Is Statistical Induction a Proof?

What is the test box and control box for evolutionary theory? Your arguments to declare something is not science requires you to show what scientific standards are and then demonstrate why they are violated. Without this you are being arbitrary.

Typical Bill. Fails on his attempt to show a scientific means of falsification of his God hypothesis, tries to change the subject to hide his failure.

Why is it so important to you to “scientifically” prove your God? That’s the real mystery.

Do you understand why this is a failed argument?

No Bill, explain it to us. Explain why an omnipotent God couldn’t work behind the scenes and make it look like a purely natural mechanism.

Then explain why it’s so important to you to scientifically prove your God.

Science is not about proving a negative. It is about showing the most empirically likely cause of what you are observing.

The way you state this shows you struggling to follow the conversation. Proof has nothing to do with this discussion.

You dodged the question again Bill. How do you falsify the claim an omnipotent Deity was responsible for any observed phenomena?

Since you keep dodging I’ll answer for you: you can’t.

Sorry Bill but the fact is the supernatural is beyond the scope of science.

What’s the title of this thread Bill? :rofl:

Just to stop you from dodging:

Why is it so important to you to “scientifically” verify your God?

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By showing an alternative cause that is not the ultimate cause. Again I showed you how General relativity falsified Gods involvement in planetary motion.

That still fails Bill. You have no way of establishing your supernatural Deity wasn’t behind the alternative cause. Repeating your failure won’t magically make it come true, although I do understand a magic POOF is your one-size-fits-all explanation.

Why is it so important to you to “scientifically” verify your God?

No Bill, that didn’t falsify the idea God was behind gravity. “Goddidit” is not falsifiable and is not scientific.

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This is not a requirement of science Tim. You are making arbitrary objections and assertions.

It is simply interesting to me that the concept of faith and reason are not opposing concepts. It turns out to be fake news :slight_smile:

@colewd

There is no way to reasonably design an experiment where God operates on one box, but not on the Control Box.

You lose the argument… and so does Behe.

Yes Bill, having a hypothesis be potentially falsifiable IS a requirement of science. Supernatural intervention can’t be falsified which is why it is not science. Once again your complete lack of knowledge about scientific basics rears its oft-seen ugly head.

You dodged the question one more time. It must be terribly embarrassing to you that your faith is so weak you need scientific justification.

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Why do you think there is a problem here?

The problem is Behe and you are offering “Goddidit” as a scientific explanation. Supernatural intervention is not scientific. You don’t seem to understand anything about how science operates or what its limitations are.

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No that doesn’t make sense. First of all The hypothesis that [God actually did design life] is not falsified by demonstrating that [there is a non-God mechanism (such as evolution) that can also do the same job]. The latter does not falsify the former. You are trying to say that we can falsify a historical claim(what did occur?) - with a possibility claim(what could occur?). The fact that B could have occured, does not mean A didn’t do it.

Second, you don’t postulate a hypothesis and then expect others to falsify it otherwise it’s true by default. Rather, you postulate a hypothesis, derive testable predictions from it, and then test it by seeing if those predictions are consistent with future observations. Only when the hypothesis have passed many critical tests should you begin to tentatively accept it as true.

Third, you made a textbook example of a God-of-the-gaps argument(which reduces to an appeal to ignorance-fallacy). You are effectively saying that until such a time as we can provide you with a satisfactory naturalistic explanation(by implication we must lack one now, aka our current state is one of ignorance), you are going to believe it requires a supernatural one.

Fourth, there IS a mechanism that explains complex adaptations like the flagellum. It’s in Matzke 2003. If you can’t be bothered reading the whole article, just look at figure 7 and the legend there. It’s provided there in succinct form. Gene duplications, point mutations, insertions, and natural selection. Those are the mechanisms, and those mechanisms are all observed facts. The evidence for the model is the homologous relationships between individual components that make up the flagellum (which strongly implies it evolved incrementally), and the homologous relationships between the flagellum and other macromolecular structures. Suggestions for further tests of the model are also provided later in the article, such as finding additional homologous relationships to other similar structures.

No, he didn’t falsify divine involvement. That’s probably impossible, since you can always just postulate that your omnipotent God is the one orchestrating the whole thing behind the scene. That’s a bug, not a feature, and why God can never amount to a scientific hypothesis. Einstein gave a naturalistic explanation, but that obviously doesn’t mean there isn’t really an invisble God holding the planets in their orbits and that this is simply what we call gravity.

You really need to understand how hypothesis testing works in science, at the level of logic and reason.

Also, just what the fork does “divine involvement (per Newton)” mean?

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If you’re hypothesis states that God was not directly involved why does that not work? In the case of the motion of the planets Einstein showed God was not directly involved.

An interesting paragraph from Stanford philosophy on Popper to unpack.

As Popper represents it, the central problem in the philosophy of science is that of demarcation, i.e., of distinguishing between science and what he terms ‘non-science’, under which heading he ranks, amongst others, logic, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and Adler’s individual psychology. Popper is unusual amongst contemporary philosophers in that he accepts the validity of the Humean critique of induction, and indeed, goes beyond it in arguing that induction is never actually used in science. However, he does not concede that this entails the scepticism which is associated with Hume, and argues that the Baconian/Newtonian insistence on the primacy of ‘pure’ observation, as the initial step in the formation of theories, is completely misguided: all observation is selective and theory-laden—there are no pure or theory-free observations. In this way he destabilises the traditional view that science can be distinguished from non-science on the basis of its inductive methodology; in contradistinction to this, Popper holds that there is no unique methodology specific to science. Science, like virtually every other human, and indeed organic, activity, Popper believes, consists largely of problem-solving.

@colewd

So you think God was directly involved in the evolution of bears… but not directly involved in the planetary orbits?

@colewd

Behe claims ANOTHER origin for some things: some mutations are by God, and some are not. How can we figure out which is which?

Who has this as a hypothesis? Go bother those people.

You need to understand the difference between saying
[God was not involved]
and
[there is no good evidence that God was involved].

It all comes back to the principle of parsimony: Do not multiply entities beyond requirements to explain the observed. God is not required to explain the observed. A model using observed mechanisms like mutations and selection can do it. If you invoke God in biology, you can do it anywhere. Including planetary orbits.

How did he accomplish that? All he did was provide some equations that describe how certain forces would produce certain planetary trajectories. That doesn’t actually mean God isn’t secretly behind the scenes doing it. To show that God was not directly involved you’d have to predict what would happen If God was directly involved, and then show that the prediction deviates from observation. But you could always just rationalize that whatever happens what God wanted all along. This is why the God hypothesis is unfalsifiable and useless as a scientific theory, it doesn’t predict anything, it just rationalizes all observations after the fact.

I find it absolutely fantastic that I as an atheist have to sit here and explain that to a Christian.

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Not necessarily. If we are to have a holistic worldview as Francis Schaffer advocates we both agree that God created everything. Therefor as we do science we will hit the ID wall as the final explanation as all we are observing is Gods creation.

Science then becomes only an exercise is identifying causes that are not directly the result of Gods work but a derivative of it.

Can we quit picking on Bill now? I think the point has been made.

I will add one more objection, a theological objection, that hasn’t been mentioned.

In the example we are discussing, evolution is rejected and “The Designer” is accepted as the responsible party. BUT the Designer is an implicit assumption. I could equally well claim , based on the very same evidence, that Zeus is responsible, or unicorns, or a bowl of jello. Scientifically this is nonsense, and why we require clearly defined hypotheses. Theologically this reduces God to a material quantity, and is unacceptable. It’s also rather insulting to God, if you are so inclined.

Intelligent Design make no official claims about the nature of the Designer, and that’s a big problem. It’s not a question of what a Design can do, but rather what a Design cannot do. A Designer than can do anything could create the evidence needed to falsify themselves, which leads to scientific nonsense. ID places no restrictions on the Designer, allowing the Designer to be equivalent to God.