touchingcloth wrote:
Show you where they didn't say something?
Please read the articles TC.. Also your tests don't reveal anything either.. Just an idea that rests on a future outcome.. Darwin in the gaps explains the rest..
Also remember that no scientific theory stands or falls on a single test or prediction. The test could be wrong, or you might have the wrong data or misinterpretation of that data.
You mentioned SETI earlier.. Finding life on other planets. To falsify this you could propose that the conditions for life are very narrow, so you need a lot of components for life to exist. To test this you would have to find native life around the planet radically different from the earth or you find life based on a completely different chemistry than carbon and water or even in a more hostile environment than ours. If you could find life in these conditions, you could easily falsify the argument.
Rich brought up these cases below.. All of these methods are testable and are in use today.
1. Archeology: Is that rock formation natural or due to intelligent design?
2. Anthropology: Do sharp, pointed rocks occur naturally or are they designed by intelligent beings?
3. Forensics: Intelligent cause of death or natural circumstances?
4. SETI: Are those radio signals natural or caused by intelligent beings?
Source:
http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/ ... esign.html
touchingcloth wrote:
If you believe that either of those particular articles deals with how the ID hypothesis might be falsified then feel free to point it out to me as I may be missing something.
They both give details for what observations might confirm the ID hypothesis ("High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.") but as far as I can see neither article states what observations would render ID falsified (or at least count as a large negative mark against it).
Easy.. ID would be proven false on the general grounds that the scientist didn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes would suffice. You could do this with any idea.. As another example if we used evolution to falsify ID, all a scientist needs to do is experimentally reverse-engineer biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they could conclude that such structures were designed.
In hindsight, if a scientist performed that same test using gradual evolutionary standards perhaps it would be even harder to falsify since natural selection requires a much longer time or a greater population base of parts to produce a biological structure. Perhaps it never could, scientists don't really know. ID therefore can easily be tested or falsified although it has not been falsified as of yet.