Can't ID be tested AT ALL?

Hi Crashfrog, Once again, I have never said anything about a "non-natural explanation". The point you seem to have trouble understanding is that we may be incapable of providing an explanation at all. I find your disdain for philosophy more than a little naive. If most of the scientists you know have never heard of Popper, you have found a particular ignorant group of scientists to work with. And if Popper is the most contemporary philospher of science you can name, you seem to ignorant in this area as well. Emergent phenomena (both ontological and epistemological), chaotic complexity, and our general inability to reduce complex dynamic interactions, for starters. Very little of what we know can actually be reduced to fundamental physics. You are mistaken - please show where I introduced "supernatural" into this discussion. Hmm, let's see. You have said: And Percy has said: (emphasis added)So I believe you are mistaken again. As I have already pointed out: There are many things science can't explain. Some of these things - such as our subjective awareness - appear to be utterly resistent to explanation within our scientific understanding, and to blithely state that consciousness arises from the brain or that it must and does emerges from physical activity in the brain is overstating our knowledge (the fact that you cannot understand the importance of distinguishing necessary and sufficient conditions in scientific explanations notwithstanding).

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

That seems obvious. But neither one of us can predict the future, and since there's no way to know what explanations can't be reached, it seems fruitless to proceed from the assumption that something can't ever be explained. What's the merit of that assumption? That's fine, I guess. I find your enthusiasm for it ridiculous. But let me assure you - if you think my disdain is based on a lack of familiarity with philosophy, or ignorance of it, you're mistaken. Sure, they're ignorant about philosophy. That was the point, didn't you understand that? Knowledge of philosophy is as irrelevant to the prosecution of science as knowledge of last night's American Idol winner, the self-important delusions of so-called "philosophers of science" notwithstanding. Who said anything about him being the most contemporary philosopher of science?I think you'll find you have more success if you actually address my arguments, not strawmen. I would say that heat is the most obvious emergent phenomena, easily reduced to fundamental physics.And chaos? You like to toss out accusations of ignorance but you seem to betray your own. The entire premise of chaos is that great apparent complexity can emerge from very simple rules.Reductionism, as you self-importantly dub it, has made great strides in understanding the natural forces in play around us and harnessing them to human use. Wholism and wholistic thinking have produced no knowledge whatsoever. And how could they? How could you even begin to understand something by refusing to examine it in detail? I already did. Are you changing your assertions? Percy doesn't speak for me, so Percy's impression of my words are irrelevant. "Utterly resistant?" You've already said we've made "movement on that front." (Your exact words.) Which is it? You don't seem to know, which I guess is why you're arguing out of both sides of your mouth. Nonsense. That consciousness arises from the brain is trivially demonstrated. I don't reccommend that you do, but one trivial proof would be for you to surgically remove your brain and see what happens to your consciousness. Sigh. Look, name-calling doesn't constitute an argument, and the fact that I disagree with you about something isn't sufficient reason for me to conclude that I'm some kind of idiot. But I'm beginning to understand that name-calling and derision is the best that so-called "philosophy" has to bring to the table.

I'm beginning to get the feeling that you're defining the natural as that which science is able to explain. It isn't. The natural is that which science is able to study.--Percy

From what I gather, Chalmers makes the claim that physical matter may have non-physical properties which may underlie consciousness. This also leads to support for panpsychism (suggesting matter is dependent on mind).I'm quite sure that given 50 years we'll have a solid materialist explanation. Cognitive and Affective neuroscience are pretty new sciences, it gives lots of space for philosophy, most of which is pretty unfalsifiable. Even defining qualia is an issue.

Hi Percy, I disagree. Think about "action at a distance". Newton accepted that gravity was a force that acted unmediated across space. Einstein believed that only local causality was possible, and that action at a distance was impossible. Then quantum physics reintroduced that concept in yet an even stranger way. QM changed a great deal about what we believe is "natural", including that the physical world is deterministic (which is a very big deal indeed). We cannot scientifically study things that have no effect on the natural world, right. I'm surprised at people's animosity toward philosophy. I can only believe you have not studied it. There of course would be no science at all without philosophy. Where do you think concepts like "methodological naturalism" come from? I think you have expressed merely a necessary truth (a truth by definition). Of course I agree. It is not merely complexity that makes this impossible. Not only can we not reduce our consciousness to physics, for example, but we can't even explain how it is that we reason. There are very difficult and currently unsolved problems in my own field, AI, and there are some very bright people who make very good arguments that thought is not algorithmic. We currently do not have very good reason to believe it is or it isn't. But you've said it again! You are not justified in saying this. You can only say that if we are to understand a phenomenon in terms of physical interactions, then the phenomena must in fact derive from those interactions. These are two different statements. The first - the one you made - is philosphical naturalism, and the second - what you should have said - is methodological naturalism. Only the latter is scientific. I have never said this. I have said it may, or it may not. At this point it isn't clear what you think. On one hand you say if consciousness transcends the physical, then "it cannot be studied by science", which is all well and good. On the other hand you say that consciousness does not, and can not, transcend the physical, which is simply a statement of materialist dogma. Roger Penrose (Nobel laureate, physics). John Eccles (Nobel laureate, physiology). Eugene Wigner (Nobel laureate, physics). David Bohm. Henry Stapp. Stuart Hameroff. Scott Hagen. Jack Tuszynski....And many highly respected (outside of this forum, anyway) philosophers believe this as well. Science can study anything that a scientist wishes to study. Whether or not that study will ever - can ever - result in an explanation is the point. If there are causes that transcend physical interactions as we understand them, then science - as we understand it - will not explain them. If WE DO NOT KNOW, then this always remains a possibility. And once again you say that I agree with. I would encourage you to review your statements and see that you really have vacillated between statements of epistemological and methodological naturalism. Saying that "consciousness arises from physical interactions because it must" is the former; saying that "if it doesn't then science can't study it" is the latter. These are two very different statements. Not to me. In any case, we do agree on what is amenable and not amenable to scientific investigation. You (and Crash) however lapse into materialist dogma when you say all things must be explainable within physicalism. Rather, you need to say "They may or may not be physical, but if they aren't, science can't study them" (until we change our physics so that we can actually have empirical investigations of them).

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

Hi Crashfrog, I have never made that assumption - if you think I have, please show me where. Sadly, yes. I have never said that knowledge of philosophy is relevant to the day-to-day prosecution of science. If you think I have, please show me where. I do find your demeaning attitude towards the discipline disconcerting, though, and I do think that philosophy is an important part of a liberal education. I think I've addressed both your arguments and your snide comments about philosophy, neglecting neither. I would say that heat is the most tractable emergent phenomena. There are really two types of emergent phenomena, sometimes called "strong" and "weak" (or ontological and epistemological) emergence. Consciousness is considered to be strongly emergent, since nobody has any idea how physical interactions can give rise to subjective experience. Weakly emergent phenomena include results of complexity theory, and properties of matter such as solidity and liquidity which emerge based on principles (e.g. symmetry) not entirely associated with constituent components (e.g. the molecules) themselves. Easy now. The point about chaotic complexity is that the results are epistemologically emergent, and the instances are not strictly reducible to component interactions. Self-importantly dub it? Uh, actually I didn't make up this term, and I really don't see how this speaks to my importance one way or the other. Let's relax a bit here, shall we? Nobody is doubting the amazing success of the reductionist paradigm, Crash. Rather, I am suggesting that there are limits to it, which in no way detracts from its successes. And nobody has suggested that holistic thinking has produced scientific knowledge, either - if you think I have, please show me where. No, you didn't, and no, I'm not. Please simply provide the quote from my post where I introduced "supernatural" into this discussion. Please, Crash, let's just relax a bit. If you read what I said, you'll see that the progress I've referred to has been in identifying the neurological correlates of consciousness. We have made no progress in framing an explanation of consciousness per se. In that case, we can demonstrate that the movement of your car arises from your ignition key (remove your key and see what happens), and that fire arises from only wood (remove the wood from a campfire and see what happens).So you see, this distinction between necessary and sufficient causes really is important after all. There are necessary causes that are not sufficient, and there are sufficient causes that are not necessary. First, you had said: "The necessary/sufficient dichotomy is not one that I find meaningful." Second, I have called you no names nor indicated that I think you are an idiot (if you think I have, please show us where). And finally, I am not a philosopher (I do commercial research in AI), so whatever you think of me ought not to reflect on your respect (or lack of same) for philosophers.Edited by aiguy, : removed unintended frowny face made by juxtaposing colon and left paren

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

These "you said", "no I didn't" things can get pretty confusing to dissect, but Aiguy seems to be trying to cut his distinctions mighty fine, and as far as I can tell you and I are in agreement. To put it in my own words this time, I believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of underlying, low-level physical processes within the brain that are nothing more than interactions of matter and energy.--Percy

Hi melatonin -Yes, that's my read of Chalmers too. But his real contribution was to get people to admit that there is a "hard problem" of consciousness - an explanatory gap between what sorts of things we can explain physically and the experience of conscious awareness that we can verify inter-subjectively, but apparently not explain in objective terms.

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

Hi Percy,I think you and Crash are in agreement, and that you both think we are justified in claiming that consciousness arises from nothing but physcis as we understand it.I disagree, and believe that consciousness has no explanation at all, and appears to be a very different sort of thing than everything else that science can explain (in that it is, after all, an inherently subjective phenomenon). Thus, I claim we do not have a justification to say it will necessarily be explicable scientifically at all.And when you say science can study consciousness - well, yes and no. Since all we can study are objectively observable things (neurology and behavior), it isn't actually consciousness that we are studying at all, but only the objectively accessible aspects of it.

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

Just now:

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The point you seem to have trouble understanding is that we may be incapable of providing an explanation at all.

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You're clearly putting forth that assumption as reasonable. I see it as meritless. Again, these are the exact comments you made before dinner on this very day:

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Reductionism is in high disrepute, if you haven't heard, from scientists and philosophers of science alike (and I'm not talking about anti-science folks and IDers here).

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Clearly you think philosophy is of such crucial importance to science that you feel that the disdain of a philosopher is sufficient to disqualify a methodology from science.Look, I'm not having any trouble at all here understanding your statements. Why are you having such difficulty all of a sudden remembering them? It's going to be hard to continue debate with you if you have no memory of what's come before. It's like I'm arguing with the main character from Memento. It's obvious to me that you've done nothing of the sort. Pretty much all you've done is level accusations of ignorance. And I'm still waiting for you to address the original question. Ah, yes. Of course, in philosophy, there's no requirement to be consistent in one's terminology; definitions can be redacted and altered at a moment's notice to suit the argument of the minute.Single-handedly, you're proving the irrelevance of philosophy. Congratulations, I guess. But if they're emergent, that's exactly what it means - that they can be reduced to their component interactions.Sure, it may not be easy to do so, and our understanding as a result may bear little resemblance to the casual understanding of the whole - much as the kinetic motion of atoms seems far removed from our experience of heat and temperature.So what? The idea that reductionism can be hard doesn't strike me as a mark against it - not when the alternative is simplistic, woolly thinking. Well, great. When we hit the limits, we'll let you know. So far, though, we've pretty handily walked right past every other "limit" on reductionism that has ever been proposed. And if the limit is the limit of what can coherently be described in language - as the idea of the "supernatural", which appears to be undefinable, would suggest - I'm not too worried we're likely to hit it soon. I didn't say that you did. I simply used "supernatural" to refer to a concept that you introduced, as did Percy.I'm sorry if you don't like it as a synonym, but that's what it is - a synonym for the very concepts you've been introducing. That is, phenomenon that could be studied naturally but isn't natural. We're certainly not the ones who brought that malarkey up, surely you agree? And as I originally contended, and you have not been able to refute - the neurological correlates are the explanation, and the explanation will increase in sufficiency as our understanding of the neurology increases. It does arise from the key, because the car is designed to require the key as a proximate cause. It also arises from the transmission, from the engine, from the gas, and from all the other parts that, when they are absent, leave the car motionless.What it most definitely doesn't arise from is any kind of supernatural car-soul, or any other "naturally-studied phenomenon that isn't natural." And the same techniques that allow us to conclude that about cars allow us to conclude that about people. I've burned other things besides wood, I guess. These examples don't bear any analogous relationship to actual scientific thought processes. I hardly find your vocational qualifications relevant. Since you're advancing the claims of philosophy, and using the work of philosophy to buttress your claims, for all intents and purposes you're a philosopher, because you're engaged in philosophy.If you're so concerned about my opinion of you, though, you could do much to redeem it by actually addressing my arguments.

Can science study the atom, or only the objectively accessible aspects of it?

Hi Crashfrog, I believe the words "may be" are clearly indicative that I make no assumption one way or another. It is you who assume that our understanding of physics must necessarily ultimately provide some sort of explanation for consciousness. I remain uncommited, which is why I said "may be" rather than "are". The part about how this is supposed to affect scientists in their day-to-day work seems to be missing from this quote. Perhaps you were thinking of something else? I believe it is important to carefully articulate what distinguishes scientific knowledge from all other types. The ID movement capitalizes on ambiguities and misunderstanding of science. It is very difficult to capture the distinguishing features of science, and the ones who are most qualified to do so are trained philosophers. I liked that movie, but my memory is just fine. As I've pointed out, no fair reading of what I actually wrote matches your paraphrased interpretations. Sorry, but now perhaps I am forgetting. Which argument that you've made to me have I failed to respond to? As for the original question - are you referring to "Is ID Testable"? If that is what you mean, my answer is unequivocally "no". In my view, the alternative to knowing something is not knowing it, rather than pretending to know it in some simplistic, woolly(?) way. I'm not accusing you of this - I mean I agree that non-emprically-based explanations are no substitute for science. Can you point to where we've figured out abiogenesis, or how human memory works? I seem to have missed those papers. Now, please: I am NOT saying there is some reason to assume we will never answer these questions!!! The ONLY thing that I believe may turn out to be resistant to reductionist science is consciousness. Not the physical correlates of consciousness, and not the evaluation of human verbal reports of consciousness, but of consciousness itself - that inner light that we all experience, our subjective mental experience. I cannot imagine what sort of physical explanation can account for this at all. I said that scientists can undertake a study of whatever they choose - it's just that they may not be able to make any progress. That is the case with consciousness per se. There are some people (like Penrose) who have gone out on speculative limbs, and there are some (like Dennett) who solve the problem of consciousness by denying it exists. But there has been no progress at all in generating any sort of scientific explanation of why we have a subjective inner awareness. Some people agree, and some do not, and there is no settled science on the matter. What do you think these correlates are, and how do they give rise to consciousness? Are you certain that these neurological correlates are necessary, or could an appropriately configured computer also be conscious? Why couldn't we reason and behave in exactly the same we do, but be like unconsicous robots rather than conscious entities? I disagree. I can make my car move with no ignition key by crossing the wires, so apparently the ignition key was not actually necessary. I don't know what you mean by car-soul, so I don't think we can evaluate that suggestion. Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe consciousness could arise from computers, as Dennett believes. Maybe it requires actual biological brains, like Searle believes. Maybe there is a universal platonic logic that affects quantum superposition in microtubles like Penrose believes. Maybe there is a property of pre-consciousness in all matter, or maybe... Huh? Identifying necessary and sufficient conditions are essential to evaluating scientific explanations. If you concluded that fire arose only from wood in the same manner that you have decided consciousness arises only from brains, then you would simply be mistaken, having confused a sufficient cause with a necessary one. No, I'm really not at all, but yes, I will be glad to address whatever argument you've posed that I've missed. Please be so kind as to reiterate whatever point you've made that I've failed to respond to. There are no properties of the atom that we are aware of that we cannot investigate by objective experiment. The concept of an atom is well defined, and we can explain and predict all sorts of phenomena consistently. In contrast, the phenomena of consciousness is inherently inaccessible to all objective study. If this were not the case, we would be able to evaluate any particular thing and say if it was or was not conscious. As it is, we can't even do this will human beings reliably (cf Terri Schiavo). But when it comes to other things, we really have no way of telling scientifically at all.Is a dog conscious? A lizard? A fly? Is consciousness graded? If so, what does it mean to be "sort of" conscious?

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

Again, I never said "must."Just, if I had to guess, I'd confidently guess "yes." Because the alternative guess is useless. The assumption you're not sure if you hold or not is meritless. To the contrary; I see that meaning very clearly in your statement. Clearly, though, that's nonsense. Scientists would be most qualified to capture what distinguishes their fields, since they're right there doing work in their field. So you say. I'm satisfied to leave others to make their own determination about that. I think it's pretty obvious that you've been trying to have things both ways in several posts now. The one that started this whole business. You replied to the message earlier today.More memory issues? Then why bring them up? If I stated somewhere that all scientific questions have been answered, then I have to ask you to provide a quote.Regardless, though, we've made progress in those fields, which would seem to suggest that these aren't intractable issues beyond the limits of science. Just, hard problems. I think it won't, but neither one of us can predict the future; moreover, I find your pessimism ultimately fruitless. What's to be gained by giving up? Patterns of neural connections exchanging neurotransmitters in response to activation thresholds.That didn't seem so hard. Do we have one? You keep using that term but I don't know what it refers to. And I don't see how it represents an intractable problem for science. Just because you put that word "subjective" in there? I can't do that, so the key is necessary for me. What is necessary is some way to close the ignition switch. Either by turning the key or by shorting across the switch.Brains are clearly necessary. I've seen no evidence that they're not sufficient. Probably a computer, though, could take the place of the brain, but some kind of hardware is necessary, and probably sufficient. (This is where your necessary/sufficient dichotomy seems completely useless - multiple different equivalent things, only one of which is necessary. Are the rest not necessary? Are they all not necessary, since as long as one is left, you can take away as many as you like? Or are they equally co-necessary?) What would be the difference, exactly? I would suggest that the majority of humans are unconscious robots, most of the time.That's not cynicism. The majority of the human experience is spent in instinctive behavior, responding passively, not in a state of conscious self-reflection. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of "subjective" consciousness or whatever to explain. Nonsense, since science is regularly done without this "necessary/sufficient" ridiculousness. It's a useless concept as far as I can tell that has nothing to do with function in the real world.

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From what evidence do you conclude that your intelligence is not the product of natural causes?

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That's what I want to know. You've repeated your conclusion - consciousness is not, in your view, the result of purely natural causes - almost to distraction, but I keep getting stymied when I ask for the reasoning.To conclude from a lack of physical explanation is to make an appeal to ignorance; moreover, it isn't even accurate since we have partial explanations for how consciousness arises in the brain. To conclude from the assumption that consciousness is beyond the limits of science is, again, making an appeal to ignorance. And we know of no properties of mind that can't ever be investigated the same way. There may or may not be properties we don't know how to investigate yet. You think, apparently, that subjectivity is a part of that, but I don't follow that reasoning (and can't, since you won't lay it out for me.) As it turned out, everybody who wasn't motivated by playing politics was pretty much able to discern her lack of consciousness accurately. And, in the end, the realization that she literally had no cerebrum allowed for a completely reliable diagnosis.But I find it rather amusing that consciousness, to you, is at once so simple and obvious that it need not be defined nor any rigorous method necessary to conclude that it's all over the place; yet simultaneously so complicated that any explanation is inherently impossible.I don't know, consciousness doesn't seem all that amazing or special to me. The question to me is not why people are conscious; the much more interesting question is - if people are supposedly conscious, why are they so generally stupid?

Hi crashfrog, Well, you said "Nonsense. The brain is the explanation." (emphasis in the original)
We do, however, know that human brains are sufficient for consciousness.
That seems like a fairly clear expression of certainty to me. But if now you say it's just a guess, then we agree. I only object to dogmatic certainty on the matter, not on somebody's guess. I strongly disagree - that would be a bit like saying policemen are the authorities on law. There is actually a great deal of subtlety in thinking about epistemology, logic, language, argumentation, etc., and scientists are not trained in those areas. (Also - you're a bit quick with this charge of "nonsense" - you might disagree with my view, but it certainly was not "nonsensical"). You do insist on putting words in my mouth, time and time again. Instead of making up my arguments for me and then deriding them, I suggest you actually read what I write. I have never said we should give up, of course. That's funny. I suppose I could explain memory by... neurotransmitters and activation thresholds. And how we learn language, and how we solve the frame problem, and... Why not just say that everything is explained by the fundamental physical forces, and be done with it? The thing that Mary learns is called the qualia of seeing color. It is what is missing, currently, from physicalist accounts of mind. You have argued that there is no meaning in the "necessary/sufficient dichotomy", and you have argued that we know that consciousness arises from the brain because if you remove the brain, consciousness ceases. However, the necessary/sufficient dichotomy is essential to science, and so you are mistaken. To illustrate, I pointed out that although if you took the key out of the ignition of a car it would stop, this did not mean that the key was a necessary component of car motion - and of course I'm right, cars are perfectly capable of moving without an ignition key. Of course brains are necessary for consciousness in human beings, yes, but we do not know if they are necessary for consciousness in general, because we do not know what causes consciousness. Gasoline is necessary for motion in gasoline-powered cars, but it is not necessary for motion in electric cars. Would you care to say why you think a computer could replace a brain and still be conscious, given that you have just explained consciousness as the result of neurotransmitters - which do not exist inside of computers? Are you making this up as you go along? Sorry, but it is not "my" necessary/sufficient dichotomy. Understanding the difference is essential to understanding scientific explanations, as I've tried to illustrate. Sorry, but I don't understand your question. Which multiple different things are equivalent here? Brains and computers? Neurons and transistors? Nobody knows what causes consciousness, and so nobody knows if computers can be conscious or not. See the thought experiment about Mary, above. That is a very ideosyncratic view. Most people agree that human beings experience consciousness, and that we can distinguish between conscious and unconscious states in people. If you ever have surgery, I would suggest you ask the anethesiologist to make sure you are unconscious, just to be on the safe side. This is getting tiresome. It is not "nonsense" of course. I have already pointed out that although by your logic you would conclude that ignition keys explain car motion (because if you remove them the car will stop) in fact they are neither necessary nor sufficient components of car motion (since we agreed we the cars could run without them, and they won't run with them if they are missing an engine). I have also pointed out that by your logic you would conclude that fire arose only from wood (because if you took the wood away the fire would go out), when in fact wood is only a sufficient substrate for fire, rather than a necessary one (because other things burn).If you make such elementary errors with such simple examples, one can only imagine what sort of nonsense you'd come up with if you actually tried to generate scientific explanations of things without regard to this distinction. Are you joking? I have never said I have concluded human intelligence is not the product of natural causes, so you are once again putting words in my mouth! I have never said that consciousness is not the result of purely natural causes either - not once! Do you not understand the difference between "maybe, maybe not" and "definitely no"? Do you not understand the difference between saying "nobody knows" and "I'm certain it is false"? What is wrong with you? Everybody can read these pages, and everybody can see that I have never said any such thing. Please stop building these straw men!Here is what I have said in this thread: I will gladly leave it to readers of this thread to decide if I have said "I conclude consciousness is not the result of natural causes", or if I have said "WE DO NOT KNOW". I have asked you several times for how you think consciousness arises in brains, and you have failed to answer: You simply make these assertions, but you ignore my requests for you to back them up.Since I have clearly stated many times now that the question of how consciousness arises is unanswered, and that it might or might not be answerable within our current understanding of physics, your charge of "appeal to ignorance" is utterly groundless. We cannot investigate what it is that Mary learned when she was released from her black-and-white room. We cannot investigate what it is like to be a bat. And you have failed again to respond to my questions, and so I will repeat them:Is a dog conscious? A lizard? A fly? Is consciousness graded? If so, what does it mean to be "sort of" conscious? How do you scientifically support your conclusions? Glad you're amused. But stop putting words in my mouth, will you? You seem like an angry fellow. Please don't take it out on me, OK?Edited by aiguy, : No reason given.Edited by aiguy, : No reason given.

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Science is not simply reason - it is much less than that. It is reason constrained by empiricism.

I agree with you when you say that life is capable of reproduction and adaptation - though I'd have to add that it is even better at not reproducing and failing to adapt. Its the first part of this quote, however, that I have the major problem with. The judgement that life seems very well ordered and that it works extremely well can surely only be comparative - and to what are you comparing life? Is life more ordered than diamond? Does it work better than a volcano? If you don't know what the purpose of things are - if you can't even be entirely sure that they have a purpose - how can you make these judgements? I agree that the feeling of consciousness and self-consciousness are pretty amazing (and at the same time are utterly mundane). However, I don't find your argument that this amazingness translates into a convincing argument for the existence of an intelligent designer. I could for example make an analogous argument about the sun. After all, the sun burns at a temperature of 5 Mega Kelvin at the corona. How on earth do you expect me to believe that something that burns so hot can be the product of natural causes? I suppose if we all had an unshakable conviction that an ID had to exist then this might be significant. However, I for one don't, and I know a lot of other people who don't either. To me this makes the belief in ID look more like software than firmware.Edited by Tusko, : Spulleng