Wednesday, June 05, 2002

Via Instapundit --Iain Murray attacks "Intelligent Design" as unscientific by definition. Science is not allowed to consider questions like the existence of God because, citing Karl Popper, it is not falsifiable.

OK. You don't have to call it science, if you don't want to, but that won't make it go away. To me the argument against ID is like a kid claiming that cows do not exist because he has only seen milk come from the refrigerator. Of course, that IS science because we can take the kid to a farm and then track the milk through the dairy and the store to the fridge. Because we can't think of an experiment to disprove the existence of an intelligent designer, however, it can't be discussed.

I thought science was supposed to be openminded, not excluding of uncomfortable issues or explanations that its leading lights don't like. I've felt over and over that the main attraction of Darwin's theories was that they allow us to deny intelligent design, although why we want to do so is beyond me. The result of all this is a kind of dishonesty that is obvious in most popular explanations of science. Just listen to any program on Nature or Nova on PBS, or programs on the Discover channels, and you'll notice that "nature" and "evolution" are used in a way that is interchangeable with "the creator." They constantly talk about natural features animal and plant anatomy as having purposes, being designed or engineered. Why? Because the idea of something so elegant and functional is, in all of our experience, incompatible with a goal oriented process.

What is this goal? Survival, say the evolutionists. Why is it that way? Well, that's just the way life is! But why is it that way? What made living things so antithetical to entropy? Pure chance.

So given enough time, anything we can imagine, and a lot we can't, will happen all by itself. Excuse me, but that doesn't make sense. Rocks don't turn into pianos spontaneously. Of course, that statement isn't falsifiable so it isn't scientific.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home