Can't ID be tested AT ALL?

Testability of ID is not a logical impossibility, if only because ID itself is not logically impossible. We ourselves are living proof of that: we have made lots of intelligently designed objects. (An alien could have an ID hypothesis about one of the probes we sent out into space. It could test this hypothesis by following the path of the probe in the opposite direction and find us.)Now, if something is not logically impossible, then it can be true. And if something can be true, then, if it is true, it is logically impossible to prove it untrue.Science works on the basis of hypotheses that are constantly under scrutiny, to see if some way can be found to disprove them. But scientific hypotheses are only scientific because these ways to disprove them can be formulated at all.For ID, no one has ever formulated a way to disprove it. So, although ID is a logically possible hypothesis, it is not a scientific one until some test has been proposed that could prove it false. And such a test would have to be concerned with the defining tenet of ID, namely that life is too complex to have arisen without the help of an intelligent designer.The question is thus whether such a test can ever be formulated. {edited to change "would prove it false" into "could prove it false"}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 13-Sep-2005 10:20 PM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Let's also compare the entire stack of volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with an elephant. By your standard of complexity, although it contains vastly more information than the encyclopaedia, the elephant is not nearly as complex on account of the fact that an elephant is a rather large object, larger in any case than the stack of books.Another funny thought experiment just entered my head: let's compare the Encyclopaedia Britannica with itself. Let's put the books next to the DVD version. Both contain the same amount of information, yet the DVD version is decidedly smaller than the stack of books. So by your standard, the DVD version must be the more complex, even though we cannot extract more information from it. Curious.You may want to rethink your standard of complexity, or better still, listen to what people have to say about it, who actually know something about information theory. What for? There's no reason to avoid references to design, since there clearly is design in living nature. It's the implication of an intelligent designer that's unwarranted. ID is a house of cards that's based on a single flawed idea, namely that the presence of design implies an intelligent designer.Apart from the obvious logical objections (an intelligent designer must be complex itself, hence designed, so who designed the designer?), computer models have shown that mindless repetition of a relatively simple algorithm can produce elaborate design. So one might say there is a designer of sorts, but it's a process, and it's not intelligent.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 15-Sep-2005 02:02 PM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Warren, could you please finally learn how to quote properly? When reading your posts, I always have to look out for the tell-tale "Warren:" to know where your quotes end.Please press the peek button of a message with proper quotes and see how it's done. It's not that hard.This has been asked before and it's becoming tiresome. Do something about it.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 20-Sep-2005 10:51 PM