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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
 Posted - 10/28/2007 : 01:31:15
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Nothing, obviously, but try to get that into the minds of any ID supporter. On UncommonDescent, BarryA claims that
Now if only ID theorists would make a testable prediction; something like “over many thousands of generations natural selection will account for only extremely modest changes in the malaria parasite's genes and will be unable to cause any increase in genetic information.” Oh wait a minute, that prediction was made and confirmed.
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Even if we grant the ID crowd to use whatever definition they want to for "increases in genetic information" AND that there actually is a designer, there is NO way ID can predict what will happen to genetic information. The reason for this is very simple: ID makes no assumptions what-so-ever about the designer. And in order for ID to make any sort of predictions, at least something has to be said about the designer's intentions/character. For example, in order for ID to predict what BarryA claims that it does, you have to assume that the designer is not tinkering with the malaria parasites' genes to cause increases in genetic information. Or, alternatively, if no increases in genetic information are found, we could assume that the designer is not actively suppressing such increases.
Here's the million dollar question: What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption?
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METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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H. Humbert
SFN Die Hard
USA
4574 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 08:59:12 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Hawks
Here's the million dollar question: What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption?
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Unscience?
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"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." --Richard P. Feynman
"Face facts with dignity." --found inside a fortune cookie |
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Ricky
SFN Die Hard
USA
4907 Posts |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 11:13:29 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Ricky
| What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption? |
Philosophy.
What I find amazing is that IDers still think "Intelligent Design" simply means "Not evolution."
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That definition works for me. Maybe just add, "Not science, either."
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 10/28/2007 : 13:17:19 [Permalink]
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What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption?
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How 'bout Con-sumption, because after all, it is little more than just another con game; an elaborate bait & switch.
And ID does make at least some predictions. It predicts work for lawyers, aggravation for school boards, and hilarity for skeptics.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 17:36:53 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by filthy
...and hilarity for skeptics.
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Some things that comes out of the ID camp can be donwright funny, but but some of the things - like my pet peeve when IDists claim that ID makes predictions - are at best annoying. |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 20:15:08 [Permalink]
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As William Dembski put it:
| But what about the predictive power of intelligent design? To require prediction fundamentally misconstrues design. To require prediction of design is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. This is to commit a category mistake. To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably (designers often institute policies that end up being rigidly obeyed). Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability. |
Me providing the above quote might seem like an attempt at an argument from authority (this might the only form of argument that work on quite a few ID supporters, btw), but Dembski's logic is actually quite good in this instance. What Demsbki seems to be saying is that for any given designer, you can't predict what it will do. And given that that ID doesn't say anything at all about the alledged designer, the predicability goes from zero to even less.
This issue (predictability) is so fundamental that you would have thought that the approved posters at UncommonDescent (not commenters, these posters are the hand-picked people of Dembski to represent his own blog) should at least try to understand it. We should see the ID crowd discussing this issue at length to resolve it. Instead we constantly get the same message relayed time and time again - and hardly anyone ever questions it. But perhaps there is some light at the end of the tunnel. One of Dembski's bulldogs (DaveScot) writes:
| With regard to your comment about ID predicting genomic stability over many generations - I don't agree. I don't see anything about ID that predicts stability. What is your basis for that claim? |
I've seen DaveScot make a similar objection previously and, just like this time, no one makes an even half good attempt defending the original position. BarryA (the original claimant for the predictability claim) later comments:
| When we observe known designers we see that they often build in redundancy and error correction mechanisms in order to increase stability. We observe both redundancy and error correction in the genetic code, which results in stability over thousands of generations. I infer that an unknown designer built in the redundancy and error correction for the purpose of obtaining stability that is observed similar to the way known designers achieve the same result. |
And later:
| A manmade system may incorporate redundancy and error correction mechanisms to promote stability. Nevertheless, the manmade system will always be only “relatively stable,” not absolutely stable. In the same way, the biological systems we observe that have redundancy and error correction mechanisms built in are also only “relatively stable.” |
That is a pathetic response and shows a fundamental lack of understanding simple logic. BarryA's original claim was that we should expect stability, not that stability was a mere possibility according to ID.
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METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 21:49:58 [Permalink]
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Just a few words for the lurkers who might not know what the big deal is about a scientific theory making predictions. (Please correct me, people, if I misstate any of this. I'm not a scientist.):
1) First, ID isn't a theory. To be so, some science would have to be performed to confirm the notion. None has. Also, there have been no peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting ID. (Given the supernatural "nature" of the ID notion, it's difficult to even imagine what sort of evidence or experiment would confirm it. The matter's essentially science-proof.)
2) A real scientific theory must make predictions. This is related to "falsifiability," the idea that real theories must make material statements of substance that potentially allow them to be disproved. The Theory of Evolution makes many predictions, and there are numerous ways it could be falsified (such as finding a Devonian Bunny fossil), though it has not been.
3) ID simply substitutes "adesignerdidit" for "goddidit," without saying who or what the designer is, how he/she/it accomplished the act, or when it happened. It's just a vague, pseudoscientific restatement of Creationism, but with less specific details.
4) The admitted lack of ID's ability to make predictions pretty much proves all by itself that it is not science.
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 22:04:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Hawks
Originally posted by filthy
...and hilarity for skeptics.
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Some things that comes out of the ID camp can be donwright funny, but but some of the things - like my pet peeve when IDists claim that ID makes predictions - are at best annoying.
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Where it gets amusing is that they are talking about an unknown designer.
At which point one asks: if the designer is unknown, how can you state that ID makes predictions? Or that the designer even exists, comes to that?
And then, as they drag out the hoary, old "irreductable complexity" knee-jerk -- another prediction! -- you collaspe in hysterics as you beat it to death with the very science they proport to be masters of.
It's funny 'cause it's all they got.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 10/28/2007 : 23:35:56 [Permalink]
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filthy said:
Where it gets amusing is that they are talking about an unknown designer.
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Well, the best part of this is that the only possible designer is a supernatural one.
The ID crowd will tell you with absolute certainty that life cannot arise by natural means. There is no possible way, according to them, that an abiogenesis event could happen.
So they are utterly full of shit when they say the designer is "unknown". They know exactly who they are talking about, and its the christian deity.
Because if life can't arise without a designer, then the only possible designer is a supernatural one.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 03:25:26 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dude
filthy said:
Where it gets amusing is that they are talking about an unknown designer.
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Well, the best part of this is that the only possible designer is a supernatural one.
The ID crowd will tell you with absolute certainty that life cannot arise by natural means. There is no possible way, according to them, that an abiogenesis event could happen.
So they are utterly full of shit when they say the designer is "unknown". They know exactly who they are talking about, and its the christian deity.
Because if life can't arise without a designer, then the only possible designer is a supernatural one.
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Indeed, indeed. As I further said; it is all a grift. The ol' bait & swicheroo. Tell the rubes of an unknown designer to get in the door, and as soon as ID is in the science classrooms, break out the Bibles and teach the "Controversy," with the emphisis on "Con."
ID is a sad, and funny, little philosophy, isn't it? By it's very nature, it can't qualify as a religion. It doesn't know who/what to pray to (claimed), and yet it is so manacled by it's own tunnel vision that it can't do the science it proports to understand but doesn't.
Sometimes Dembski & Behe, et al., remind me of Abbot & Costello. The biggest difference is that A & C had talent.
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist!
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Dude
SFN Die Hard
USA
6891 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 05:24:46 [Permalink]
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A&C were intentionally funny.... the ID crowd aren't intending to be funny, they are just so ludicrous that you can't help but laugh at them sometimes though.
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Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
-- Thomas Jefferson
"god :: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument." - G. Carlin
Hope, n.
The handmaiden of desperation; the opiate of despair; the illegible signpost on the road to perdition. ~~ da filth |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26020 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 07:04:16 [Permalink]
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| The funniest part about the IDists is that all you've got to do, really, to demonstrate the aburdity of their position is to let them keep talking about it. |
- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too. |
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Bill scott
SFN Addict
USA
2103 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 07:22:46 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by H. Humbert
Originally posted by Hawks
Here's the million dollar question: What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption?
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Unscience?
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A theory. |
"Lets get one thing clear, Bill. Science does make some assumptions." -perrodetokio-
"In the end as skeptics we must realize that there is no real knowledge, there is only what is most reasonable to believe." -Coelacanth-
The fact that humans do science is what causes errors in science. -Dave W.-
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pleco
SFN Addict
USA
2998 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 07:24:52 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Bill scott
Originally posted by H. Humbert
Originally posted by Hawks
Here's the million dollar question: What do you call it when your conclusion is also your assumption?
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Unscience?
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A theory.
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That would be funny if you knew what you were talking about.  |
by Filthy
The neo-con methane machine will soon be running at full fart. |
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BigPapaSmurf
SFN Die Hard
3192 Posts |
Posted - 10/29/2007 : 07:24:55 [Permalink]
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| Erm, without testable predictions it doesnt even qualify for 'hypothsis' let alone 'theory' |
"...things I have neither seen nor experienced nor heard tell of from anybody else; things, what is more, that do not in fact exist and could not ever exist at all. So my readers must not believe a word I say." -Lucian on his book True History
"...They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence. So if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage of a situation comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time." -Lucian critical of early Christians c.166 AD From his book, De Morte Peregrini |
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ID predicts.......
