It's the half-baked claim that he uses to justify it that gets me though:
So really, what the critics of "Expelled" have a problem with is the origins of life, even though they claim evolution has no opinion on the issue. ... Funny how no one ever defined science as excluding any sort of intelligent designer.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The simple reality is that there is no testable means to test the claim of an intelligent designer. Period. You can claim it all you like, but you cannot demonstrate it in any meaningful sense. (and no, a Behe-style argument-by-credulity approach doesn't count either)
The second, and more serious problem with the film, is the fact that it grossly mischaracterizes the political/academic situation by essentially claiming that the oh-so-evil evolutionists are trying to suppress a valid theory. Nothing could be further from the truth, but none of ID's proponents has come up with anything that substantiates their claims that would survive peer review.
The reason that science in general has no opinion on the "origins" of life is because to this point, there is no means to prove or disprove what exactly happened at the moment that life became identifiable. In the purest sense of the word, science is quite atheistic (in the "without god" sense, not the "excluding god" sense that is so often inferred). Science in general concerns itself with what it can describe based on what we know, not the utterly unknowable.
Along the lines of the classic philosophical "brain in a bucket" model, we cannot prove the validity of anything that we cannot describe with our senses. However unlikely, it is possible that our entire experience is the result of someone artificially stimulating our brain while it sloshes about in a bucket of fluid somewhere. Since we have no means to prove or disprove the assertion that we are just floating in a bucket somewhere, we cannot meaningfully support it or refute it.
Accepting as "fact" the notion of an "intelligent designer" being involved in the creation of life falls into the same category - it is simply an assertion. As a hypothesis, it remainjavascript:void(0)
Publish Posts quite untestable - which is why ID doesn't even qualify as valid science.
2 comments:
there is no testable means to test the claim of an intelligent designer. Period. You can claim it all you like, but you cannot demonstrate it in any meaningful sense.
And once upon a time, there was no means to test the claim of little tiny particles of matter called "atoms." I guess the search for those should've just been abandoned forever at that point. And also once upon a time, there was no means to determine if some apparently accidental deaths were truly accident or were murders.
Thankfully, in both cases, open-minded people allowed the discussion of and research into such things. Too bad the modern world of academia is populated by closed-minded cowards who won't allow ID to be discussed, much less researched.
Why not let research into ID be played out like any other theory? If it is not science, as you claim, then that will be borne out in the research and the theory will be modified or abandoned.
So the ultimate question becomes: what are you so afraid of?
I did not say that some future could not present a means to test the existence of the supernatural. However, today, there is no such means.
The real problem with ID is that it is sloppy science. It essentially invokes the supernatural on the basis of credulity, not evidence.
It's not a matter of "cowardice" in academia at all - it's a matter of ID failing to meet the basic standards of scientific inquiry.
As for me being "afraid" of ID, I'm not - I merely think it's junk science resting upon the egos of its authors, rather than upon any body of useful evidence.
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