youngalexander

Who is Miller and how does (he/she) use ID "in a non-trivial degree in the actual practices" (of science?)?

Doubting Didymus

Just wondering, but did you seriously mean this, or is it part of a general caricature of ID supporters? Surely you don't seriously think evolution makes no useful and easily confirmable predictions? Please clarify.

Evoken

He was playing devil's advocate.


Valz

Doubting Didymus

I suspected as much, but one traditionally makes as good a case for the 'devil' as possible when doing so. This is just another caricature of ID, to make them look as stupid as possible. Both PLP and plenty of IDists are well enough aware of the predictive value of evolutionary theory to make the above quote just another cheap shot at the stupidest possible formulations of the case for ID.

PoodleLovinPessimist

Of course I'm playing devil's advocate.

My point is that if we privilege vague and subjective definitions of science, then proponents can exploit the vagueness and subjectivity to call ID science and there's no reasoned argument to exclude ID from science class.

If we just privilege the preponderance of opinion of professional scientists, then we fall right into the hands of the DI. If they lose just because it's not accepted by "mainstream" science, the propaganda becomes, "Look! The scientists can't exclude ID on objective grounds, the best they can say is that they all just don't like it. If it was for some 'objective' reason, they would have said so. And we know why they just don't like it: Because it challenges their a priori dogmatic religion of materialism. It becomes the province of the political process to counter this illegal promotion of religion by allowing equal time."

The avowed strategy of ID is to undermine the social and political confidence people have in scientists. Now they might well be able to do that no matter what scientists do. But if we are going to take opposition seriously, we have to look at the battle strategically: It's not enough to win, you have to win in such a way that your strategic goals are furthered. Indeed there are some battles it's preferable to lose, if you can lose them in the right way.

I submit that the goal of the proponents of real science is or ought to be not merely to keep ID out of the classroom. It is to maintain the social and political authority of science and rational thought in general. And for that we're going to have to rely in no small part on the courts, for whom the concept of a "legalistic" interpretation of rules was invented. If we win in Dover, but we do so at the cost of introducing a vague and subjective definition of science into precedent, then ID proponents will come back with a version of ID that fulfills the vague definition, argue that they have "enough" scientists to fulfill the subjective definition, and we lose the courts.

My point is that the vagueness of the evaluation in the OP leaves the door open to defining ID as "science" under an admittedly legalistic interpretation. But since we are counting on the courts as a primary battleground, I don't think it's unreasonable to look at whatever definitions we privilege with a legalistic eye.

The OP leaves critical criteria undefined. What constitutes an "explanation"? What is "evidence"? Who is a "scientist"? Without an explicit definition, a proponent can argue for broad interpretation of the terms.

The OP includes too many subjective and passive-voice criteria. Who is doing the evaluation? How many "scientists" does it take to establish "actual practice" and "characteristic motivations"? Again, without an explicit definition, if it's legally arguable that there are reasons to name actual practices and characteristic motivation of "mainstream scientists" as impermissible establishment of "religion" (also without explicit definition), then the criteria themselves will fall: Lacking any objective criteria, anything will pass.

I'll repeat my position: The empirical falsification criteria of demarcation and evaluation works perfectly to exclude ID, on completely objectively-determinable grounds: If proponents present ID in empirically unfalsifiable terms to avoid being found false, it gets excluded by definition. If cast into empirically falsifiable terms, it is false, and gets excluded for falsity or at the very least failure to be well-supported. And empirical falsification is broad enough to encompass everything we do want to call science.

ID is an intentionally bad scientific theory because its proponents don't for a moment really want to evaluate it scientifically: Their intention is to undermine science itself. ID proponents are trying to exploit a weakness in the philosophy of science: the lack of an objectively-determinable demarcation criterion.

A demarcation criterion need not be razor-sharp, nor does it need to exclude everything objectionable. ID is not a borderline case, it's not just a matter of it being a little bit dodgy, or a teensy bit vague on its falsifiability. ID is pure poison, a poison "intelligently designed" to weaken and kill scientific thought.

Doubting Didymus

And yet, I've seen you admit more than once that the falsification you propose is insufficient to distinguish bad falsifiable theories from good. You still need to find good reason to exclude crap from science classes. If you're having to do that anyway, why the big deal about letting anyone, anywhere, call ID "bad science"? Your argument just isn't consistent.

PoodleLovinPessimist

Let's just look at "explanation" for the moment. Look at Swinburne's essay, The Justification of Theism. In this essay, he proposes God as the simplest "explanation" for the existence of the universe. Now of course it's arguable that the theistic "explanation" is no explanation at all, but this is beside the point. If I were a Dover defense attorney challenged to discuss the explanatory power of ID, absent any explicit definition of 'explanatory power', I would introduce ID as having explanatory power in the same sense that Swinburne offers theism as having explanatory power. Now ID and Evolution are no longer differentiable on the presence of explanatory power; they both now have explanatory power in some sense. The only differentiation is which sense of explanatory power they have. And absent an explicit definition, the court has no basis in precedent for excluding ID's version.

Doubting Didymus

Meanwhile, While your proposed falsificationism might work as a demarcation for what is taught in school, if you actually say that "If proponents present [a theory] in empirically unfalsifiable terms to avoid being found false, it gets excluded by definition. If cast into empirically falsifiable terms, it is false, and gets excluded for falsity or at the very least failure to be well-supported." is a workable metric for solving the demarcation problem generally, you run headlong into the problems with falsificationism as a description of scientific practice (as divorced from simply defining science), which I've previously seen you avoid doing for that very reason.

PoodleLovinPessimist

I've never seen a convincing argument to the effect that falsification poses problems for the conduct of science. Falsification doesn't, by itself, determine practice, it just establishes the domain of what science is practiced on.

I'm happy to take that question head-on in a separate thread. You probably disagree, but I think I successfully defended falsification in our earlier thread (which I'm too lazy to look up), but I'm always happy to discuss it again.

PoodleLovinPessimist

BTW: I would love to discuss this issue in a Formal Debate. Clutch has begged off; perhaps you might be interested in stepping up?