So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY)

How do you square this statement with the information provided by Dwise1 in Message 54?--Percy

Hi JB1740,This is where I think you go in a direction that only confuses the issue, especially in a thread with creationists seeking support for their claim that Archaeopteryx is just a bird: For creationists, this statement from you says they're right, case closed. As much as you might prefer this way of expressing it, it communicates a different message to creationists. I know you said "basal" and qualified it with "primitive", but Creationists either reject or don't understand the context in which your preferred way of stating this can be properly interpreted, and so insisting on saying it this way, and again let me repeat, particularly in this thread, is working against yourself, and against the others in this thread trying to explain why Archaeopteryx is not just a bird.If by some stroke of luck Archaeopteryx were still extant today, would it be placed in the Aves class with modern birds? Not an easy option to argue for, is it? So I think it might be better to instead say that Archaeopteryx was a bird predecessor and do what Dwise1 did, enumerate the similarities and differences with both dinosaurs and modern birds.There's also an inconsistency in your approach. Given the number of shared characteristics with both dinosaurs and birds, if you feel it accurate to state "Archaeopteryx is a basal bird," then you must agree it would be equally accurate to state "Archaeopteryx is an advanced dinosaur," and hopefully just mere consideration of these statements as both true points out the inadequacy of these types of "all or none" statements. I think Dwise1 would agree with you that Archaeopteryx shares many characteristics with Aves, but it also shares many characteristics with dinosaurs. It seems you want to emphasize what Archaeopteryx is a transitional to and ignore what it is a transitional from.--Percy

Hi JB1740,Thanks for the reply, well done! It isn't easy for a true expert to gently correct a nudnik who has the gall to try to correct him, but in this you succeeded. It also isn't easy for a true expert to convince said nudnik that he really is a true expert, or at least knows much more than said nudnik, and in this you also succeeded.And so I now understand that the preponderance of scientific opinion is that Archaeopteryx is a bird. A very primitive bird, but still a bird. I still feel very uncomfortable with the "Archaeopteryx is a bird" statement, though. I think that in the presence of creationists this should never be stated without immediately noting how different it is from modern birds with many dinosaur traits that modern birds do not possess. Perhaps a mention might also be made of the somewhat arbitrary nature of classification systems, though this might go over their heads.--Percy

Hi Way!In terms of how observation and experiment should be conducted as part of good science, I think we're all in agreement here. You differ with us in believing that an intelligent designer should be acceptable as a proposed scientific explanation. That doesn't seem too much to ask, so I think I'll agree with you that that is a reasonable request.But given that only 1% of the scientific community is convinced by the ID answer, and far less of the biological subset of that community, your task becomes one of persuading them that an intelligent designer is not only an acceptable explanation, it is the best explanation supported by the evidence.You see, the objection to an an intelligent designer isn't that he is inherently unscientific, but rather that there is scarce scientific evidence for him. You have to convince the scientific community that he exists before you can begin convincing them of his involvement in the changes in life over time.--Percy

Incredibly actively pursued, in fact. My issue of Biblical Archaeological Review, which surveys the Biblical archaeology field at the layperson level, still arrives every month. The editor is Hershel Shanks, author of many books on topics like the Dead Sea scrolls. I thought TheWay made a pretty good attempt back in Message 72, and I thought he was pretty clear about supernaturalism, too. The problem with supernaturalism is agreeing upon a definition. Is it anything that isn't natural, where natural is defined as anything that can have an effect on the natural universe, which means the supernatural can never be observed, either directly or indirectly? Or can supernatural effects be apparent in the natural world as violations of physical laws? I think a clear definition of supernatural is necessary to addressing the thread's topic.--Percy

Hi Beretta,Most of what you say speaks more to your misunderstanding of evolution than to anything else. If evolution indeed held that organisms had to make do for millennia with half-formed limbs and organs before evolution finally completed its course then scientists everywhere would feel a need for a more likely explanation.But evolution proposes nothing so ridiculous. All species are fully formed all the time. All species are also transitional, with the exception of those that go extinct. The characterizations of creationists as "lying, deceiving and conspiratorial" have nothing to do with what they believe and everything to do with what they do, for example, telling school boards that there is a scientific controversy over creationism when there isn't. Evolutionists don't march into Christian churches claiming there's a religious controversy over Genesis that should be taught in Sunday school, and they certainly don't lobby religious publishers to de-emphasize treatments of Genesis while presenting the religious evidence for evolution. But creationists spend much time and effort trying to get their religious beliefs taught in public school science classrooms by falsely claiming they are science, and it is this for which creationists are criticized. No one would really care what creationists believed if they could keep their beliefs to themselves. It has been the mantra of creationists ever since Henry Morris founded the modern creationist movement back in the 1950's that more and more scientists are becoming convinced of the bankruptcy of evolution and the truth of creationism, yet after all these decades creationism remains what it has always been, a religious belief accepted as science by less than 1% of scientists, most of whom are creationists themselves. The claim that creationism is making inroads into the scientific community is one of the lies evolutionists have in mind when they characterize creationists as liars.As I said to Way, you have to convince the scientific community that the designer even exists before you can begin convincing them of his involvement in the changes in life over time, but the actual topic of this thread concerns how one conducts supernatural-based science. Judging by the responses so far in this thread, supernatural-based science involves making uninformed criticisms of evolution.--Percy

Buz, topic, please.--Percy

Hi Beretta,The reason I gave you such brief answers about evolution is because most of your post was off-topic in this thread. If you'd like to have a discussion about the basic principles of evolution you'll have to find an appropriate thread where that would be on-topic.--Percy

Buz, I'm sure it would be appreciated if you would take the off-topic issues, such as archaeological evidence for the Bible, to another thread. Thanks!--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

This thread is about how practitioners of supernatural-based science would go about their job. To that end, perhaps a brief description of traditional science would help by providing a benchmark against which supernatural-science advocates could point out similarities and differences. So here it is: Using this definition, how does supernatural-based science differ from traditional science?--Percy

I've been interpreting the focus of this thread as more on supernatural-based science rather than ID, but RAZD mentioned genetically engineered genomes versus evolution produced genomes, and this seems like an excellent idea for ID research.It would work like this: in a double blind study involving bacteria, ID scientists could compare the genomes of two laboratory produced child species of a single parent species. One of the child species would be created naturally through evolution of many generations in a petri dish, while the other would be created through genetic engineering, i.e., laboratory manipulation of genes. ID scientists would then apply their criteria (which as far as we've been told so far is, "If it looks designed, it was designed") to determine which genome evolved and which was designed.Naturally the experiment would have to be repeated a number of times in order to produce statistically valid results. If ID'ers correctly identify the genetically engineered species roughly 50% of the time then their criteria are a bunch of hooey.--Percy

I wasn't concerned about species boundaries, thinking of it more as just a convenient label for describing the experiment. Since species boundaries, especially for bacteria, have a significant arbitrary component, it's really only necessary that the child species are some minimum genetic distance from the parent species so as to be identifiably distinct.I wasn't thinking at the level of detail you describe, but it did became apparent to me later last night that if the experiment were carried out as I described that it would be a trivial matter to identify the evolved species from the genetically engineered one. Assuming that the evolved species took a large number of generations, there would be a large number of mutational differences scattered about the genome, while the genetically engineered species which would be very nearly identical to the parent species, except for the gene insertion/modification/whatever-it-was.Designing experiments that tell you something useful is a challenging puzzle requiring thinking both forwards and backwards through potential implications and anticipating pitfalls, so given that it was offered off the top of my head I'm not surprised that my proposed experiment wouldn't really work.So I guess the real point is to ask a question: Why aren't IDists designing experiments like this? Certainly experiments showing that they could identify when human intervention played a role in a species' evolution would go a long way toward making their point. For instance, is there something systematic in the dog genome that is different from, say, the coyote genome that says dogs were the subject of a breeding program and did not evolve in the wild? If there is, while I wouldn't describe this as evidence of a designer, it is at least a baby step, and the IDists have to start somewhere. Their problem is that they haven't yet started anywhere. Before they've done any a science they've already taken their case public and cried foul.--Percy

I couldn't find a book by Frank J. Tipler called The Omega Point. Do you perhaps mean The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. While poking around I saw a couple indications that he may have introduced the concept of the Omega point in this book.I think you have to understand that a strong distinction must be drawn between the speculations of people who happen to be scientists versus peer reviewed science. A speculation isn't even a hypothesis, let alone evidence.--Percy

Maybe it would help if a couple questions were asked about how supernatural-based science would work.How do we know where the natural stops and the supernatural takes over? For example, take something as simple as lighting a match. When the match lights, how do we know we actually struck the match hard enough to create a sufficient spark? How do we know it wasn't a supernatural event?Lighting a match is just an example, of course. In reality the question applies to absolutely everything. No matter what happens, no matter how ordinary and mundane it might seem, how do we know it didn't involve a supernatural event?Another question concerns the "how" of the supernatural event. When a supernatural event occurs, is it possible to learn anything about how it occurred? Take the example of a fatal tumor that shrinks and finally disappears. Should it be possible to determine how the tumor was made to disappear? For example, should we be able to propose hypotheses for the supernatural event (e.g., God decreased the flow of blood to the tumor, or God increased the flow of toxins to the tumor, etc.) for which we can devise tests?--Percy

In order to explain supernaturalistic science, you have to first explain the difference between the natural and the supernatural. If for you the natural is ill-defined then you're going to have a lot of trouble explaining how the supernatural is different.But the natural is not ill-defined. The natural world consists of what we can see and hear and all the rest of the senses. Anything that is not in some way apparent to one of our senses cannot be part of the natural world and is therefore supernatural. Even dark matter, which cannot be directly detected because it doesn't interact with ordinary matter, is part of the natural world because our senses can detect the effects of its gravity on galaxies.There is a conundrum regarding defining the supernatural. God in his own realm is supernatural, but if he were to make an appearance on earth to thousands of people at once, would that be natural or supernatural. You could argue that it is natural since he's detectable by our senses. And you could argue that it is supernatural because the manner of his sudden appearance violates a half dozen known physical laws of the natural universe.I think its incumbent upon those telling us about supernatural science to tell us the definition of supernatural.--Percy