Stop With This "ID isn't Science" Crap

[superleeds]

Why one in a quadrillion, real IDer's say I in a 100. It's got nothing to do with science and nothing to do with probability and everything to do with 'oh please Lord, don't let my existence mean jack chit'.

[maurile]

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The question "were human beings designed rather than evolved" is a scientific/probability question, NOT a philosophy question.

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Whether humans were designed is not a scientific question until somebody can come up with some way to empirically distinguish between designed entities and non-designed entities. So far, nobody has done this. The idea that humans were designed does not rule out any possible observation we might make -- whatever we observe, it's possible that things were just designed that way. So the idea that humans were designed is untestable. There's no experiment we can do to rule it out. So it's not science.

(The idea that humans have evolved, on the other hand, is inconsistent with plenty of possible observations. Just to pick an easy one, if you find human fossils that predate the earliest non-human mammalian lineage, then humans couldn't have evolved from non-human mammals.)

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If there is a one in a quadrillion chance that a designer exists and the probability that humans could have evolved this quickly is one in two quadrillion, than there is a a two thirds chance that we were designed. But don't forget that the designer need not be God.

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Fine, but that's not science.

[maurile]

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I don't know if it is because I am a professional poker player or a college dropout that I think this way, but I get very irritated when evolutionists say that ID should be taught only in philosphy courses because if "it isn't falsifiable it isn't science". Nonsense. The only good reason it shouldn't be taught is if it is very unlikely to be true. Which is apparently the case.

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Do you think the notion that a flush beats a straight should be taught in science class? It is very likely to be true.

Here's the thing. Highschool science textbooks (and therefore classes) present a summary of the ideas well-supported in the primary literature (i.e., peer-reviewed articles in science journals).

Biology classes teach about how animals and plants have different cell structures, about how photosynthesis works, and about the common ancestry of separate species because all of these things have been reported in the science journals.

You will not find anything about "intelligent design" in the science journals, however. There's no research program associated with it. There are no experimental results to report because IDers don't do any experiments. There's nothing to write up in a journal article. It isn't science. Writings on ID will be found only in newspaper op-ed pieces, blogs, and books intended for a popular audience -- not in the professional scientific literature. But highschool science textbooks aren't supposed to summarize what's in some ignoramus's blog -- they are supposed to summarize what's in the professional scientific literature.

That's why ID isn't (and shouldn't be) taught in biology classes.

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But if evidence suggested otherwise, (for instance a group of super intelligent beings made up only of gold and argon who spoke their own language came spewing out of Mt. Helens with the story that they were created by Andy Fox), it would be mathematically and probablistically wrong to claim that these beings were more likely to have been evolved than created by AF.

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So nobody would claim that.

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Science has no right to choose the less likely explanation even if probability, rather than experimental evidence is the basis for the other answer.

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Science doesn't choose the less likely explanation.

nh