Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

tech_fan
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:03:13 +0000

Mollie – Far be it from me to say that, because the line demarcating science is smudgy and sociological, ID is near it. It is not anywhere near it.

But I still think you are overenthused about falsifiability and the quality of being “naturalistic”. Lots of ID-style theories could make claims that smell falsfiable AND naturalistic, such as that the emergence of high complexity (defined appropriately) is always accompanied by a sudden decrease of entropy through processes that aren’t iterative. There is a cottage industry of cooking claims like this. Logical definitions will engage us in a decades-long philosophical war. My way, this can be settled by one vote of the national academy every 10 years.

Your Kary Mullis example is pretty good one, but it illustrates my point more than it refutes it. No objective machine verified that his claims were not supported by the evidence. The community examined the evidence and decided that it wasn’t up to its standard. The evaluative mechanism is exactly the social aggregate that I say defines science. And I never claimed, by the way, that being admitted into the club grants you eternal rights as an incontrovertible priest. Just that it gives you a vote on club issues. On this vote, Mullis lost. In what way is my argument refuted?