(February 20, 2016 at 1:26 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(February 20, 2016 at 12:47 am)AAA Wrote: If you follow the conversation leading up to that point, I laid out a way to investigate the unobservable past, but stimbo kept saying that it wasn't science unless it could be done in a lab. I agree that you can investigate the unobservable past scientifically, I just wanted to see if he could answer it in a way that simultaneously rendered intelligent design unscientific while still permitting materialistic explanations scientific. I think they are both scientific. But not empirical, and by definition not repeatable.
It doesn't literally mean a lab; it means that whatever hypothesis you develop (like these just-so stories of God-power at work, sans any form of explanative power of what that is, how it operates exactly, or in what ways it even interacts with our universe, if this God-power even exists, you must do experiments which measure the predictions you are making, and they must be reproducible by all your peers to see what you might have missed in narrowing down your results and/or conclusions.
Intelligent Design is not science. Again, as I have mentioned before, read the Kitzmiller case. In order for ID/IC to be considered a scientific theory, as the ID/IC people were attempting to do in court under oath, they admitted that based on the definition they gave, astronomy and voodoo might be included within the scope of that definition. We are unprepared to "expand" the definition or practice of science to people who cannot actually practice science.
To do so would be to endanger our future as a culture extant upon this earth, I fear.
You may not be able to actually study God scientifically, but we can test to see if there was likely an action of a designer at a point in history. Again, I'm not trying to prove that God exists, I am just trying to propose that we can examine natural phenomena to see if a purposeful designer ever played a role. And I still want to hear a definition of science that simultaneously excludes intelligent design as scientific, while permitting materialistic explanations for the origin of life to be considered scientific.
And don't say that they cannot actually practice science, because the fact is that it is the people who look at the evidence differently who are the ones who advance science. We don't need to discourage people from questioning the standard scientific ideas, when this is exactly what will help us gain new perspective. Unless you think we currently are correct in everything that we think we know in modern science.
