“Einstein never felt the need to have a school board change the rules of science so his theory could be taught to high school students. He proposed a scientific theory, offered potential disproof (kindly enlighten us as to the potential disproof for ID), and then, when partial vindication for his theory was presented, held out for additional support. That's how science is done. Thanks for reminding us about Einstein.”
You’re welcome. So we shall limit all formal presentation of scholarly thinking by requiring that it be accompanied by an example of disproof. Einstein is not great because of the disproof he offered, but because of his courageous use of imagination to forge new paths in human thought.
“No faith at all. It is the theory that best explains all the known evidence. If you think it's based on faith, you're not paying attention.”
We can observe the replication of DNA in a test tube. We cannot duplicate the hypothesized process of the formation of species, so our acceptance of speciation as fact is a leap of faith.
“ID uses mathematics in the absence of all the known factors, so the math is junk, too. As I've posted before, ID pretends to be able to tell us the odds of rolling a six in an unknown number of passes, with an unknown number of dice, each having an unknown number of sides. Go ahead and show us how you'd calculate the odds under those conditions.”
You have shown no example of any violation of mathematical principles by proponents of ID.
Whatever. He still didn't go around to school boards demanding (or even requesting) that his ideas be taught. No scientist whose ideas were eventually vindicated ever behaved in this way to my knowledge. Do you have a counter example?
Well, gee, could that be because you have shown no example of any use of mathematical principles by proponents of ID?
No, just the possibility of disproof. Otherwise it isn't science. You're right about why Einstein was great. I'm right about why he was a scientist.
Gumlegs:“No faith at all. It is the theory that best explains all the known evidence. If you think it's based on faith, you're not paying attention.”
We can observe the replication of DNA in a test tube. We cannot duplicate the hypothesized process of the formation of species, so our acceptance of speciation as fact is a leap of faith.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the hypothesized process of the formation of species," but we have observed speciation in nature and in the lab, so again I say there is no faith involved.
All the evidence leads us to the same conclusion. All the evidence from fossils, the newer DNA evidence, everything. There is nothing (at present), that doesn't fit. And there is nothing that ID adds.
Gumlegs: “ID uses mathematics in the absence of all the known factors, so the math is junk, too. As I've posted before, ID pretends to be able to tell us the odds of rolling a six in an unknown number of passes, with an unknown number of dice, each having an unknown number of sides. Go ahead and show us how you'd calculate the odds under those conditions.”
You have shown no example of any violation of mathematical principles by proponents of ID.
I've shown they don't use mathematics in a scientifically valid way. No one knows what the conditions were on the earth when life began. No one knows how many variables have changed or how much they have changed. Yet ID proponents claim they use math to model the impossibility of life arising naturally. Their claims are GIGO; any calculations they make, any guesses as to probabilities are just so much eye wash.
Um, actually, no, we can't observe this, or at least have not yet done so. (I don't know enough about imaging processes on the molecular level, but replication happens VERY fast and I doubt it can be captured and actually seen.) We can put some DNA into a test tube and, under the right circumstances, end up with more copies of it. In other words we observe the starting conditions and the ending conditions, but not the replication itself.
We only hypothesize the replication process and, as we do further research, the details of it, because we presume that no miracles occurred and only natural processes were involved. But the logic, and certainly the rhetoric, of ID is to deny the validity of this very presumption.