Okay…
Lay out the difference between Behe’s methodology and CONVINCING methodology on the same topic!
And when the convincing methodology results in the negative, we will be satisfied.
I really have no idea what you mean by that question. And given that you appear to be unsatisfied with inductive generalizations by definition, then I don’t think science could ever truly convince you. The mere fact that you are stating that you find some aspects of science convincing just tells me you probably don’t understand how the things you find convincing are actually supported.
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I can’t make it sufficient to avoid induction and have it remain a small percentage.
Think of it this way: if you can’t organize your thoughts enough to convince someone who already agrees with 90% of what you assert about Creationism … you should probably stop posting.
I’m sorry but I don’t find that to be a convincing response to my question to you.
Make your own ideal thought experiment that shows what is different between an informed guess on thd existence of design
Versus
a laboratory or field demonstration on testing for the existing of design.
I’m sorry but I really don’t understand this question. Please don’t take this as a personal attack because it’s not meant as such, but I get the distinct impression that your thoughts on this subject are unclear. I have a hope that it is possible for us to make progress if you take some time to think about it more, and express yourself more clearly.
I don’t know how many different ways I can say this, but we keep coming back to what appears, at least to me, like you having an unconsidered problem with science itself. You think, it appears to me, like you have identified a fundamental problem with the usage of inductive generalizations by Michael Behe, in one of his arguments for ID. And it appears to me like you think the problem is that Michael Behe isn’t getting science right when he uses this argument.
But here is where I think the disconnection happens: You think the problem with Michael Behe’s argument, that makes it (in your view) an unscientific argument, is that it is based on an inductive generalization.
You want to try to show that arguments based on inductive generalizations are bad scientific arguments. They are uncertain, they can’t be trusted, they could be wrong. This is your central thesis as I understand it.
Here’s the problem though: The problem you have identified is not just with Michael Behe’s argument. It is with the tentative nature of all scientific knowledge, which ultimately all rests on observations that have intrinsic and unavoidable uncertainties. Both in terms of the accuracy of measurement, but also in terms of our bringing them up to the state of “laws”. What basis is there for the law of the conservation of energy? Observation. We have so far observed that energy is conserved, at least in classical systems. We generalize this observation as a law.
Does that mean the law is certainly true and will be forever? No. It really could be the case that energy isn’t always conserved. We really could discover tomorrow, at least in principle, that a system that is, as best we can tell, isolated, is gaining or losing energy. The law would then be false.
There isn’t anything we know in science that isn’t vulnerable to this fundamental problem, that we have generalized historical observations into inviolable laws. Ultimately, those are just assumptions we can’t prove, and no experiment could even in principle, prove them. You could observe it repeated an infinite amount of time, and then see it break down on the very next. There is no way out of this. You are getting the fundamentals of science itself wrong if you think otherwise. You are asking of the method what it cannot provide.
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An philosopher, biologist, an engineer and a mathematician were crossing the border into Scotland from England on a train when they saw a field with a black sheep in it.
The philosopher said, “Look–all sheep on Earth are black.”
The biologist said, “Look, in Scotland the sheep are black.”
The engineer replied, “No, in Scotland some of the sheep are black.”
The mathematician rolled his eyes to heaven and said, very patiently, “In Scotland, there exists at least one field, in which there is at least one sheep which is black on at least one side.”
This was my original plan. But this plan has become so controversial, I have adopted a completely new plan:
Find someone who thinks he knows epistemology better, and have that person design an adequate thought design that compares and contrasts the two approaches.
Possible Exemplar:
Behe’s methodology (which is to rely on what some thing looks like ) to conclude (say) whales are designed to have lungs - -
Versus
Whales have lungs because it was too difficult or genetically cumbersome for the whale populations to return to gills!
Maybe not too difficult nor too genetically cumbersome. Maybe it just didn’t happen to work out that way.
No. Cetaceans have lungs because Cetaceans evolved from terrestrial mammals which already had lungs.
Yes, of course.
If you step up to construct the ideal thought experiment, you get to write it any way you think is the most compelling.
I chose that particular wording to contradict Behe’s rhetoric and devolution. In earlier threads I would ask if whales were deformed mammals or deformed tetrapods!
@nwrickert
Agreed. But Behe says a loss of function is a terrible thing… I think a mammal trying to retain gills would be a terribly suffering monstrosity!
Thought experiments work much better if some actual thought is put into their construction.
I am inviting you to demonstrate that actual thought.
Or we can continued to argue about MY attempts!
I don’t think that is quite right.
@T_aquaticus has been so focused on trying to invalidate my “thought experiment” analogy, that he added a statistical element to my hypothetical narrative.
I presented a lab test that had been successfully replicated anywhere from 33 times to 3000 times… and he ignored that so he could talk about statistical probabilities… even though I was presenting a 100% curve for replicating the same results.
As a revised example, maybe I should propose lab work for proving water boils at 212 F degrees!
You should do, because your inductive conclusion that water boils at 212F degrees is incorrect in its general sense. In the lab you could vary the ambient pressure at which you boil the water, and you would notice that it only boils at that temperature at one specific pressure.
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I think @T_aquaticus post is a relevant response to your thought experiment.
He could have gone much further into the relevance of the statistics (and statistical theory - see the Central Limit Theorem) to your hypothetical, but his post is a nicely succinct, non-expert friendly outline of the general approach involved in basic scientific hypothesis testing.
Something he could have made a bit more clear perhaps, is that the inductive logic applies by way of taking the means and standard deviations of the experimental results, and inferring that this observation is true of the relationships between these two variables in general.
That is, among all the observed data points, we will make a statement that there is most likely a particular relationship between the two variables (our hypothesis or its negation) that can be thought of as true in the majority of cases, whenever the average proportion of cases/data points are consistent with our hypothesis (or its negation). When the average case is found to be consistent with the hypothesis (or its negation), this is then taken to indicate provisional evidence in favour of (or against) the truth status of the hypothesis we set out to test.
The concern I raised was specifically to do with his interpretation of p values - standard null hypothesis tests do not provide a measure of the probability that the hypothesis is false.
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