Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Science was only ever possible in Christianity and only ever safe with it.

Faith in science in an oxymoron.

Faith in science in an oxymoron.

There is objective evidence for Science only being possible within a Christian context and that is that it occured there and nowhere else

I never said there was/is/always will be an intelligent Designer. I merely point out that it is a possibility and this provides opportunities for those humans who try to imitate a supposed design to run things and that those who have a track record of running things best (Us) are in some way correctly interpreting the design.

And Darwinists don't interpret the design properly because they leave out emotions and self-consciousness and treat with humans as if they were animals. Which is plainly ridiculous.

Could it be that our ability to take the piss out of ourselves, as all the best authors do, has been evolved out of the a vast pool of living matter none of which shows the slightest sign of having such a capacity, in fact quite the opposite, or do you think that is an irreducible complexity?

There is objective evidence for Science only being possible within a Christian context and that is that it occured there and nowhere else.

I don't understand what this paragraph is saying, but I think you are trying to state that it is possible to interpret such evidence as stating that there is a designer.

Only a few of these interpretation, however, are scientific. Proposing the existence of a designer is not one of them.

It's not ridiculous for biologists to say that humans, which are animals from a biological perspective, are animals. It's just a statement of fact. If you want to argue that our ability to reason, to love, to make art somehow differentiates us from other animals, fine, but that's metaphysics, not science.

Hard to give an evolutionary explanation for a phenomenon about which we know absolutely naught, don't you think?

Ever hear of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology, both of which deal with the evolutionary origins of emotions?

Show me evidence of a mechanism that prevents the naturalistic evolution of the ability to "take the piss out of ourselves".

There has been plenty of scientific discovery under the ancient Greeks and Romans, old China, the medieval Islamic empires, not to mention the countless areas of the modern monde which are decidedly NOT Christian.

If you mean to say that the scientific method could only have developed under the auspices of Christianity, you may be right, but your logic is faulty. A mathematician sees a black sheep in Scotland: is he right to conclude that all sheep are black?

His posts are fun to read!

That statement suggests a lack of appreciation of modern science. I recommend a close reading of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West or even, if light reading is more to your taste, Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class which provides a narrow economic appraisal of civilised behaviour patterns similar to the biologist's narrow appraisal of the human organism.

fm asserted in another place that "we ignore him" by which I presume I am the him

In fact, you are such a bald-faced liar that , recently, on this very thread you were exhorting us to "answer your two questions, implying that , somehow you were being ignored.

This is a total cop-out.

we ignore him.An assertion is often correct. AT least I fact check mine before assertion insertion.

fm asserted in another place that "we ignore him" by which I presume I am the him

I understood that Mr Kuhn had discredited Mr Popper and as the latter is sometimes quoted on here I'm left wondering which scientist we ought to believe

The only thing that can be accomplished conclusively by the empirical process of science, concluded Popper, is falsification! He went on to explain that any scientific theory must be in the form of a universal statement capable of being refuted by experience. It has to be possible, by deducing implications of the theory and attempting to match them against observations, to argue from the singular assertion, or description of the observed event, to the falsity of the original statement. This is strictly a deductive reasoning process, even though it proceeds in a seemingly inductive direction: from the data of experience back to the hypothesis. In this manner only, concluded Popper, is the logical dilemma posed by Hume resolved.

Popper claimed that it is indeed possible to conclude that some propositions are more reliable than others, simply because they explain more things more comprehensively; and because, over time, they have stood up better to disciplined attempts to refute them. Their "fitness" has been demonstrated by the very fact of their survival. It follows that the aim of the empirical method can never be to test for the truth of theories, but to corroborate them through failed efforts to prove them false. It must be "not to save the lives of untenable systems, but, on the contrary, to select the one which is by comparison the fittest, by exposing them all to the fiercest struggle for survival."

Popper's argument can be summed up as follows. A theory, to be scientific rather than merely ideological, must clearly rule out specific possible occurrences, so that there will be no question as to whether or not it is indeed falsified if these events do, in fact, come to pass. The more a theory survives attempts to refute it, the more highly corroborated it becomes. It is thus increasingly reliable as a guide to predicting future events, and one can ever more confidently hope that, to some degree, it reflects the regularities actually out there. But there is no guarantee that it is a complete and true reflection.

*************************

Kuhn suggested that, after a particular theory has won out over all contenders to achieve paradigm status within the problem area concerned, the practitioners of what is now a mature science behave, for all practical purposes, as if their disciplinary matrix were indeed coincident with reality. And the paradigm is initially assimilated by candidates to the field as if it were reality. In fact, science is often taught as dogma, in courses quite devoid of epistemological sophistication. Kuhn called this "normal science", because he had concluded that it is indeed the norm for most scientists most of the time.

Karl Popper disagreed with this. In his estimation, Kuhn's wholesale acceptance of what he called "the myth of the framework" was both mistaken and dangerous. However, Popper admitted that the concept of "normal science" is valuable as a warning because it is unfortunately true of some occurrences in modern laboratories and university departments. But, he maintained, it is neither the norm nor is it science. He pointed out that, on the contrary, the best scientists (such as Bohr in 1913 and Einstein in 1916) realize the tentative nature of their conjectures and expect that they will be superseded in time. He observed that Kuhn's version of "normal science" has only recently become a significant aspect of the behavior of those who work in the field and if, indeed, it should ever represent routine practice, it would signal the end of science!

Kuhn argued that, for the individuals concerned, the pursuit of "normal science" may well inhibit the doubt and originality that would seem to be a prerequisite for scientific progress during revolutionary periods. But, he added, it may also be the source of the strength of science. For it means that working scientists can dispense with questions of definition, philosophical assumptions and non-replicability, and concentrate directly on puzzle solving. They are superbly prepared to push the theory as far as it will go and to recognize anomalies in the results. In this process of refining and elaborating the theory, they function as "worker bees": the indispensable knowledge builders in the cumulative scientific enterprise. They are also armed with considerable resistance to radically different perspectives on the problem, according to Kuhn, and this means that propositions challenging the established paradigm will not be readily accepted. This is what protects the enterprise from being blown off course by current cultural fads. Only after expectations are consistently violated by the research results will the established paradigm be questioned, and only when a more adequate contender is available will the paradigm be given up.

************************

In the end, Kuhn's essential criterion is paradigm consensus within the relevant specialized problem area. Sounding very much like Popper, he maintained that, in the case of a science, "the resolution of revolutions is by selection within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science." But clearly, the key issue is how such "fitness" is determined. Popper believed it is by means of the uniquely scientific testing process that selects out those hypotheses which fail to survive attempts to refute them. Kuhn believed that it is, instead, by established procedures of verification. "Verification," he said, "is like natural selection: it picks out the most viable among the actual alternatives in a historical situation."

*****************************

Only one ingredient was missing from Kuhn's powerful organizing principle, but it was an important one, as he himself came to recognize. A paradigm common to all the members of the relevant professional community is the necessary condition for science, but it is not a sufficient one. The most enduring ideologies (such as Marxism and Freudianism) could lay claim to something almost like a paradigm. Popper's criterion of falsifiability is the crucial link missing from Kuhn's original theory of knowledge. A scientific paradigm is distinguished from an ideological model by the fact that the hypotheses generated by it are amenable to falsification.