Comments Elsewhere

Oscar: “By the way, someone with a decent scientific hypothesis or theory must, by definition, suggest some ways to test it, even if those ways are unavailable. here is no way to test intelligent design because there is literally no conceivable experiment…”

Like a lot of sweeping theses about proper methodology in science, it seems like this is projecting the methods that worked very well for general mechanics and chemistry onto a lot of sciences that don’t actually work that way. Aside from the obvious examples (mathematics, anthropology, etc.) from sciences outside the natural sciences, there are also plenty of perfectly respectable natural sciences that don’t depend on (and often don’t even allow for) controlled experiments: epidemiology, most of astronomy, and paleontology, for example. Of course, all of those sciences depend on empirical evidence, but the way that that evidence is gathered and the way that it enters into reasoning about what is true and what is false is quite different from the “testing predictions” model of scientific method. (If ID depended on nothing more than a sort of gestalt picture of the points of evidence and an inference to best explanation, it wouldn’t be any worse off on those grounds than any number of quite respectable theories in paleontology.)

From what I understand of them, ID theorists actually usually try to claim that the method of argument is a modus tollens against natural selection (there is some set of features had by living organisms which can be demonstrated to be “irreducibly complex” and therefore not explainable by natural selection). That happens to be a modus tollens whose minor premise is wildly undermotivated by the evidence, but that’s something you can and ought to demonstrate by doing evolutionary biology, not by throwing things at it from the philosopher’s armchair.