Miss the point much?
I mentioned the Lenski et al. paper precisely because they claim to show that complex functions can originate via undirected processes. That claim is their test of Behe.
What is the difference between MN and ordinary empirical testing? By definition, an empirical measurement is a measurement of nature. What we can empirically measure is considered natural.
MN makes no such assertion. All MN requires is repeatable empirical observations and a falsifiable hypothesis.
Now, that sounds like MN.
Any stick will do to beat a dog, right? Never mind consistency or coherence.
I made a practice earlier here of ignoring you, Tim. Going back to that.
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It disproved Behe’s specific claim a detail of ID. It didn’t test ID’s overall claim about unknown meddling by an undetectable external “Designer”.
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It is interesting that both Behe and Lenski seem to agree that the mutations occurring in the lab are not guided. Do you also believe that the mutations occurring in life right now are unguided?
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That is not true @pnelson. Do you really believe this? I find this hard to fathom…
The objection is to divine intelligence, not creaturely intelligence. You know this, right?
Then MN does not rule out hypotheses of design. But most people think it does. Why?
Fully developed philosophical accounts of MN assert the “causal closure” of nature and the inadmissibility of intelligence as a real (ontologically irreducible) cause. For that reason, many skeptics and atheists, who want evolution to have succeeded as the best explanation in a fair competition, reject MN (see the recent writings of Sean Carroll and Sahotra Sarkar, for instance, as discussed in my chapter on MN, co-written with Steve Meyer, in the Theistic Evolution volume).
Spending too much time here again. Back to day job. Best to all.
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False analogies really don’t help.courts work on reasonable doubt. If there is enough reason to believe that the finger prints were planted, then the forensic analysis won’t hold. For example, if it’s found that a person leaving finger prints at the site was near impossible…(say one in a million… ). No court would prosecute.
Yes… but common descent with modification is not a full blown scientific theory… the fact that evolution has a bare minimum version as opposed to different competing theories is itself strange.
{It appears you edited your original statement, so I included both.}
Dr. Nelson, I love the way you worded that sentence. It really helped me understand your position.
That said, I also think many visitors to this forum will be baffled by a phrase like “real ontologically irrreducible cause”. @swamidass, I wonder if there any features in this forum software which would allow a post-author (or moderators?) to add a pop-up annotation or some kind of footnote when technical terms arise that are extremely important to someone’s post. (Frankly, if Dr. Nelson had not parenthetically added “ontologically irreducible” to that sentence, I may have misunderstood his statement. But non-academics will still be left in the dark. I know that that often can’t be helped—but I like to find ways to help the average forum visitor appreciate the discussions.)
In any case, this is a very fruitful conversation. I am better understanding ID perspectives.
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MN does not rule out the hypothesis of design. It rules out the hypothesis of SUPERNATURAL design.
ID’s bait-and-switch over the two very different concepts just doesn’t work with the scientifically knowledgeable.
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???
Evolutionary theory is arguably the best supported scientific theory of all time.
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What hypothesis of design? Can you show us a scientific hypothesis for design that makes specific predictions of empirical observations and is also falsifiable?
Because there are organizations and websites that mislead the public. One of the organizations that tells the public that design can not be a part of methodological naturalism is the Discovery Institute. I am guessing you are familiar with this organization.
Here is another example of how ID/creationists try to mislead the public on what MN is. If intelligence can be empirically tested then it is part of the natural world, by definition. That doesn’t rule out design. All it does is require empirical evidence and a testable hypothesis. If, as you say, intelligent design is rejected by science then it only means that it doesn’t have any empirical evidence to back and/or it can’t be falsified.
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No, because we also know that humans also plant fingerprints and DNA at crime scenes. But I’ll remember the goddidit defense should my own DNA and fingerprints be found at a crime scene!
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The biology of life is incapable of producing a continuous spectrum. This would require rampant horizontal genetic transfer between all populations on Earth. Horizontal inheritance does occur occasionaly in prokaryotes and extremely rarely in eukaryotes. The dominant form of inheritance is vertical, from ancestors to descendants.
The dominance of vertical inheritance in the biology of life is a big reason why we expect to see a nested hierarchy if common descent is true. This means that evolution can only produce modified versions of ancestors. Evolution can’t take an adaptations from mice, jellyfish, and humans and mix them altogether. However, a designer could do that. In fact, we human designers have created mice that also have genes from humans and jellyfish.
There is absolutely no reason why we would expect to see a nested hierarchy from intelligent design given all of the other possible patterns available to a designer. When humans design organisms we regularly violate a nested hierarchy. When we look at the mechansisms affecting living species we see that they only pattern of shared and divergent features that these mechanisms can produce is a noisy nested hierarchy.
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I’ll shout AMEN to that.
I can’t help but make comparisons to the word “miracle”. A miracle is some event or phenomenon that cannot (at least presently) be recognized as the result of natural causes (whether by physics/chemistry/biology or by intelligent intervention by humans.) Once we discover the natural cause of something, we don’t usually call it a miracle any more. (Of course, I said “usually” because people like superlatives like “the miracle of birth” or “the miracle of space flight.” which use a different definition.)
As has long been noted, to a non-technological society, they can’t necessarily tell the difference between technology and a miracle. Likewise, how do we detect the difference between “some intelligence” which arose in the natural world versus a supernatural intelligent agent?
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I will disagree with you here. A lot of parents will call their children a miracle even though their conception and birth are considered completely natural. Farmers in my region of the country depend heavily on irrigation from snow sheds, and they often call a good snow year a miracle. None of them think snow is a supernatural force.
That’s exactly what I just wrote! Are you sure you read my entire post? (I even explained my use of the word “usually” because I mentioned the people who talk about “the miracle of birth”! Those are different definitions of the word miracle.)
(As a has-been linguist, these kinds of lexicographic distinctions are important to me.)
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LOL!! I missed that part. My apologies.
I don’t think it is a different definition. People think that God acts through nature, and that nature itself is a miracle. I would suspect that only in more modern times have we created this idea where God is separate from nature.
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You’re equivocating between inference and testing. They are very different.
ID is entirely the former, none of the latter.
That’s how science works as well. There is no reason to doubt common descent in the same way that there is no reason to doubt forensic evidence simply because it could have been planted by God.
Common descent with modification is a full blown scientific theory in every sense of the phrase.
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