I’ve always understood Methodological Naturalism to mean the assumption we make in science that things are predictable, probabilistically at any rate.
It needn’t be true, and nor do we make any conclusion as to whether it is true or not, we merely proceed under that assumption, because it underlies the methodology that we call science.
But clearly some people, often citing Plantinga (here and here) regard it as some kind of error made by scientists that enables them to fallaciously reject religion, or at least compromise “religious neutrality”.
But oddly, it seems to me, Plantinga himself solves the problem he thinks “methodological naturalism” creates, but doesn’t appear to notice the solution. He writes :
So there is little to be said for methodological naturalism. Taken at its best, it tells us only that Duhemian science must be metaphysically neutral and that claims of direct divine action will not ordinarily make for good science. And even in these two cases, what we have reason for is not a principled proscription but a general counsel that in some circumstances is quite clearly inapplicable. There is no reason to proscribe questions like: did God create life specially? There is no reason why such a question can’t be investigated empirically63; and there is no reason to proscribe in advance an affirmative answer.
in which he seems to have got himself into a muddle. He seems to accept that “ordinarily” the assumption of methodological naturalism is what makes for good science, but complains that it is “clearly inapplicable” to some questions. Well, sure. And those questions include “did God create life specially?”
We can’t answer that using scientific methodology (i.e. methodological naturalism), but it doesn’t stop us asking the question, nor from believing that the answer is yes, even if we find evidence that it could also have occurred “naturally”. So far so good.
But then writes: “There is no reason why such a question can’t be investigated empirically63“. It can? How? So we check footnote 63, where he writes:
Why couldn’t a scientist think as follows? God has created the world, and of course has created everything in it directly or indirectly. After a great deal of study, we can’t see how he created some phenomenon P (life, for example) indirectly; thus probably he has created it directly.
So we can infer, I think, that Plantinga regards such an empirical method as a violation of “methological naturalism”.
And indeed it is. Moreover, it is exactly the “empirical” method espoused by ID.
So does that mean that ID is not science? Or that ID is science, but scientists are deliberately eschewing a methodology that would allow an ID to be inferred?
It seems to me that this lies at the heart of the non-connection between IDists and ID critics. It’s not that science can’t investigate intelligent causes (it can) or infer intelligent causation (it can), or that ID doesn’t posit a supernatural designer necessarily, it’s just method for detecting design. It’s that ID proceeds by drawing a conclusion from lack of an alternative explanation. In other words, it is based on rejecting a null hypothesis that it does not model.
So is all that’s wrong with “methodological naturalism”, in the eyes of IDists, the fact that we insist that the null is modeled? Is that it?
I think that’s what it boils down to, hence all those probability arguments, and challenges to ID critics to provide a probability estimate for Darwinian evolution.
But, if so, what an odd disagreement to have spawned so vast an argument!
(Hoping an IDist or two may weigh in here….)
Methodological naturalism is a failed philosophy. That is why IDists don’t like it.:
Methodological naturalism is a failed philosophy- and it fails the regress test as natural processes only exist in nature and therefor cannot account for its origin, which science says it had.
Huge failure, right off the bat.
Also limiting scientific inquiry and starting with a conclusion (question-begging) is another huge science-fail. A closed science is a useless science and a science ruled by methodological naturalism is a closed science.
Closed science for the closed-minded…
Joe G,
Well, we might agree that “naturalism” has problems as a philosophy. But what is usually referred to as “methodological naturalism” is a method of enquiry, not a philosophy (that’s why people sometimes use the word “philosophical naturalism” when they mean the other thing).
And methodological naturalism, as in the working assumption that scientists make about the world in order to predict things, isn’t failed at all. It’s so successful (at predicting things) that we can land tiny robots on planets millions of miles away, and insert DNA segments into genomes.
So as a method, it works pretty brilliantly, wouldn’t you say?
OK maybe you should post a valid and accepted definition of methodological naturalism. That way we are talking about the same thing.
BTW I doubt MN has anything to do with DNA nor robots…
Joe G,
I think this criticism is based on a misunderstanding of scientific inference. No, scientists don’t start with a conclusion. They do start with a working assumption, but that never becomes their conclusion – it remains as a caveat.
Like this:
Assuming that nature is predictable, we can hypothesise that X happens because of Y. If true, we should see Z, and not Q. We do see Z and not Q. Therefore X probably does happen because of Y, always assuming that nature is predictable.
This means that we cannot conclude that any event does not have a supernatural causes. We can only conclude that if the cause is not supernatural, that Y probably caused the event, or that we don’t know what caused the event.
Science does not conclude, in other words, that ID is wrong. In fact, ID is not falsifiable, which is why many people say it isn’t science.
Joe G,
Well, I’ve looked around, and there isn’t a clear definition. So when people talk about it, or criticise it, obviously it’s important to know what they mean by the term.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is rather vague.Wiki gives:
Which is more or less the definition I have been assuming.
However, in practice, what scientists actually do, I suggest, is what I have said: they make predictions on the assumption that nature is, at least probabilistically, predictable.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that science is basically a prediction method. People used to use entrails and astrology, but now we use science. It’s very successful. And because it is so successful we can make a provisional conclusion about the world: that it seems to work according to a few discoverable basic laws. So much of science involves constructing theories about what caused what, and why, and using those theories to derive their predictions.
But that endeavour rests on the working assumption that there really are just a few discoverable laws that govern they universe and confer on it its predictability. Those laws could have been “designed in”, or they could be broken at times by some designer. But, if so, we can’t detect that through scientific methodology, because it would involve dropping the very assumption that enables our scientific predictions to be made.
That’s the true reason why the supernatural is, by definition, beyond the reach of science, and why no scientific endeavour can detect a supernatural designer.
We can detect natural designers, of course, and even their products. But not supernatural ones.
Elizabeth,
But natural processes only exist in nature and therefor cannot account for its origin, which science says it had.
So MN is a non-starter.
Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design) and Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing) might beg to differ on your assertion.
Do you think we should stop looking for a natural origin?
I have never found a need for assuming methodological naturalism.
That seems to be a non-standard view of MN. However, I think it wrong. There is no need for such an assumption. Science simply studies those aspects of reality that are predictable.
Dr. Liddle, I wonder if you heard of, or had the chance, to read a book titled “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. It was one of the books Sam Harris was recommending a few months ago. It is both completely brilliant and quite mad in places. And much of it went way above me. However, the first part of the book is all about what makes a good explanation … about how we create or acquire knowledge. At some point, before discussing methodologies or processes, there is perhaps an interesting question to ponder around what makes one explanation superior to another and why some explanations work and others do not. I found this part of the book incredibly thought provoking and pretty entertaining as well.
I guess that’s another way of putting it. In fact I tend to find the insertion of an “ism” between the start of a claim and the end usually obscures the obvious! I guess all I am saying is that the method by which science makes predictions (and it is colossally successful) rests on the assumption that the universe is predictable. That’s not as tautological as it sounds, because the universe is also very complicated.
So to predict what happens next, we have to figure out causal theories, and those theories won’t work if we assume that we can’t event B can be predicted from event A, even if what we want is some kind of probability estimate for event Z.
ETA: even I can tell that’s garbled. Perhaps my bannination affected me more than I like to think 🙂
No I haven’t. Sounds interesting.
Well, it does rather depend on the definition of MN! Yes, indeed, science can’t tell us why there is anything rather than nothing (although it may try to tell us that that is a meaningless question….). But that doesn’t mean that it won’t work perfectly well, given the working assumption that there issomething. And evidence suggests that science works rather well at predicting B given A, in other words that the natural world works according to discoverable laws.
Joe G,
“Natural processes” don’t actually exist outside of our descriptions of them.
For instance, “gravity” is the description of the attraction of two masses.
What you call “natural processes” are successful, in the sense that they are useful, descriptions that we can understand.
You could add ID to natural processes if you could come up with a description that we could understand and use.
What do “alternatives” to methodological naturalism solve? Has anyone clearly defined what an alternative is and what it accomplishes that MN doesn’t?
Nearly every complaint about MN seems to originate from sectarian misconceptions about scientific concepts. That started way back in the early 1970s when Henry Morris constructed a pseudo-conflict between thermodynamics and evolution; and that has remained a central thread throughout all of ID/creationism ever since.
What we know about the universe we learn by “taking it apart.” There is little question that what we observe is happening. Taking things apart to see how they work is essentially what science does. Postulating explanations for the patterns we find and then checking the postulates is a perfectly natural process. What would an “alternative” methodology do better?
Asserting how the universe must be and then bending observations and evidence to fit is not what science does.
What does an “alternative” to MN require of us? Define an alternative to MN that works.
And this “infinite regress” issue is a red herring; especially in the light of what we know from modern physics, even though modern physics is still pushing into new territory. One cannot complain about “infinite regress” in the science of the natural world when the same issue comes up with the “supernatural” world (whatever “supernatural” means).
There are already a number of plausible explanations for the beginnings of the universe that do not require speculations about the “supernatural.” Just because experiments haven’t sorted out which speculations are more likely doesn’t require us to abandon MN.
Again, Stephen Hawking (The Grand Design) and Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing) might beg to differ that science can’t tell us why there is something and not nothing
I don’t particularly like the term “methodological naturalism.” It’s one of the labels philosophers of science have attached to whatever it is that scientists do. It’s a purely descriptive term, sort of like “yellow warbler.” Yellow warblers are yellow and they warble all day. Successful science relies on natural explanations of phenomena. This is certainly correct at present, although there is no guarantee that it will not change in the future. Anyone, creationists included, are welcome to upset this state of affairs.
It’s not like they are not trying. Dembski seems to have some sort of a positive program for ID research, but so far his books and articles have failed to impress the scientific world, myself included. Note that I am not trying to disparage him, I am simply describing the current state of affairs.
ID supporters like to say that critics have not shown ID arguments to be wrong. Sorry, guys, this isn’t the stick with which to measure success in science. There are lots of crackpot theories that no one bothers to disprove. Success happens when your theory is accepted. By that measure, ID remains unsuccessful as a scientific enterprise. It can claim some success in Christian apologetics, but that is not how its proponents like it to be perceived.
Anyway, today science stays away from the supernatural and that’s that. It might be different tomorrow, but we don’t know.
olegt,
Most practicing scientists don’t like philosophical “isms,” especially those in the post-modernist genre.
Methodological naturalism sounds pretentious, even if it might capture the gist of what scientists do; or more correctly, what they are constrained to do.
However, the “alternatives” proposed by the ID community sound even worse. I have no idea what to do with philosophical supernaturalism in conducting a research project.
Methodological supernaturalism appears to be some kind of oxymoron as far as any kind of investigation is concerned. What handle does it give on investigating phenomena we can actually detect? And what does it allow us to say about anything we cannot detect even in principle?
So we get down to the accusation made by people like Philip Johnson in which he claims that scientists engage in philosophical materialism. Just what does that mean?
As I think about research proposals and experimental techniques; as I think about the epistemological issues involved in detecting phenomena and converting that detection into something objectively measurable, why would I be thinking about the supernatural? How can one not think about natural phenomena and processes linking to other physical phenomena that researchers can check and agree about among themselves?
FTFKDad,
Perhaps none of my business, but are you Scott at Cornelius Hunter’s blog?
On Scott’s recommendation I’ve read Deutsch’ The Fabric of Reality. I loved it.
My understanding of “methodological naturalism” is relatively simple. For me, it means the study of the natures of things where ‘nature’, broadly speaking, refers to that which makes something itself and not something else.
We learn about the natures of things in the outside world through observation. This does not mean just seeing with our own eyes or detercting with our other physical senses but, in its broadest sense, refers to our acquiring data about the world around us by any means, however indirectly or distantly.
Data becomes information when it becomes meaningful in the mind of an intelligent agent such as ourselves. In other words, the most common understanding of the word ‘information’, I would argue, is teleosemantic More specifically, data involves the use of symbols and models to represent. in abstract form. aspects of the observable world, in the mind of the observer. Data becomes information when, added to or placed in the context of already existing data, the combination yields new insights that did not exist in the mind of that observer when the two sets of data were separate. In this usage, therefore, information only exists in the mind of an observer, it is not a property of what is being observed. As an example, we all know what a circle looks like. In geometry, it is a shape formed by a closed curve where every point on the curved line is equidistant from the central point. Absent any context, a circle is just a circle. To a dendrochronologist, however, the concentric near-circles seen in a cross-section from the trunk of an ancient tree become information about the climate and environment in which that tree grew and spent its life.
On this understanding, anything which has a nature which makes it a thing distinguishable from all other things and which we can observe is, by definition, part of the natural world. This includes gods, ghosts, ghoulies and the Goa’uld. Supernatural is, in effect, a redundant concept.
Except ID does not require the supernatural. ID contrasts the natural with the artificial. Not that you can grasp that.
As for materialism, well Johnson is talking about the claim that all in the universe is reducible to matter, energy, necessity and chance.
FTFKDad,
Great, when either has some evidence for their claims people will listen.
Joe, I think that is incorrect: we do grasp that “ID contrasts the natural with the artificial”.
But “natural” when used in contrast to “artificial” has a different meaning than when contrasted with “immaterial”.
I entirely agree we can distinguish natural objects from artefacts That does not mean that I think the artefacts are “immaterial”, nor does it mean that I think their designers and manufactureres were “Immaterial”. Indeed, one of the reasons I infer that an artefact is an artefact is if I have material evidence of the material existence of a designer or artisan, if only in the form of tool-marks on the object.
But I see no evidence that biological objects are an artefact, merely that they emerged from a process that filters what promotes durability and persistence from what does not. Intelligent artifice is one such process, but not the only one.
Most contrast natural with supernatural, as oleg did.
That said there isn’t any evidence “that they emerged from a process that filters what promotes durability and persistence from what does not.” So you have an issue.
Joe G,
Hey, Joe, can you tell Bruce David where I am? In case he hasn’t got the memo. He’s someone I really miss.
Done…
ID does not require the supernatural. And the scientific world has failed to impress anyone but those already indoctrinated.
As for Christian apologetics- well ID doesn’t have anything to do with christianity.
Thanks!
Actually I have been following the antics of ID/creationism since the early 1970s.
And ID inherited all of its misconceptions and misrepresentations of biology, physics, and chemistry from Henry Morris who concocted a conflict between his version of the second law of thermodynamics and his version of evolution.
All ID advocates, from Dembski, to Behe, to Abel, and onward, presume to add “information” and “intelligence” to the “forces” that push atoms and molecules around, They do this because they don’t understand the fundamentals of physics and chemistry. They do this despite repeated corrections coming from the science community that their understanding of fundamental concepts is wrong. They have been doing since Morris set up his Institute for Creation “Research” and Duane Gish left his job at the Upjohn Company to join him.
Not one ID/creationist in over 40+ years has ever been able to grasp even the most basic concepts in chemistry and physics; and despite all their claims about “chance and necessity,” not one has ever been able to pass an elementary concept test on entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
You can find those misconceptions being propagated to this very day.
What misconceptions and misrepresentations? Please be specific.
Hi Elizabeth,
A short comment here after some brief exchanges at UD.
What I found frustrating there was lack of recognition that ‘Darwinism’ qualifies as an ‘ideology,’ and not just as a ‘natural-physical science’ or ‘scientific theory.’ You seemed to willfully refuse ‘tainting’ the ideology that you hold, i.e. Darwinism, with the label ‘ideology.’ Why?
Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not a (neo-)Marxist and don’t use ‘ideology’ only in the pejorative sense. There is positive ideology too. But to ignore that ideology is even at play in such an obvious case like ‘Darwinism’ shows you simply have not grasped several important features of Philosophy of Science (PoS), a field which you claim to have studied (since your youth).
Away from the thread where I pressed you on why you thought Darwinism was *not* an ‘ideology,’ in an off-hand comment re: church burning with your son at Starbucks , you wrote: “Sadly, ideology itself – people trying to act in the name of what they think is right – often leads to atrocities.”
Is this what you mean by ‘ideology’?!
If that is so, then doesn’t ‘methodological naturalism’ count as an ‘ideology’ too? Here ‘what they think is right’ refers to *nothing non-natural* in their view of reality.
I haven’t forgotten your contention that ‘technology’ is ‘natural.’ Do you not see how logical it is to conclude that you are wearing ideological blinders that disallow you from seeing extra-natural things (which likewise contain or can heed knowledge)?
‘Methodological Naturalism’ is a prime example of what I call ‘Weak American Philosophy (of science)’ (WAP). There are others cleverer than I (even in England) who speak more strongly about MN folly, while at the same time respecting and supporting ‘good science,’ performed and practiced without the ideological distortion. You’ve been WAPed by MN, Elizabeth!
“I’ve always understood Methodological Naturalism to mean the assumption we make in science that things are predictable, probabilistically at any rate.” – Elizabeth
Wouldn’t that more appropriately be called ‘methodological probabilism’ (i.e. leaving out ‘naturalism’), to assume that things ‘in science’ are probabilitistically predictable?
There is more than one, starting with Henry Morris’s claim that the second law means everything is deteriorating and evolution means everything is getting better and better.
You can get the full blast of Morris’s shtick from his protégé Thomas Kindell.
Or you can take a look at Granville Sewell’s “Second Look at the Second Law” paper. Same problems of attributing to physicists what physicists don’t believe or teach.
There is the constant conflation of entropy with disorder; or the conflations with “information.”
The attempts by Dembski, Abel, et.al. to postulate “information” and “intelligence” are all being done to solve a problem created by the misconceptions of ID/creationism, not problems that exist in chemistry and physics. They are problems inherited from Henry Morris and Duane Gish when they started “Scientific” Creationism.
One never hears of these misconceptions in the thermodynamics and statistical mechanics courses we teach our physics students. These misconceptions come up only in the context of popularizations and in the socio/political activities of ID/creationists attempting get ID/creationism into the public school curriculum as an “alternative” to the “problems” they claim belong to science.
What I have linked to above are the fundamental misconceptions and misrepresentations that run through all of ID/creationism. ID/creationists are attempting to solve “problems” of their own making.
Anyone who stops to look around and learn about what actually happens with matter and energy will recognize that ID/creationists misrepresent what science has learned about what matter and energy really do. There are entire industries built on the knowledge obtained from condensed matter physics and organic chemistry; and these are some of the largest industries in the world.
This thread is about methodological naturalism; but the strained attempts by ID/creationists to inject some other “method” are all predicated on their misconceptions about what is already known.
One doesn’t learn enough from popularizations of science to take on the mantle of expertise that presumes to fix science.
A question for Elizabeth.
What does it mean if a comment shows but there is this message at the top?
Do links to other sites hit a spam filter? If so, I won’t use them.
It means that the spam filter caught it as spam, and I haven’t logged in to unclog the filter!
Sorry!
ETA: I think it counts the number of links. I think that’s an option I can change, but I’m going to be busy for the next 24 hours.
I’ll try to fix it then.
Gregory,
Good thought!
I’m not wild about either term, to be honest.
Nice to see you, got a busy 24 hours ahead but hope to catch up later.
I was looking for misrepresentations of biology and the theory of evolution.
As for “information” the confusion was caused by Shannon who didn’t use “information” in the way every one else, and information technology, uses it.
That said neither ID nor Creation would be around if you guys could just support the claims of your position.
Joe G,
Well, it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying. I’ve been at it for over 40 years; and many others, including the National Center for Science Education, find they have had to devote nearly full time to countering ID/creationism. Yet ID/creationist memes continue to be picked up by the general public and even by well-intentioned writers attempting to popularize science.
And you must certainly be aware of the Discover Institute, the Institute for Creation Research, Answers in Genesis, Reasons to Believe, and a host of other well-funded and politically organized groups constantly pushing this stuff off on legislators and school boards.
It also would help if intelligent and curious laypersons would make the time and effort to actually dig into real science rather than taking the easy route of getting sucked into the siren song of pseudo-science.
The ID/creationist misrepresentations of biology are derived from misunderstandings of chemistry and physics as well as from the role of natural selection on variations. These concepts exist in chemistry and physics as well, and they firm up one’s understanding of these processes in complex systems such as living organisms.
And it wasn’t Shannon’s or von Neumann’s fault about the conflation of entropy with “information.” It is a common occurrence in science and engineering that the same or similar words are used for different things. It is simply an unfortunate result of the proliferation of specialized fields and a lack of cross-communication.
Yet the concept of entropy in physics and chemistry remains what it has always been. It is irresponsible for a person to promulgate confusion without sorting out their own confusions or haziness about concepts.
I would love for people to dig into the alleged science behind the “ttheory” of evolution.
But thanks for not providing any of those alleged misconceptions and misrepresenations of biology and the theory of evolution.
As for the NCSE- just a propaganda agency, nothing more. Heck the NCSE thinks that anyone opposed to the theory of evolution argues for the fixity of species- IOW they have no idea what their opponents claim.
Scientists are generally so busy that they don’t like to get drawn into ideological wars started by people who seem to have nothing else to do and no knowledge with which to do it.
Evolution and natural selection do not violate any laws of physics and chemistry, and the processes involved in biology are perfectly consistent with everything else that is known about complexity evolving in the universe. This is observed at every level of complexity; no exceptions.
Just because one refuses to study it doesn’t mean that millions of others have not already figured it out.
There are no questions that are unanswered in the ID/creationists’ complaints that ID/creationists could not answer for themselves just by starting with the basics. You simply cannot jump into advanced concepts without laying the groundwork and them expecting to understand all.
Mike Elzinga,
Umm Intelligent Design is not anti- evolution nor does it say natural selection doesn’t exist.
After all natural selection is just a result- if you have differential reproduction due to heritable random variation, then you have natural selection. It doesn’t “do” anything.
Robert Pennock on MN:
“Ontological Naturalism should be distinguished from the more common contemporary view, which is known as methodological naturalism. The Methodological Naturalist does not make a commitment directly to a picture of what exists in the world, but rather to a set of methods as a reliable way to find out about the world – typically the methods of the natural sciences, and perhaps extensions that are continuous with them – and indirectly to what those methods discover. An important feature of science is that its conclusions are defeasible on the basis of new evidence, so whatever tentative claims a Methodological Naturalist makes are always open to revision or abandonment on the basis of new, countervailing evidence.”
Pennock, R. T. (1999), Tower of Babel : the evidence against the new creationism, Bradford books. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT press p. 191.
Well now, there you go; you have the fundamental misconceptions of all ID/creationists.
ID/creationism – whether you think it is anti-evolution or not – is pure pseudo-science as it is currently pushed by its main proponents. Dembski, Abel, et. al., are trying to cram vague concepts like “information” and “intelligence” into places where they think they see holes in the science of evolution and natural selection.
But the “holes” they think they see are a result of their own misconceptions and failures to comprehend the concepts in science. In addition, admit or not, that blindness is maintained by sectarian dogmatism that has a strong socio/political agenda to go along with it.
Nobody who has watched this show for nearly 50 years now is fooled by it. Furthermore, there is a detailed public record of ID/creationist history that includes all the major and minor court cases that have stopped their takeover of public school science.
And, there are no results coming out of ID/creationism on which any research programs can be constructed and on which any technology can be built. It is totally vacuous and impotent because its premises don’t connect with reality. Not like science at all.
When reading things like David L. Abel’s stuff, I see nothing but a proliferation of pretentious, made-up terms followed by a proliferation of acronyms and references to previous papers making exactly the same unsupported assertions.
Whatever Philip Johnson wanted to substitute for his pejorative use of methodological naturalism in demonizing science and scientists, given what ID/creationists actually crank out, one could also apply a pretentious appellation like “Pseudological Unnaturalism” (PU) to them.
Mike Elzinga,
Mike Elzinga,
There isn’t any research coming from your position- there isn’t even any way to test the grand claims of the theory of evolution. No results- noithing- if your position had sometjing then both ID and Creation would have been non-starters. But obvioulsy all YOU have is your misguided rhetoric.
Thank you for proving my point.
Joe, I understand that this is what you think, but obviously we disagree. I’m curious to know why we disagree, because clearly both you and we agree that there is a vast literature of empirical research on evolution.
So could you say specifically what you mean by the “grand claims of the theory of evolution”?
What claims, precisely?
You seem to be trying to make a copycat argument by asserting that there is no research in biology as well as claiming there “isn’t even any way to test the grand claims of evolution.”
Here is a little experiment that you can actually do for yourself in just a few minutes.
Google “top journals in biology.” Then try “top journals in intelligent design.” Then try “top journals in creationism.”
Here is another experiment you can do. Try defining some fundamental concepts in science, such as evolution, natural selection, alleles, DNA, phenotype, genotype, entropy, second law, etc.
Now try to do the same with ID/creationism. Define information, intelligence, complex specified information, irreducible complexity, cybernetic cut, prescriptive information, endogenous information, exogenous information, active information.
Don’t stop at just defining these words; tell us how one goes about making objective measurements of these in the laboratory.
Tell us about all the journals and active research programs going on in ID/creationism. How much money goes into ID/creationist research? What percentage of the National Science Foundation budget goes into ID/creationist research? What percentage of the budget of the National Institutes of Health goes into ID/creationist research?
Now look up the same data for the various fields of biology, paleontology, geology, geophysics, cosmology, planetary exploration, physics, and chemistry.
Just in case you think it is unfair to include the non-biological sciences in this comparison, tell us how much ID/creationism draws from the knowledge of other disciplines. Show us the journals and the research.
By the way, we already know about the “journals” at AiG and ICR. If you think there is any relevant research in those journals, let us know. I have read some of it.
Elizabeth,
ID is not anti-evolution. And we have been over this before- grand claims of evolution:
1- There isn’t any research that demonstrates populations of prokaryotes can evolve into eukaryotes. Endosymbiosis provides mitochondria and chloroplasts-> no nucleus. And no way to test the claim that engulfed bacteria evolved into mitochondria.
2- No way to test the claim that any flagellum evolved from a population that never had one via accumulations of undirected mutations.
3- There isn’t even any way to test the claim that chimps and humans share a common ancestor without assuming it
If we could take fish embryos and perform some sort of targeted mutagenesis and get fishapods to develop then you would have something.
I could go on and on but maybe you get the point.
Mike Elzinga,
What is the research that demonstrates that undirected mutations can accumulate in such a way as to give rise to new, useful multi-protein configurations?
What is the research that demonstrates that natural selection does something?
The problem is that people like you don’t have a &^%$ing clue as to what ID claims.
Is there a way to test whether two humans share a common ancestor?
Well, here it is again.
You presume to dictate how evolution must proceed and what processes are involved; and then you demand that somebody “refute” or “explain” your claims.
That is a typical mindset of an ID/creationist who has not made the time or effort to actually understand evolution at any level of complexity
What you are attempting to do is mud-wrestle over concepts and niggling details while demanding that people provide evidence for your own misconceptions. You are presuming that you define what science is and how it is conducted.
That has been the tactic ever since Morris and Gish taunted scientists into debates on college campuses back in the 1970s and 1980s; and it has become the standard shtick of ID/creationist followers ever since.
And it isn’t just biology. I gave you a link to Granville Sewell’s latest attempt to resurrect the second law of thermodynamics zombie. And the flurry of activity and praise over at UD was clear evidence of the fact that the followers of this bogus argument were delighted and could take “proper consternation” at the “unfairness” that a journal rejected Sewell’s paper.
I happen to be a physicist; and I happen to know that one of the tricks of ID/creationist mud-wrestling is to quickly jump onto an area of science for which an opponent is not likely to be an expert. Duane Gish used to go around uninvited to biology classrooms harassing biology teachers with the second law of thermodynamics. He and other debaters would jump all over the map of science, throwing out misconceptions and misrepresentations for which they then demanded detailed answers.
And when their opponent didn’t answer every misrepresentation by the end of a debate, the creationist would simply claim, “Well, you couldn’t answer 90% of my questions.”
You see, we have studied the game; we know how it is played. We see it played out over on UD every day, and we can see the same kinds of “challenges” over on Panda’s Thumb and in the political pressures put on school boards and state legislators.
What you have apparently not learned – besides not having learned even the most basic concepts in science – is that the mere “challenges” by ID/creationists are misconceptions and misrepresentations.
Now if you really think we don’t understand ID/creationism, I can point you to papers by Dembski and Marks, by David L. Abel and others and ask you to explain and justify their claims.
But I am guessing that you cannot explain or justify any of the concepts like exogenous information, endoginous information, active information, complex specified information, intelligence, or the myriads of other concepts ID/creationist are attempting to replace science with.
And do you know what your next argument will be? It will be a copycat of what I have just written. And not once will you have had to demonstrate a proper understanding of any scientific concept. Just infinite mud-wrestling and accusations.
What does any of this have to do with methodological naturalism?