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without adding anything but my threpence worth I'm with this Galanter fella

and I like his avatar.

galanter wrote:
My own position is what is sometimes called "soft-boiled" agnosticism. i.e. (1) I don't know whether God exists and (2) I don't know whether other people can know if God exists. That's not to say I don't have suspicions. My own suspicion is that God doesn't exist, and that's more or less how I live my life. But I just don't see how such things can be proven, and in the interest of intellectual honesty soft-boiled agnosticism is the best I can do.

I pretty much think that way too although I call myself an atheist, I suppose it's just semantics at this point. I don't think that atheism makes a positive statement but I could be wrong. The way I interpret the term it means a lack of belief in one god/gods and I end it right there.

I also agree with you ID argument I don't see how the curriculum would really change if it was implemented other than the insertion of a deity. It's not like ID is allowing anyone to make any relevant or useful findings about the world around us. Looking for evidence of the supernatural in the natural just makes no sense.

But just to be clear I'm not saying that IM could never be science. I'm just saying that as a matter of fact it isn't today.

If you take it at face value, there is something there that is open to the scientific method. The hypothesis is that living things exhibit a level of complexity which would be impossible to achieve without an intellegent agent of some kind planning the way.

I've been studying complexity for a few years now, and there are (contested) ways of quantifying complexity, and I suppose there may be some way of determining the *cost* (in energy, in information, etc.) of creating that complexity. Maybe there would be ways of showing that without an external input of complexification there isn't enough time or energy to achieve the level of complexity in living things.

Or something like that.

But the point is that *in science* the burden of proof is on the ID folks to do the research, publish the research, have others inspect it and duplicate it, and so on.

But they haven't done the work. Leaving aside the question of whether ID could ever be science, it's simply a matter of fact that it hasn't been established as science to date.

Rather than stealing Board of Education elections, the ID crowd should sponsor research and show some scientifically compelling proof. The should do the work! Until then they are just, relative to science, acting like spoiled children.

galanter wrote:Science includes:

* The condition/limitation that any proposition under consideration must be falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable, science can't even think about it.

If this is a criteria of science then when Einstein theorised about relativity it wasn't scientific. It wasn't falsifiable until years later. But if scientists had stopped thinking about it no experiment would have been undertaken which proved Einstein's theory.

Also, how is the theory of Evolution falsifiable? It could be if something was found that was completely contrary to the fossil record but we need scientific research to continue in order for such a thing to ever be discovered.

As far as I understand it there is till debate over whether this particular criteria for science should be a determinant of whether something is scientific or not.
However, I haven't looked into this a whole lot so if you disagree with the above statements then do say I'm genuinely interested and its something I have been planning upon looking into.

Earwicker wrote:

galanter wrote:Science includes:

* The condition/limitation that any proposition under consideration must be falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable, science can't even think about it.

If this is a criteria of science then when Einstein theorised about relativity it wasn't scientific. It wasn't falsifiable until years later. But if scientists had stopped thinking about it no experiment would have been undertaken which proved Einstein's theory.

This has been the problem with physics in the 20th century. There are 2 kinds of specialists, theoreticians and experimentalists, and you really need both to establish an idea as sound science. There are some who dismiss M-theory/string theory as being metaphysics, because the energy levels required to do anything close to experimentation are so immense that it's hard to imagine we will ever get there. But it's seemed that way before and then experimental solutions were found.

Earwicker wrote:
Also, how is the theory of Evolution falsifiable? It could be if something was found that was completely contrary to the fossil record but we need scientific research to continue in order for such a thing to ever be discovered.

There are lots of ways evolution could have been falsified. As you mention, inexplicable fossils. But also showing that there is no mechanism for inheritance (but there is), or showing that that mechanism doesn't work in a way that would allow for evolution (but it does). There are still controversies around evolution among biologists, but none that point away from evolution per se. Just differences of opinion in terms of refinement.

Earwicker wrote: As far as I understand it there is till debate over whether this particular criteria for science should be a determinant of whether something is scientific or not.
However, I haven't looked into this a whole lot so if you disagree with the above statements then do say I'm genuinely interested and its something I have been planning upon looking into.

There is a whole school of postmodern thought called "science studies" which savages the current scientific method and offers all manner of radical alternatives. For example Feyerabend and to some extent Foucault. But 99.99% of scientists don't take them seriously. It's mostly academic postmodernists talking to other academic postmodernists, and almost none of them are practicising scientists.

Pay them no mind. They'll go away soon enough.

galanter wrote:Pay them no mind. They'll go away soon enough.

Good god, let's hope so.

Earwicker wrote:

galanter wrote:Science includes:

* The condition/limitation that any proposition under consideration must be falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable, science can't even think about it.

If this is a criteria of science then when Einstein theorised about relativity it wasn't scientific. It wasn't falsifiable until years later. But if scientists had stopped thinking about it no experiment would have been undertaken which proved Einstein's theory.

Also, how is the theory of Evolution falsifiable? It could be if something was found that was completely contrary to the fossil record but we need scientific research to continue in order for such a thing to ever be discovered.

As far as I understand it there is till debate over whether this particular criteria for science should be a determinant of whether something is scientific or not.
However, I haven't looked into this a whole lot so if you disagree with the above statements then do say I'm genuinely interested and its something I have been planning upon looking into.

"Falsifiable" does not mean that we, right now, have the information, ability, understanding, and/or technology to disprove a theory or hypothesis. "Falsifiable" means that it is theoretically or hypothetically possible to disprove a theory or hypothesis. For example, you state that evolution "could be [falsifiable] if something was found that was completely contrary to the fossil record". What I think you really mean is that evolution could be disproven if something were found that was completely contrary to the fossil record. This means that evolution is in fact falsifiable. Likewise, when you say relativity "wasn't falsifiable until years later", you mean that we didn't have the ability to conduct tests that might disprove it until much later. But if a theory is falsifiable, it is always falsifiable.

Compare this with Creationism, including the subset called Intelligent Design. There is no possible fact or information that could be discovered that could prove Creationism false. There is no state to which technology could advance that would allow us to test Creationism in any meaningful sense. It is inherently unfalsifiable, and thus inherently unscientific.

galanter wrote:In other words by definition God is beyond us in everyway imaginable, and an infinity of ways we can't imagine...but God can't be limited, and so he has to have any ability imaginable, including making it so that we can know him.

God is pure "to be" or "esse" or "einai", galanter. I hate to remind you of that which I'm pretty sure (judging by what you have written thusfar in these forums) you already know. In this statement of yours that I have quoted, you are essentially saying that God IS in fact limited in that He has not actualized an "ability" He qua God has, namely "making it so that we can know [H]im.". I say this much: God is pure "to be" or "that which is"...therefore He cannot have ANY abilities. If He had "abilities", or to use the old Aristotelian/Thomistic terminology "potentialities", then He would not be God.

Look..........God just IS- He's "Pure Act" and therefore any imaginations you might have about this very subtley anthropomorphic Deity which you have, again, imagined which lead to the conclusion "God's existence is unprovable" are erroneous. Any limitation we might try to paste upon God is merely a projection of our own sensory and intellectual limitations.....and sometimes pride. After all, God is "to be" and we merely "are".

God does indeed exist.

matthew wrote: actualized

hahahahah sorry.

i just watched that movie king arthur. you know those priests who tortured heathens and were willing to be closed in with them to serve their Lord? i immediately thought of you.

i mean, you ARE roman catholic. and they're the ones who tortured people.

matthew wrote:God does indeed exist.

No she doesn't.