Intelligent Design vs. Real Science

This would be an excellent exercise in actually doing the research instead of getting all of your information from videos. This morning, I knew nothing about the phenomenon, though I had my suspicions (hint: Spitzbergen). It took me two minutes to find it and my suspicions were confirmed.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

"Law" is a conclusion, not an observation.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

Order is not an observation. It's a convenient way of describing our observations. Do you understand the difference between a thing and a description of that thing? You can ride a horse but you can't ride a description of a horse.The order in graphite and the order in diamond is just the way we describe the arrangement of the carbon atoms. It isn't a "thing" in itself.Similarly, a law is a convenient description of a process. Newton's Laws of Motion describe how we observe things moving. The laws are not processes themselves.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

Change isn't what we were talking about. We were talking about order and law. I did say that order is not an observation and I explained why. How do you measure the order in a sample of graphite? How do you compare it to the order in a diamond? Please demonstrate that you can see Newtion's Laws of Motion. Hint: you can see the motion. How do you see the law?

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

We can observe changes in order. If "Dog bites man" becomes "Man bites dog", that's a change in order. But all we can do is compare one order with another. The question was: How?I can explain how I measure a two-by-four. I can tell you the Sears catalogue number of the tape measure that I use. I can tell you how I hook one end on the two-by-four and pull it out and then read the number at the other end.That's how I want you to explain how you measure order and law.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

I'm talking about the word order. A little change in the order makes a big change in the meaning. Another change could make it meaningless: Bites man dog.That's all order is, a way of comparing things. It isn't a thing in itself. Never mind "an illustration of the same type". I gave you specifics of the equipment that I would use and the way I would use it. Give me the catalogue number of the instrument that you would use to measure "law". All that does is confirm the observations that have already been made. You said you could measure a law. A measurement produces a quantitative result, not just a qualitative confirmation.How much does Newton's Third Law weigh?

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

This discussion is based on your claim that IDists use the same methods as scientists. Scientists use real objects to measure real objects. If you can't do that, your claim is falsified. Unless you can come up with a number for your measurement, you're not doing science.If you can begin to understand what measurement is, you can begin to understand what scientists do.

You have that backwards. The observations come first and then the logic is applied to those observations.How do you think we discovered that "consistent harmony" in the first place? For example, how did we discover that planetary orbits are elliptical and that the sun is at one focus of the ellipse?Answer: We took a lot of observations, measured a lot of positions, accumulated a big pile of real-world numbers measured with real-world instruments - and then we analyzed those numbers, plotted them on a graph, if you will, and discovered that all planets have consistent motion, that that motion is elliptical and that the sun is at one focus.Even if you could anticipate, using nothing but your brain, that orbits are elliptical and the sun is at one focus, the physical measurements are still required to confirm the conjecture.The difference between science and ID, in a nutshell, is that IDists never confirm their conjectures, they never link hypothesis to substance.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate