Rusting Car Bumper

Thats a typo. That should be "design" and not "designed." I am suggesting that such a model might be implicit. It's not necessary in science generally.

There is no universally accepted definition for "Law". Law is typically used historically. More often than not "principle" or some other similar word is used nowadays. Step one could in principle be satisfied by forming a law even by your definition of it so its moot anyway.

That would depend on the domain of ID but generally that is simply not the case.

DC

Rusting Car Bumper

Cleary that would part of the outlined steps but those monikers are really just arbitrary tags anyway. ID rests on the premise that there are things in nature that didn't come about through the laws of nature acting upon matter but by a volitional mind acting upon matter. Any attempt at supporting that premise would require one to distinguish designed from non-designed and thats basically what step 1 does.

Step 2 is essentially the experimental step. That is, once youve established step 1 then it is required to find actual examples in the universe.

People are mentioning prediction but that's really a secondary or rule of thumb and frankly is a cop out unless more information is given. If the theory requires prediction then lets give the minimal standards for prediciton that fit the criteria. It seems if someone could pull 1 and 2 out of their behind then prediction might be an implicit part of that.

DC

Rusting Car Bumper

I think people are missing the point of the thread. One can only learn so much from being polemical which is essentially what most Creation-evolution discussion are.

The point of the thread is to put yourself in the shoes of the IDer and try to invent a more specific set of conditions, if satisfied, would establish ID as scientific. Simply blurting out something from the Philosophy of Science 101 textbook doesn't really do that. If ID were scientific what would it look like generally? That's what I attempted to do in a rough form in the OP.

DC

Mordy

I think its going to take a while for ID'ists to get a hold on what they need to do. There is way more involved in detecting design then saying 'nature did it', although we'd like to accuse them of saying "god did it" detecting design and intelligence is no small matter, while saying nature did it due to the abundance of natural evidence from geology, cosmology, etc, is quite simply a no brainer. Since everything that happens we assume the default answer is always nature and for good reasons, its going to take much more effort in getting design off the ground and I'd think you'd all agree with me on these points. Despite any bias or axe you may have to grind against them.

Also most biologists and evolutionists do not have degree's in engineering so I think what they have to say about design is quite simply irrelevant, many have no idea/educational background in/of engineering processes, production processes, chemical engineering, etc that goes in in human industry and the natural limits and difficulties we face in designing things of our own, some of which definitely has exact counterparts in nature. There are only so many finite ways you can design something via a standard processes. This is why companies like intel have to build new multi-billion dollar factories as advances in production and process advance, they start over from scratch a lot of the time when they cannot re-tool, or re-engineer their old technology, when it in fact would take too much money and resources to do so. This most definitely has/is a problem for explanations regarding life: The re-engineering something from what it was into something else from the ground up over time, developing new systems and methods of problem solving de-novo via blind materialistic / law based processes.

This is a micrograph of the bacterial flagella, and if I was behe I would have written Darwin's black box myself, although I might have not have written it in such a hostile intellectual atmosphere. Nor would I have jumped to the conclusion 'it must have been god' in the book like he does, but one only has to look at the flagella and our own human motors and machines to see the similarity and we all know: Matter is matter no matter what, there is no such thing as "different matter" when biologists say well "of course thats natural... its biological / found in life" that to me seems interesting because for any other collection of atoms that are not found in life-forms, they'd automatically assume with great certainty that it was the result of intelligence.

Micrograph of lower flagella

Prof

ID obviously has some fundamental problems. However, in trying to be as charitable as possible to examining how science would be employed in evaluating a designed object...

First, it seems to me "sentiently designed" or "cognitively designed" or "purposefully designed" is better than intelligently designed. What I'm trying to get around is the sticking point of whether something is designed "well," and examining only if something appears designed. (Maybe just "designed" is better than Intelligent Design, on that score).

Anyway...

Say the astronauts who went to the moon had come back with what they claimed was a mysterious machine they found on the moon. Science certainly would be front and center in determining everything we could about that machine (including whether it was a hoax of the astronauts). If the machine was made of novel materials not found on earth...nor even of materials found on the moon...it would be through science that we'd find that out. Scientists (and engineers) would be deployed to find out as much as possible about the device, including no doubt ascertaining it's purpose.

Science may not be able to tell us who designed it. But it could probably say: "Folks, everything we know about the moon tells us this object is impossible to have arisen there...our best guess is that it's an artifact of some sort of conscious design."

Given that conclusion we would proceed on to other investigations (what is it made of, how is it constructed, what does it do and what might it's purpose have been?).

I think perhaps this shares some similarity with the public relations description ID uses ("we are only searching for evidence of design"). However, the situation on earth is fundamentally different in that there are all manner of possibilities for explaining the features of earth's biology, which are not present in my machine-on-the-moon example.

But off the top of my head, I don't necessarily see that science couldn't be deployed to ascertain design vs the probability of non-design, in principle.

Prof.

theyeti

I don't see where a model is implicit in simply going around and labeling things as either "designed" or "not designed". In the absence of a model, such designations are meaningless. What exactly does it tell me about the bacterial flagellum to say it was "designed" that I didn't know before?

Well sure, but there's no universally accepted definition for "science" either. Philosophers of science do not agree on what constitutes "science", or even if it's possible to come up with a set of criteria to begin with. The fact remains though that ID is not a mere quantitative relationship between two or more things, and is instead proferred as a comprehensive explanation about the origin of things. So as I see it, in order to be "scientific", it has to come up with a testable model that explains the origin of things. Otherwise, it's just an exercise in appending a label to something.

IDists already claim that they have a method for distinguishing design from non-design. The method consist of this: If you eliminate all possible non-design explanations, then something must have been designed. The obvious problem being that you can't prove a negative (and it's not as if they've actually made a good stab at it anyway). And furthermore, it assumes that current knowledge is sufficient to eliminate all non-design possibilities. But history is filled with people making improper design inferences because they simply didn't know better.

Anyway, contrary to what IDists claim, their method is not how we normally go about choosing between designed and non-designed. Normally, we have a theory about how something was designed (it was made by humans, using these tools, during this era in history, for this particular purpose, etc.) and we compare it to a non-design theory (erosion, chance, mutation and selection, some repeatable process that produces a pattern, etc.) We go with whichever one seems more likely. And that depends on testing each one independently, then comparing them.

So before we can judge how likely ID is, we have to have some sort of testable model. There has to be an account of how the putative designed object came to be. Once we have that, we can see if the facts favor this model over the current model. Without a model however, the facts are mostly irrelevant. And that leaves ID pretty much scientifically worthless.

theyeti

Rusting Car Bumper

In the absence of a model of how a force can act at a distance, did we abandon or dismiss as unscientific parts of science which depend on force acting at a distance? No.

I think you really aren't interested in the main question and purpose of the thread. It just seems you want to gainsay what I write.

DC

Rusting Car Bumper

Yes. My step one above was to point out that they would have to come up with a GENERAL way to distinguish one from the other. Its clear that, on the street, ID Christians mistake structure and order for design and frankly the IDers are all too happy if they play along.

Sure. This is a good analogy or example. But I'm introducing the demand that says ID has to be more fundamental than that. To operate in principle, it has to have clear unambigious methods for distinguishing mere order "caused" by natural processes from order caused by "volition" or "will."

Off the top of my head, I'd agree but its possible as we go along it *could* be an intractable problem.

DC

theyeti

Actually, yes. In the 19th century, "action at a distance" was a heavily argued over philosophical idea that many dismissed because they couldn't make sense of it. It was because Maxwell's equations did such a good job of predicting things that they were accepted anyway. What does this have to do with ID?

Oh good grief. I'm just offering my viewpoint on the question you raised. This is something that I've spent no small amount of time thinking about, and as a scientist, I am interested in what makes something "scientific" irrespective of the cre/ID debate. If you don't like my opinion, tough patooty.

theyeti

Rusting Car Bumper

It doesn't seem that way to me. Why not actually try the exercise yourself?

DC