What a shame, aye? Methodological Naturalism is the foundation of science.
I disagree. Science is a human endeavor that aims to pronounce true statements about the natural world. If it happens that a mind has actually played a role in the apparition and development of life on earth, MN would prevent science to discover the truth. IOW, MN would betray the very vocation of science.
“A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Charles Darwin ”
Since there is not even one tiny bit of evidence for such a “mind” being involved there’s no reason to discuss it in any science classroom. Do some research, produce some positive results, then get back to us.
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Well, Gil, you have only arguments (the false claims about influenza you posted are a good example) and the science side is the only side producing facts. Not much of a balance there, but you could get to work producing more facts…
That doesn’t make sense first of all because there isn’t any observation scientists could make that they would just ignore.
Another point is that scientists propose models to explain data, and those models are supposed to be testable by how well they explain already collected data, and by predicting what yet-to-be-collected data should be like. “Designer wanted it that way” isn’t an explanation for anything, and it predicts nothing.
But there isn’t anyone saying “you aren’t allowed to propose that model” if you can actually come up with a model for the origin of life that both explains the data we see(with something more than just “it was designed that way because designer wanted it as such”), and predicts new data.
Notice, though, that “evolution can’t explain X” isn’t a model of how X was designed, and it doesn’t follow from the idea that “X was designed” that therefore X’s evolution is impossible.
Yet that is all you have, assertions that “X was designed”(which explains nothing) and “evolution can’t explain X” which isn’t a prediction of anything, it’s just something IDcreationists like to insist. What little argument’s have been erected to try to support the claim that “evolution can’t explain X”, such as the whole FI nonsense of Gpuccio’s to pick an example, all suffer from catastrophic flaws.
So this is where you are, forced to make up bad excuses about how you think science is somehow biased and prevented from discovering the idea you like. But that is all it is, excuses erected because your pet idea has failed to yield any useful explanatory models. Rather than try to fundamentally undermine the methods of science, you should be trying to come up with better models.
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No it would not. Methodological naturalism is entirely capable of detecting minds. It is commonly used to differentiate between artefacts which are the products of minds and artefacts which are not.
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Your concern is only applicable if advocates of science claim that science is the only pathway to truth.
If you allow that religion, philosophy, and art can also help lead to the truth, then science and its rules do not impede the discovery of truth by other means, such as intelligent design philosophy.
You need a lot of different tools to build a house. The house will not stand, however, if you try to use the philosophy hammer to turn the science screw. Or if you try to use the science screwdriver to drive the philosophy nail.
The two approaches of methodological naturalism and philosophy are complementary, just as the different tools of a homebuilder are complementary. But these knowledge tools only work if you use them correctly, in the correct context. Use the tools incorrectly, and you will ruin the house.
Best,
Chris
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If it happens that a mind has not played a role in the apparition and development of life on earth, ID would prevent science from discovering the truth.
As stated in prior posts, once the conclusion of supernatural cause has been accepted, that closes the investigation. There is no heuristic value in ID.
Believe otherwise? Then please reference instances where the Discover Institute asserted a feature of nature as naturally inexplicable or irreducible, then later announced to the scientific world, “hold on, we were not happy with that, so we persisted, researched, experimented and followed some novel lines of investigation, and you know what’s great, it was a lot of work but we eventually found a natural explanation! No need here for the design hypothesis after all!”
Not likely. Actually discovering something which plugs a gap in the understanding of nature works against the ID mandate, which is expressly political and inherently theological.
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You need to justify that claim. I think the position of Maarten Boudry that I quoted in my article persuasively argues against that: Just as methdological naturalism allows us to determine that a mind created the carvings in the Rosetta Stone, it would also allow us to determine that a mind created DNA if that were the case.
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Didn’t I just give you one? “A biota in which different groups of organisms have different, uncorrelated, genetic codes would falsify evolution, or at least common descent.”
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Discovering that Biblical “kinds” are real and finding there actually is a genetic barrier which makes it impossible for one "kind’ to evolve into another “kind” would falsify universal common descent.
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There’s a difference between a lack of a fossil record and a fossil record inconsistent with evolution. Imagine an ID supporter from the 1860s. Perhaps they might have argued that faunal succession was an illusion caused by insufficient sampling, and predicted that it would have gone away as more and more fossils were unearthed. Needless to say, that prediction would have failed.
I don’t think that you did. (You’d need a bigger data set to do that.) However, I wrote correlation for a reason. The theory of evolution does not predict a perfect nested hierarchy - convergence and randomisation, missing data, rate variations, paralogy, and lineage sorting, and a variety of other factors can lead to misinferences of phylogeny. But we don’t get different data sets with one saying we are closest to chimpanzees and another saying we are closest to chestnuts and another saying we are closest to cod and another saying we are closest to chestnut mushrooms and another saying we are closest to chickadees and another saying we are closest to chipmunks.
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“Falsify”, as I’ve mentioned, is not a good word. What it would do is provide evidence against common descent. What I would expect from a phylogenetic analysis of different kinds is that there would be some robust tree structure in the shallower parts of the tree but at some point the lower branches would all collapse into a big polytomy, and this would happen consistently over all data. Structure at the top, chaos at the bottom. Thisk of course, is not what we see. I could make a better prediction if you had any clear notion of what a “kind” was, so we could know where on the tree to expect the structure to disappear.
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ID/creationism was the dominant view in science before 1859. This didn’t prevent Darwin to develop his naturalistic theory that were finally going to take hold over the design perspective. This historical fact invalidates your claim that ID would prevent science from discovering the truth if that truth was that purely natural processes are actually capable of producing high FI.
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We could have found that life on earth is divided into millions of different groups that each has its own molecular basis for inheritance, completely unlike DNA and completely unlike each other. It would be very difficult to account for such a finding with a model that proposes common ancestry between each of these groups (or “kinds”, if you will), but this would be perfectly compatible with the model that each kind was created separately.
Sorry what? Are you saying ID is creationism?
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First, i didn’t say it was impossible to evolve hollow bones. However, there is probably many more ways than one (specific genetic sequences) to get you there. Second, the penguin limb than had to adapt to flight and we know for certain there are more than one way for that to happen, But even if it did evolve flight feathers and all the other necessary adaptations, the likelihood that It would occur precisely the same way genetically is less than once in 4 billion years of history. So yes, it’s an exceedingly small chance.
I don’t see the point of your argument, other than for argument sake. Surely you are not this dense.
Sure, but science was still based on empirical evidence and modeling before that. That’s exactly why it’s made so much progress. Instead of people just giving up and waving their hands with “and then a miracle occurred” every time something was difficult to figure out, eventually someone came along who was able to see what others before them couldn’t.
Neil Degrass Tyson made a pretty good presentation on this topic of how the actions of the Intelligent Designer historically has always been relegated to the unknown, when how it really worked was difficult to figure out:
It’s an empirical fact natural evolutionary processes can produce what the Creationists call “high FI”. That ship sailed 70 years ago with the discovery of genetics.
You’re bluffing again!