[Phys-L] Re: ID defenders [response to R. McDermott, Part I]

[hhaskell at MINDSPRING.COM (Hugh Haskell)]

Apparently my first submission in response to this posting exceeded
the list limit on length, so I've split it into two parts, of which
this is part I:

At 10:01  -0400 8/25/05, R. McDermott wrote:
> I would amend that to being untestable.

I agree that that may be a better way to put it.

>   The problem is that "science" ALSO
> believes in things that are not really testable.  Anything based on
> extrapolation from data and not direct evidence has to be considered
> suspect, wouldn't you agree?

Rather than suspect, I would say tentative. Extrapolations often need
verification but that his usually capable of being done. Certainly
extrapolations can get into areas where the accepted explanation is
no longer valid--relativity and QM immediately spring to mind, but it
is also true that a linear extrapolation also is probably doomed to
fail at some point.

> As to there being evidence suggesting this or
> that theory, what constitutes evidence is very often a function of the
> person doing the evaluating.  We often have to resort to Occam's Razor which
> amounts to a rule for "proper" guessing.

I think there is a pretty good consensus among scientists as to what
constitutes "evidence." Sometimes the connection between the evidence
and the conclusion based on that evidence may be lengthy and/or
tenuous, but most scientists are not above making those
qualifications clear when they present their evidence and their
conclusions. And I also think that most scientists are willing to
accept the tentative nature of all of their conclusions.

>   > In fact they are not even hypotheses, since the only
>   > thing they claim is that the evidence for evolution is flawed,
> >   spotty, incomplete, or incorrect (take your pick), and so therefore,
> >   since evolution is clearly wrong, our alternative must be correct.
>
> Firstly one has to understand that there are indeed conflicting definitions
> of the term "evolution".  As I stated earlier, it is indisputable that the
> PROCESS of evolution takes place.  It is easily observable that rapidly
> reproducing organisms change over time.  Those who are anti-religion paint
> Christians as disputing this issue which makes them appear to be fools.
> Whether organisms change over time is NOT the issue!


But for some it clearly is the issue, especially with many
young-earth creationists who assert that no changes of consequence
have taken place since the act of creation. Every species found today
was present during the first six days, or so they claim. The ID
people have abandoned that issue, at least for now. They don't
dispute the current claims of the age of the earth or the
universe--they just don't talk about it at all.

> Here's the issue - Did elephants, people, spiders, germs, etc all originate
> from a single primordial organism which itself developed from a "soup" of
> (apparently) nonliving molecules?  That is an untestable hypothesis.

It is not necessarily untestable, but the part about it developing
from a "soup of nonliving molecules" is not part of the issue, at
least for scientists. While many are of the mind that that is how it
happened, no one asserts that there is any established evidence that
that must be the way it was, and evolution itself does not depend on
that. All Darwin was concerned about was how the species changed, and
differentiated themselves from their ancestors, not about how life
itself came about, and, at least among students of evolution, I don't
believe that has changed. However, investigation into  how life could
have originated is going on and will continue. At this point we do
not know if such research will ever be successful--it may not be, but
since "ever" is a pfretty long time, there is no reason to believe
that it cannot be successful sometime in the future (there is also no
reason (other than the fact that scientists seek "natural" rather
than "supernatural" solutions to research questions) to believe that
it will be.

> There
> is no COMPELLING evidence to support that specific hypothesis.

As noted above, not at the present. But even that absence of evidence
is tentative in science.

> Would the
> observations support the premise that GOD created organisms which then
> evolved?  Would the observations also support the premise that life here on
> Earth was "seeded" in some fashion by some unknown galactic or
> intergallactic entity?  And about at this point good old Occam gets dragged
> out, right?

While the first of your hypotheses is clearly untestable by the
nature of its formulation, the second one, which is at the moment
indistinguishable from the first, could become testable at some time
in the future, as our knowledge of conditions beyond the earth's
atmosphere becomes more complete.

>   > Of course, if ID were to put forth some evidence *for* its validity,
> >   then it would be testable and it could be shown to be false.
>
> Well, no, not necessarily, since as mentioned above "science" does involve
> untestable, or currently untestable hypotheses on a regular basis.

The operative word here is "currently." What is untestable now may
well become testable in the future, with the development of new
technology or some clever insight not presently held. The problem
with most of the ID issues is that they are *in principle*
untestable--that is, they presume a supernatural cause, and those are
not going to become "natural" over time. If they are not natural now,
they won't be tomorrow either.

> Proponents consider that the "evidence" suggests intelligent design.  Would
> you care to try to falsify that hypothesis?
>
> >   Since
> >   they are not interested in establishing its truth except by
> >   establishing the apparent falsity of evolution, they will never be
> >   coerced into providing any evidence for their ideas.
>
> But they do not require additional evidence for their ideas.

If the two alternatives were the only logically possible ones then
that might be true, but their approach is to say, "well, you can't
prove how it happened, and therefor the only alternative is to throw
up our hands and say 'God did it.'" That tells us nothing, and gives
us no predictive power at all. Now predictive power is not an
absolute requirement, but it is what science seeks in the final
analysis. If you believe that you have an explanation for some
phenomenon, you use that explanation to predict the result of a
future experiment, and hopefully a future experiment that any
competing hypothesis makes a conflicting prediction for. Then, when
the experiment is done, those results provide whoever's hypothesis
made the better prediction with some evidence in support.

In the case of ID, its proponents make no claims about what happened.
All they do it argue that it couldn't have happened according to
evolution. But students of evolution have repeatedly provided
mechanism by which the claimed "impossible" things can have happened.
If you tell me that something "cannot possible have happened this
way," and I then proceed to give you a possible means by which it
"could have" happened, I have effectively refuted your argument, even
if my proposed way was not the way that it actually happened.

I will grant that I cannot establish finally how something in the
distant past *did* happen, but that is not required. I need only
provide a means by which it reasonably could have happened. When I
use that technique to predict that something may have happened in the
past, the evidence for which has not yet been seen, and then later
someone finds the evidence for that previously unseen, but
"postdicted" event, that creates new evidence that my proposed method
may have some validity. This happens all the time in the so-called
"historical" sciences--most commonly in astrophysics, but also in
geology and paleontology as well.

Part II to follow.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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