind of special favour as compared to any other fanciful idea.

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Mutate and Survive