Thursday, December 20, 2007
Discovery Institute carries post on ID opponents' logical dilemma
The Discovery Institute today (the two-year anniversary of the Dover v. Kitzmiller decision) carried my piece on the logical dilemma in Judge Jones' ruling that Intelligent Design is not science. They will also be carrying some of my future articles on the issue on their Evolution News & Views blog.
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4 comments:
You still haven't responded to my "covering all bases" interpretation. Note that Jones says the following in his decision: "We therefore find that Professor Behe's claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large. [...] Additionally, even if irreducible complexity had not been rejected, it still does not support ID as it is merely a test for evolution, not design."
Jones is not making a single, internally contradictory argument. He is explicitly stating here that he's making multiple arguments against multiple (possibly contradictory) foundations of ID - and the claim that these are foundations come from the ID expert witnesses themselves.
Jones quotes Minnich as saying that IC is "is a negative argument against evolution, not proof of design", but also quotes Behe as promoting IC as the "scientific centerpiece" of ID. Both Minnich and Behe were expert witnesses for the defense. It's not Jones' fault that these positions are in logical contradiction.
Leaving aside the supposed contradictions, what parts of Jones' individual arguments do you find fault with? It seems to me that you're pretending that this "covering all bases" possibility doesn't exist because you have no rational argument against any of the atomic parts of the decision, so you have to pretend that there's some overall illogic in a effort to discredit the whole thing.
Alex,
Sorry for not responding to your post yet. Give me a few days here, I'm rather busy. I have several past comments that make legitimate points that I will be responding to over the holidays, and yours is one of them.
Thanks.
If ID is a pseudoscience, advocated by religious groups for political purposes, surely it can be dismissed? If it is bad science i.e. based on wishful thinking and not supported by evidence, advocated by etc, then surely it can be dismissed just as readily? And what is it with Americans, anyway? Do you think the rest of the world will be able to supply you with real scientists in future? What if the demand from India and China outstrips your own?
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