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

jessiehl
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:57:51 +0000

Jessie – you spent a lot of time around professional scientists in college; how many times did you hear this definition of science or any other discussion of the scientific method?



Depending on the class/scientist, anywhere from none to quite a lot.



String theory in physics is science, whereas certain crank physics is not, and it’s hard to distinguish between them on grounds other than sociological ones.



laughing I know some physicists who would maintain that string theory is, in fact, crank physics and nonscience, and would be happy to throw it out with ID. I don’t actually know enough about string theory to have an opinion on that.



There are people who are professionals at defending ID based on these objective criteria, and they will beat you both because they are better at arguing and also because they are right on the merits.



Glad to know that you have so much respect for my positions and rhetorical ability. Anyway, do you think I don’t know about the Discovery Institute, about the cottage industry of people trying to defend ID based on objective criteria? Dembski, Behe, etc?



In a fundamental sense, it’s not just that ID is not falsifiable, but that ID appeals to an agency outside the laws of science – it’s nonnaturalistic.



Yes.



That’s certainly not true in general. If a theory posits that some force decreased the entropy of some system a large amount on a short time scale at a particular time a long time ago, that theory can be tested and falsified in the same way that we falsify other theories whose primary evidence is historical (like evolution). That entropy-decreaser is the creator posited by ID.



Design != intelligent design. Intelligent design implies capacity to plan.

I will also echo Mollie’s comment that challenges to evolution, while often advanced these days by ID proponents, are not ID, they’re just challenges to evolution (e.g. Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity).