Is ID Scientific? (was "Abusive Assumptions")

Thread moved here from the Suggestions and Questions forum.

I wish I had seen this earlier, as it is pretty clear you were talking about me personally. I didn't say "nutcase", but I did use the terms "bigot" and "moron" while discussing something with you. By the way there are at least two threads where you never answered my replies.Just to clue you in, I did not use "bigot" and "moron" as a reference to all creos and ID theorists. My commentary was quite specific. It was directed at those so incapable of handling contrary opinion, as well as statements of fact, that they actually try to stop a movie from being played (as if they are forced to go).My only slam of ID, is that I believe many of the leaders are merely propagandists, and that those following ID have either been duped by the propaganda, or have not sufficiently read the supporting material. People are asking for the very best tour... the evidence. You have yet to get to it, even in some very basic way and instead continue to hand out the propaganda about ID, which comes from guess where... the leaders of the iD movement.I have read just about everything printed by the ID movement up till 2001. That includes essays. I have continued to read from time to time but not as comprehensively.I was quite interested to see what they had to say. Dembski was riddled with what another poster called "fatal flaws", Behe did not make his case and indeed admitted that much more work had to be done to make the case (and even then evolution may be true, just abiogenesis being the problem), the rest pretty much followed Johnson's lead of trying to poke holes in a competing theory, rather than build their own. Damn I wish I had read that last sentence before writing my responses. Yet another preacher/propagandist for ID theory.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

I perfer to use the term "drive-by bullshit artist".

One might wonder if interns at all these ID "institutes" and "centers" recently popping up, are expected to spend a certain amount of time looking for converts and generally "postering" the ID message all over the place.Kind of using the telemarketing approach and applying it to scientific discussions.I am almost tempted to find a forum area at one of the sites he advertised and act like him, breezing in and telling how they won't listen to me and how could SO MANY MORE SCIENTISTS be mistaken in believing in evo (that will be my only evidence) and then leave.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Is there a decent ID forum? I'm still waiting for someone to post to your thread and tell us what the current state of the field is.Anyone? good ID forum?

I don't know of any good pro-ID forum. TalkDesign | Critically analyzing the Intelligent Design movement is a pretty good anti-ID oneI may get chastised for this, but John Wilkins put it so well at Design continued: Rosemary's Garden that I have nothing more to add or say:

quote:

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Explanations fall in what Alan Garfinkel once called a "contrast space" set up by the variables of the question the explanation seeks to address. "Is Rosemary's Garden designed?" specifies a set of alternatives, and these together make a space of possible "yes/no" answers. Garfinkel illustrated this with the famous question asked of bank robber Willy Sutton: a priest asked him why he robbed banks. Sutton answered, "That's where the money is".

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The priest was expecting a moral answer - Sutton robs banks because he needs the money or because he can't get a job. But Sutton has no moral issue here; it's purely a matter of practicalities. He robs banks rather than, say, druggists, because there's more money there. Sutton has a different contrast space than the priest. Explanations are relative to the contrast space required.When I explain that Rosemary's Garden is the product of design, there's a whole set of contrasts I am relying upon.

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But the way the Intelligent Design crowd employ both the notions of "design" (to be a rarified rather than an ordinary notion), and the notion of "explanation", there is no actual contrast space here - all is fluid. All that matters for them is "saving the theology", not "saving the phenomena". So long as something like a God can be made to seem sensible, all is done that need be done. This is not science, and it's not even compatible with science. It is, and remains, epistemological despair, epistemic nihilism, Knownothingness.

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we used to have a poster called "ID man" that sent me to an ID forum (ISCID?) to discuss a point he could not refute, saying that they would demolish it.I tried it: new posters had to send their posts by e-mail, where they are judged for applicability.needless to say I never got a response to a post I was not allowed to submit.But then, they are interested in pursuing all sides of the question right?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

First, of "specified complexity" is inadequately and inconsistently defined. In true science a concept that is central to the thesis of the argument is carefully defined and delineated to assure congruent comprehension by others, in a manner that they can use it.Second, there is no method given for differentiation between naturally occuring complexity and this ill-defined concept of "specified" complexity because there is no way to make such a differentiation based on the useage. A properly defined concept and methodology would allow different levels of complexity to be evaluated and some {level\distinction\ratio} of "specified" to natural complexity to be assigned and then evaluated to see if the distinction is valid. This concept has not been defined in a manner to make this possible, so it is not testable.Third, and as I have noted before elsewhere: IC has been falsified as a concept of something that could not evolve (and was thus proof of outside assistance). An IC system has been observed evolving.http://biocrs.biomed.brown.edu/Darwin/DI/AcidTest.htmlWhat this means:One IC system has evolved naturally.
The concept that no IC system could evolve naturally is therefor falsified: it is invalidated, it has failed the test.Consider this a "test" of the scientific approach to this issue by ID proponents:
In true science falsified concepts are discarded,
Therefore IC should be discarded if ID is true science.IC has not been discarded, but is being touted just as much now as it was before being invalidated.Therefore ID is not true science, it does not use the scientific process.Perhaps you could show one ID site that acknowledges that IC is no longer a valid concept as evidence for ID.Furthermore, please not that invalidation of IC does not in and of itself invalidate the concept of ID, and that therefore IC is not a test of ID. This means that there still is no test for ID -- what is needed is a test that if result {A} happens then ID - and only ID - is correct, but if {A} does not happen then ID is invalid.Perhaps you could show one ID site that lists such a test.Not one of the other things listed under the "testability" FAQ in any way provides a methodology to differentiate exactly the same thing happening under evolution. This is not a test, it is masquerading as a test.ID has not met the minimum requirements of science to be a scientific theory, it does not have a falsifiable test, it is not science.This is not a matter of ridicule or opinion, this is the hard reality of science. The same hard reality that ashmore faces with his concept of tired light.The same hard reality that several scientific theories are facing right now, that have actual falsifiable tests, but where the test conditions have not occurred yet (quite a few in physics).Do the science, then get the recognition.Enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

You are right to say that "specified complexity" is vague - in fact it has two quite distinct meanings.In the first sense it is true that we find it in life - but that is not surprising. Indeed, life is necessarily both complex and specified and scientists were talking in those terms before the current ID movement started. Evolution is a pretty good explanation for this sort of specified complexity so it isn't much of a point for ID in that case either.In the second sense coined by Dembski, it would help ID. It's just that nobody has actually FOUND it in life. Dembski's most famous attempt was a complete botch (he didn't do ANY of the calculations he needed to do, and the calculation he did do was irrelevant).For some reason ID supporters almist never boother to explain which definition they are using.

yes. the question to IDists is: what is the degree of "specified complexity" in a human eye as compared to the degree of "specified complexity" in a salamander eye.if you cannot measure the difference the term is useless and has no meaning.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Well the general use of the term was never intended to be a strict quantitative measurement.Dembski's usage is strictly two-valued - yes or no. However, it does require a measure of Specified Information which would be exactly what you ask for (it reqires defining a bound and if the Specified Information measure exceeds that bound it is dubbed "Complex"). Unfortunately actually performing the measure for non-trivial examples seems to be impractical which makes Dembski's idea a theoretical curiosity at best.

one would also need to demonstrate by experiment and documentation of evidence that there are levels of "complexity" that cannot evolve.then you can test to see if that level has been exceeded.if it has then you check to make sure your original limit was correct and have the result duplicated by other researchers, including critics.that would be scientific.my personal take on this is that "specific complexity" is from only looking through the eyepiece of the kaleidoscope at the pretty picture, while the reality is that the jumbled bits are readily observable to the overall view. the complexity is in the eye of the beholder and not based on reality.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Dembski deals with that objection quite simply. His measure of "information" is improbability (or to be more precise the base 2 logarithm of the probability multiplied by -1, so the sign is positive).He then tries to calculate a universal probability bound such that it is unlikely that any event so improbable will happen even once in a time confortably greater than the current age of the universe. And that is the usual limit used for "complexity".

ah, so "complexity" is proportional to incredulity.without even getting to the errors in the calculations of probability and the post hoc ergo propter hoc of figuring out probability after something has happened when innumerable equally valid end results could have occured.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

You've pretty much got it. As I mentioned earlier there has been only one "serious" published attempt to apply Dembski's definition to biology. And that was a total disaster.