#37 — And you don’t dismiss certain arguments made by advocates for Intelligent Design out of hand because they clash with your preconceived religious (or irreligious) notions.
I’ll dismiss them out of hand then, and laugh loudly while I’m doing it. And this has sod all to do with preconceived notions about religion or the religious.
Science lies in the ability to create a hypothesis and use this to predict experimental results. In science you don’t know the results. You hope for certain results (if your idea is correct) but that’s not the same as KNOWING. And if you’re wrong in the results you get, you figure out why. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
ID meanwhile is essentially the invocation of magic, and the only possible prediction is more magic. ID isn’t a theory, and since it can’t predict it’s not even a usable hypothesis. As with all forms of “christian science” it’s backwards, assuming the conclusion and using cherrypicking attempts to divine supporting data.
Advocates of ID are little more than rabidly anti-science types cloaking their God Of The Gaps argument with scientific sounding cachet like “theory” and giving tautalogical names to that which they don’t understand e.g. “Irreducible Complexity” in an effort to be perceived as doing serious scholarship. Obviously it does fool some of the laymen accordingly, but practioners of science view it as the silliness that it is and rightfully ignore it.
And yet the whole thing is very sad. These are the people who are causing religion to lose favour. Science/evolution doesn’t know how things came to be but the working assumption is that it’s natural. Religion doesn’t know either but ID adherents are trying to pretend that it does. There needn’t be this division, though. If religion would simply say “we don’t really know either but we’ll assume that god designed the universe to use evolution to create sentient beings and their properties” this would be acceptable to all. We could all rejoice in finding out how it works and the faithful would smile knowingly that god’s design was indeed masterful. There isn’t a need to clash with science. Religious based “alternative science” will NEVER win any argument with real science, and the only thing it does is unfairly paint all religious belief in a bad light. It doesn’t need to be that way.
