ID or I don't konw?
In response to> http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/01/supporters-of-science-must-adapt_22.html
I think that is a great tactical rhetorical message to get across.
It is still the case that one should not give ground to the ID folk that what they are doing is science. The criticism of the existing particular story of evolutionary history can qualify as science, but they didn't name their movement after their criticism but their favored alternative hypothesis.. The hypothesis that they advance has no basis in observation and there is no claim that any specific testable result would follow from it.
ID should be treated as philosophy. Which is fine, I like philosophy. But the philosophical claim is by no means new. It is the very old argument from design. While I wouldn't send my child to a public school except as a anthropology field trip, I otherwise would think it fascinating if they would teach ID as philosophy along with the classical design arguments. Particularly if they also gave the historic responses. I can just imagine the PTA meeting after a strong argument from evil, and regress argument were made. Or the teacher training in Kolmogorov Complexity to prepare students for the ID class!
If life is so complex irreducibly complex as to require a designer, where did the designer come from? How complex is that designer? If you compressed the designer what would be the length of his program? How again does it help to introduce a more unknown more complex more powerful entity that we can't explain, to explain a much simpler phenomenon like the first cell?
How did the designer come to be? “We don't know,” they answer. But thats the same answer to the question “how did life evolve given that it looks so irreducibly complex?” So answering a designer does not add any information to the system it simply pushes out ignorance one more step. Occam's razor (as well as complexity based compression theory) demands that we shorten the explanation from “GOD...I don't know” to the more simple “I don't know”
Finally I can't resist...The old creationist had an argument that evolution was like a hurricane going through a junk yard and making a 747. Which was fine except GOD is like having no hurricane going through nothing and poof there is the space ship enterprise. At least the 747 conforms to the known laws of physics, and there are in fact hurricanes and junk yards.
I think that is a great tactical rhetorical message to get across.
It is still the case that one should not give ground to the ID folk that what they are doing is science. The criticism of the existing particular story of evolutionary history can qualify as science, but they didn't name their movement after their criticism but their favored alternative hypothesis.. The hypothesis that they advance has no basis in observation and there is no claim that any specific testable result would follow from it.
ID should be treated as philosophy. Which is fine, I like philosophy. But the philosophical claim is by no means new. It is the very old argument from design. While I wouldn't send my child to a public school except as a anthropology field trip, I otherwise would think it fascinating if they would teach ID as philosophy along with the classical design arguments. Particularly if they also gave the historic responses. I can just imagine the PTA meeting after a strong argument from evil, and regress argument were made. Or the teacher training in Kolmogorov Complexity to prepare students for the ID class!
If life is so complex irreducibly complex as to require a designer, where did the designer come from? How complex is that designer? If you compressed the designer what would be the length of his program? How again does it help to introduce a more unknown more complex more powerful entity that we can't explain, to explain a much simpler phenomenon like the first cell?
How did the designer come to be? “We don't know,” they answer. But thats the same answer to the question “how did life evolve given that it looks so irreducibly complex?” So answering a designer does not add any information to the system it simply pushes out ignorance one more step. Occam's razor (as well as complexity based compression theory) demands that we shorten the explanation from “GOD...I don't know” to the more simple “I don't know”
Finally I can't resist...The old creationist had an argument that evolution was like a hurricane going through a junk yard and making a 747. Which was fine except GOD is like having no hurricane going through nothing and poof there is the space ship enterprise. At least the 747 conforms to the known laws of physics, and there are in fact hurricanes and junk yards.