"'Pigs can't fly' is falsifiable."
Oh, is it? Can you prove that no pig is able to fly? I don't think so. You'd need to thorougly test every pig in the world.
Is that an unreasonable standard of proof to ask for? Of course it is, just as it is unreasonable for evolutionists to implicitly require absolute proof of ID (.9999999999 probability isn't good enough).
The irony is that as an evolutionist, you must be willing to concede that pigs may someday develop wings and start flying!
When I read the "arguments" presented against ID here by evolutionists, I can't help but think that they are parrotting the party line just as Democrats parrot the party line on Iraq, taxes, etc. So many evolutionists hear something about the philosophy of science and parrot it without really understanding it, thinking they are experts, and not realizing that they lost something critical in the translation.
Don't need to. All I have to show is that pigs don't have the means or physiology for it. If you had an organism with wings, hollow bones, etc., it wouldn't be a pig.
As for the rest of the rant, I think for myself. I don't have a party line. What you don't seem to appreciate is that the arguments you're presenting are transparently specious, and it's not in the least surprising that twenty people, all with a reasonable command of logic, will be able to drive a truck for them.
"'Pigs can't fly' is falsifiable."
"Oh, is it? Can you prove that no pig is able to fly? I don't think so. You'd need to thorougly test every pig in the world."
OK, let me correct myself here. I posted too hastily this time. Of course "pigs can't fly" is falsifiable in principle. All you need to do is show a pig flying. But someone took me to task earlier in this thread for giving an example of how ID is falsifiable -- because it couldn't actually be done (just as you can't actually make a pig fly).
A more interesting question is whether the theory that "pigs CAN fly" is falsifiable. How could it be falsified? As I suggested in my last post, you'd need to test every single pig in the world and prove that not one of them can fly. And how could you even prove that one particular pig can't fly? How would know that they are just refusing to cooperate with you? I'm talking about absolute, 100% proof here. You may be able to get to 99.9999999999% certainty, but I don't think you can get to exactly 100% certain proof. So then the theory that "pigs can fly" is unfalsifiable, so it is not a valid theory. Oh, but it *is* a valid theory -- just not a very useful one.
ID hasn't met the burden of ".9999999999 probability". ID hasn't even met the burden of "0.5 probability". ID hasn't made any solid (or even tenuous) case that any of its "probability" calculations are even remotely grounded in reality. Anyone who regularly works with statistics & nonlinear (i.e. chaotic) mathematics understand well that retrospective probabibility calculations in systems with blurry boundary conditions have no real meaning.
"Oh, is it? Can you prove that no pig is able to fly? I don't think so. You'd need to thorougly test every pig in the world.
To *falsify* 'Pigs can't fly' all you would need to do is show one pig fly. To *prove* pigs can't fly you would have to test a statistically significant number of pigs.
They would no longer be pigs. Just consider for a moment how many changes would be necessary.