The great gift science gives to religions -- perhaps the whole point of science -- is the conviction that G-d did not sign his work. All we have is faith.

Extremely well put, David. Though religion has rarely been very grateful for it.

The campaign to keep ID/Creationism out of science classes has nothing to do with excluding religious teachers.

It has everything to do with what science is: a hypothetico-deductive process.

The moment ID/Creationism has even one deductive consequence, then it can lay claim to being taught as science.

Until then, it doesn't. Just like astrology doesn't belong in an astronomy class.

Jeff:

If the universe was created by a deity;
And if it was done so for a purpose;
And if that purpose is reflected in the evolution of the natural world;
then genetic mutation and natural evolution are driven by that purpose and reflect it.

How's that for hypothetico-deductive thinking? Do you guys give out gold stars?

ID should be taught in classrooms - as a PHILOSOPHY course. ID isn't science. But then neither are pronouncements by atheist scientists like Dawkins and Weinberg claiming that science shows that existence is meaningless and without transendent purpose.

Anon:

Not even as a philosophy in the full-blown sense. Just as a critique of darwinism's own opening, untestable assumptions and exposure to those who argue the physical evidence supports
more than one conclusion.

And as others have pointed out, this whole debate seems to be driven by adults who were born forty years old and have no sense whatsoever of the mind of the average high school student. What should happen is we should bore them for a day on darwinism, then bore them for another day with ID or whatever and then let them get back to what really interests or challenges them.

The whole debate is a nonsense.

Writers on this subject like to bring in the old demon Dawkins with a few of his infamous anti-religious pronouncements to try to create a story that runs: "it's the crazy hardcore atheist scientists trying to stop the perfectly reasonable, open-minded ID scientists having their say".

In fact, it's a simple matter. In science classes, you should teach science. Evolution is science, because it is concerned with how the natural world works and ID is not, because it is concerned with why the natural world works. ID is at the meta-level. It only pretends to have something to say at the scientific level.

There's plenty of room for mystical and religious theories in other classrooms. You don't teach ID in science classrooms for the same reason that you don't teach Spanish in the mathematics classroom. Different categories

Brit:

Natural selection is about why, not how.

Brit

When Dawkins describes the world as one of "pitiless indifference", or when Weinberg states that the universe in "pointless", they (and others like them) are making unscientific claims of teleological nature beyond the limits of science to comment or critique. Perhaps these books should include warning labels to the effect that "Here be metaphysics".

Dawkins and people like him are what are known as "evangelical atheists". In a recent Discover magazine article, Dawkins is taken to task for his intellectual dishonesty:Alister McGrath, a molecular biophysicist turned Anglican pastor, disagrees. “What Dawkins shows, strictly speaking, is simply that the theory of evolution leads to agnosticism—a principled uncertainty about whether there is a God or not,” says McGrath. “And in driving it to atheism—that there is necessarily no God—he goes way beyond the limits of the evidence.”....Miller is also a walking paradox to people like Dawkins. As he confessed in his book Finding Darwin’s God, Miller is a practicing Catholic, and as he pointed out to Dawkins, “I will persist in saying that religion for me, and for many other people, answers questions that are beyond the realm of science.” Indeed, he complained that scientists often trafficked in a caricature of religion. And then, nodding toward Dawkins and Ann Druyan, he suggested that “atheists and agnostics are a whole lot more evangelical than religious people are.” The observation may have started out as a joke, but it landed at Dawkins’s end of the table like a spear.

Atheists and fundamentalists both strike me a half blind individuals, each blind in a different eye, and forever arguing over which is the better eye to see with. Problems arise when each tries to invade the others turf. A literal reading of Genesis for example is just plain wrong in the face of the available evidence. Genesis is a "myth" in the true sense of the word - a story which relates deeper truths than a mere literal interpretation can provide. OTOH, for scientist like Dawkins to state that life and existence has no meaning and purpose because science can find none is a logical fallacy. Science has nothing to say, good or bad, about teleology. This viewpoint is inherently nihilistic.

Or to quote my favorite SF TV show Babylon 5, "Faith and reason are the two shoes on our feet. You can get farther wearing both than wearing only one"

Jeff sez: "It has everything to do with what science is: a hypothetico-deductive process"

I confess I'm not quite sure what "hypothetico-deductive" means, but what science REALLY is is an information-gathering process. When I look up "deduction" on dictionary.com one of the definitions given is "4) Logic: The process of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from the stated premises; inference by reasoning from the general to the specific." Outside of mathematics, there is no such thing as "a conclusion [which] follows necessarily from the stated premises". There are some (not many) professional astronomers who do not accept the standard Big Bang model, but rather believe in the older Steady State model. They integrate all of the available evidence into their model, and merely draw different conclusions. Are they not scientists? As I said in a different thread this past week, the conclusions that are drawn invariably come down to aesthetics. Science as a method is agnostic about all the conclusions that are drawn from it.

M. Scott Peck, who dioed on Sunday, has an excellent discussion in his book, The Road Less Traveled, that explains both why science is a religion -- in its acceptance of its central tenets on faith -- and why Darwinism is a heresy even from the religion of science -- because it violates even those faith-based tenets:

Science is a religion because it is a world view of considerable complexity with a number of major tenets. Most of these major tenets are as follows: the universe is real, and therefore a valid object for examination; it is of value for human beings to examine the universe; the universe makes sense--that is, it follows certain laws and is predictable; but human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a profound tendency to see what they want rather than what is really there; consequently, to examine and hence understand accurately, it is necessary for human beings to subject themselves to the discipline of the scientific method. The essence of this discipline is experience, so that we cannot consider ourselves to know something unless we have actually experienced it; while the discipline of scientific method begins with experience, simple experience itself is not to be trusted; to be trusted, experience must be repeatable, usually in the form of an experiment; moreover, the experiment must be verifiable, in that some other people must have the same experience under the same circumstances.

Just click the "remember me" button and the name will automatically be filled in.

Genuine religion claims for itself the ability to know what's true, whereas genuine science claims for itself only the ability to quantify the probability of a thing being wrong. Bad science and bad religion simply swap roles, the former proclaiming Truth, the latter worshiping Doubt. - Jeffrey Satinover, 1998

quantifying probability is of course a truth claim.

Well, Mr. Guinn, we breed better cows, pigs, and horses. ID is able to be tested here, now, and it
it works. Evolution? the lab work doesn't seem to support it. The breeding programs have to work very hard to stop back-sliding to the base animal.
The cascade effect evolution needs is nowhere to be seen. Maybe evolution should be removed from the classrooms?

Peter:

Can you explain in what sense "natural selection is about why, not how"?

This is my second attempt at this post; the first apparently went astray.

So, repeating from yesterday:

b:

Hypethetico-deductive means that a scientific hypothesis has attendant deductive consequences that must be true in order for the hypothesis to be true. (note, this does not mean the hypothesis is true if the deductive consequences are satisfied, only that is is not yet false.)

Evolutionary theory has many deductive consequences that must all simultaneously be true. Not only consequences that were known at the time, but every one that has come to light since. (Example: for Evolutionary theory to be true, all reproductively isolated populations must diverge over time. Continental drift was undreamt of in Darwin's time. In order for evolutionary theory to be true, all separated populations in all land masses once joined must diverge over time.)

There are many other such examples.

In contrast, ID/Creationism has not even one such consequence.

As Peter's example clearly shows.

OJ:

Mr. Peck adds a host of unwarranted assumptions.

The warranted ones are:

The universe is real.

The laws governing the universe are not local.

Discerning the truth values between competing hypotheses requires testing them against observation.

Therefore, all hypotheses are continually open to revision, or outright rejection.

In contrast to a religion, which is an argument from authority, and whose tenets are not at all open to revision or rejection.

Mr. Mitchell:

All land masses on earth have completely transited all climatological zones on earth. Antarctica was once tropical.

Nearly all terrestrial animals can exist within a fairly narrow climatological range.

Perhaps you have an alternative explanation for why there is any terrestrial life at all.

Peter:

What Brit said.

What's more, I can't think of any scientific theory that does anything other than answer "how."

In other words, science is descriptive, not explanatory.

Religion is generally explanatory, occasionally descriptive.

It is the combination of claiming absolute truth, and making uninformed descriptive claims, that causes the collision.

Brit:

Come, come. Have we reached the point where we have to keep a dictionary close by?

Let's see: How did the tree fall over? Well, it cracked at the base and descended at an angle of 34.3 degrees southwest until it came to a halt parallel and adjacent to the ground. Why? The wind blew it over.

How did man evolve such a big brain? Genes x, y, z...etc. mutated and that was followed by a near infinite number of mutations over eons. Why? Because it was responding to survival pressures and imperatives.

Peter:

I think we do need that dictionary.

You can ask "why" something happened, and really mean "how does it work"....Why does the ferrari go faster than the mini? Why does the television come on when you press that button?

"It responded to survival pressures" is really a "how" answer. It's actually a description of a whole bunch of physical stuff.

But it has nothing to say about a reason for that physical stuff.

By contrast, ID is all about the reason. Why did x evolve into y? Because an Intelligent Designer willed it and deliberately made it evolve from x, having the end y in mind.

Brit:

You would hoot if I pointed out that the phrase "G-d did it" is also a description of a whole bunch of physical stuff.

Can you measure survival pressures? Quantify them? Photograph them? Do you recognize them as they are occurring? Can you predict which mutations will flow from which pressures?

It isn't a "how" or a physical description at all. Its an inference of cause that appears to be the most pausible explanation when you start from an opening assumption that natural change is unguided by anything external to it and then try to make some order out of the mutating mess. Otherwise "just-so" stories would be like weather reports rather than speculation.

'God did it' is an untestable hypothesis at the metaphysical level. It doesn't have any consequences for explaining how something works at the physical level. Literally anything could qualify for the explanation "God did it".

Evolutionary hypotheses at the physical level ("just so stories" as you enjoy calling them - some are good, some are amusingly bad) have to be testable, or they don't count as science.

'God did it' therefore doesn't count as science.

'God did it' might be true, but science doesn't now and almost certainly won't ever tell you that, so it doesn't belong in the category 'science', ergo it doesn't belong in the science classroom.

A student looking at the chemical make-up of paint is studying a different topic from the student writing an essay about the meaning of the work of Picasso.

Likewise, the evolutionary scientist and the IDer or Creationist, while purporting to to be studying the same subject, are on fundamentally different tacks.

Brit:

Slap, slap.

A statement from a scientist that the ancient fossil that he found or the DNA that he analysed has the following properties, or the following relationships to other fossils and DNA, is a statement of scientific fact. The statement that it got from there to here in response to a certain imperative is not a scientific fact and is not testable. The evidence may be so overwhelmingly consistent with that statement that one can argue it is justifiable to infer that conclusion (which is what the ID debate is all about), but that does not make it a physical description or a scientific "fact".

Your Picasso analogy is fallacious. The person who analyses the chemical composition of his paint is a scientist. The person who studies all of Picasso's previous paintings in order to learn why he put this stroke or colour where he did on his latest painting is not, no matter how "systematic" his research. He is engaged in inferring the reason for the present from the past, not deducing a fact from physical evidence.

The analogy is not perfect, but it shows how two people looking at the same thing can be working on different levels.

Peter:

ID/Creationism has so little to do with science common descent, or the Biblical "descended from their own kind" would be equally well explained.

A hypothesis that is so incompetent at even this level is completely worthless as a scientific endeavor.

You asked if survival pressure can be measured. Well, it can. Continental drift. A purely material process that inevitably creates climatological stress on all resident populations. You can measure it in rainfall, temperature, wind, cloudcover, altitude and nearly ad infinitum.

The extraordinary variation of life, and its specificity to climate is beyond debate.

The question is: does some material process account for the continued existence of terrestrial life (never mind its diversity), or must we invoke widespread, continual, Divine intervention?

Depending on the answer to that question, it might be worth pondering how destructive to Christianity ID/Creationism would be if widely seen as true.

Further proof, as if such were needed, that Irony is the driving force of the universe.

Jeff: You say that evolution is evidenced by the fact that life with fairly narrow climate requirements exists despite the fact that all continents have drifted through all climates. Your argument, I take it, is that if phenotypes were static over millenia, there would be no life because at some point it would have encountered an inhospitable climate. Passing quickly over the fact that not all evolution doubters believe in eternally static phenotypes, would you then concede that a single species found in all climates was therefore likely not the product of evolution?

Jeff: Still no clue what you're talking about. Look, science is what scientists do. It is quite humorous that in the last several decades there has been such an intense effort, originally by "philosophers of science" to attempt to rigorously define what science is, but it's just a feeble attempt to be able to turn around and say that certain things are "not science", i.e. illegitimate. But science is what scientists do, and that's it. Scientific papers don't say "Here's how I followed Step 1 of the Scientific Method, etc."

Is it not true that if you banished the word "random" you go from "Evolution" to "evolution" and could pretty much end all this hoo-hah?

David:

Would I concede that a single species found in all climates is not the product of evolution?

No -- what you are posing is a faulty syllogism. Here is the fault: presuming common descent, then there is no way this "hypothetical" organism could exist absent preceding evolution. Further, there is nothing in the process precluding such an organism.

b:

What I am talking about is independent of process (although the process is practically a necessary precondition). I am talking about a universal characteristic of scientific theories; that is a different layer than whatever the process might be that leads to them.

All (I am reasonably confident I won't be contradicted) theories we consider belonging to the class "scientific" have consequences we may deduce from the theory. In order for the theory to avoid contradiction, those deductive consequences must always be true. Whether you agree wholeheartedly with the materialistic theory of evolution, or find it to be a steaming load of hooey, it has a large number of deductive consequences.

For example: if naturalistic evolution is true, the Earth must be very old.

There are many other such. (In fact, the ToE has at least as many deductive consequences as any other theory I can think of.)

In contrast, ID/Creationism doesn't have even one. And until there is one, ID/Creationism simply doesn't belong in a science class.

Anon: no you have to banish the word "naturalistic."

Jeff: As far as I can deduce (ha ha), your definition of "science" is constructed to explicitly exclude religion, and do nothing else (it's basically a slight rephrasing of the old "testability" standard). And, predictably, it has nothing to do with how science actually is carried out in practice.

I'll say it again: Outside of fields that are closely related to mathematics (such as particle physics), there are very, very few things that we can say "follow necessarily from the stated premises" when we're dealing with the Universe. Theories that want to last are always very specific about things that we already know through observation, and tend to be very vague and flexible in other areas...

Take inflation, for example. It makes predictions about how the Universe should look. Of course, the things it makes predictions about are things that were known about before inflation existed, and in fact were the motivating force behind its creation.

Do you really believe that Evolution "proves" that the Earth is "very old" (whatever "very" means...)?

b:

One of the most enertaining aspects of Jeff's defense of Darwinism is that by "consequence" he never means something that follows, only those things that we all knew preceded. It's just one of the ways Darwinism isn't scientific.

OJ, you're a book guy. See if you can dig up a copy of 'Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution'. It had an excellent essay on Evolution, and discussed the failings of carbon and radioactive dating. I think showed that many of the things we 'know' about the past may be in error.

Jeff: Your thesis is that life evolved because, if it were static, it would have died out as, in turn, each of the continents traveled through different climates. That's strikes me as iffy even as a matter of logic, but certainly a counter example kills it.

What's really entertaining is the ease with which the religionists slip from denying darwinism on 'scientific' grounds, to denying any evolution at all.

Anyone really think there'd be such a fuss if darwinism restricted itself to the evolution of plants? If so, you're a fibber.

Youse are all just sniffy about being primates. Come on, sing along!