A cry for help

[Alyeska]

Touch me, you know you want to

Creationists and ID supporters have crawled out of their dark hiding spots and are making a mockery at SB.com. I request reinforcements to further humilate these bafoons.

[Lancer]

t3h sT00p1d, 1T hUr7s!!!11111

[Petrosjko]

I think you hurt that poor man's feelings, Aly. Such brutal batterings of logic, shame on you...

I'll see how it looks in the morning, and if the egregious stupidity is still running rampant, I may well be inspired to take up the sword once more.

[General Zod]

meh. standard creationist idiots. best to simply ignore them.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Wow, areoborg is a fucking idiot.

I'm going over. I may be some time.

[mr friendly guy]

There are a couple of dumbfucks there aren't they. I think I will pop back there and have a look.

[wautd]

Meh you are all wrong. Reality as I know it are just products of my imagination and/or programs from some kinda Matrix thingy

[Lagmonster]

I have enough with what I have to respond to daily over at RR's apologetics forum, unless you really, really want more voices.

[spikenigma]

Touch me, you know you want to

Creationists and ID supporters have crawled out of their dark hiding spots and are making a mockery at SB.com. I request reinforcements to further humilate these bafoons.

Chris O'Farrell's post - http://forum.spacebattles.com/showthrea ... ge=6&pp=25 - pretty much ended the entire argument and was a good one...

[Edi]

Yeah, it did, at which point Arthur Dent starts being a pissant idiot and demonstrates that he knows fuck-all about constitutional law. So you've some more work cut out for you there.

Edi

[Kuroneko]

Partly inspired by the 'reverse challenge' thread, I've thought about how one would attempt to argue that creationism is a science. I've found that while I could not establish this conclusively (which is probably fortunate), many straightforward and common-sense arguments against creationism-as-science actually fail [1], but this still would be far from an automatic victory for creationists. The three-part "Lemon test" has been formulated by the U.S. Supreme Court as follows: "First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion, ...; finally, the statute must not foster 'an excessive government entanglement with religion.'" This version verbatim has been formulated in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971), which added the third part to the pre-existing first and second criteria, and has been the standard for such cases ever since (e.g., Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980)). It is noteworthy that particular creationist cases have been found to violate all three (e.g., McLean v. Arkansas), failing to meet even one of the above three criteria is a violation of the constitution according to the Supreme Court, and that the question of whether or not creationism is a science is directly relevant only to the second part of the test. It is quite possible that if creationism is admitted as a science, it would still fail the other two criteria, since the first ventures into motive explicitly and the third would have to do with religious content of creationist literature and other factors.

[1] It should be noted that whether or not it is a good science is a question arguably separate from whether or not it is a science at all. A falsified scientific theory would still be scientific, but simply not correct (this issue is itself debatable). In such a situation, it still would not belong in a science class, just for different reasons. However, since the constitution does not technically forbid the teaching of bad science, this could still be a threat.

[RedImperator]

[1] It should be noted that whether or not it is a good science is a question arguably separate from whether or not it is a science at all. A falsified scientific theory would still be scientific, but simply not correct (this issue is itself debatable). In such a situation, it still would not belong in a science class, just for different reasons. However, since the constitution does not technically forbid the teaching of bad science, this could still be a threat.

I was actually worried this was the approach they'd take in the Cobb County, GA textbook sticker case (whose name escapes me at the moment).

[Kuroneko]

I was actually worried this was the approach they'd take in the Cobb County, GA textbook sticker case (whose name escapes me at the moment).

How so? It was my understanding that whatever the motivations for the introduction of the stickers were (and they should be obvious), there were no "alternative theories" actually proposed. Or are you reffering to attempts to falsify evolution instead?

[The Cleric]

Thank you Alyeska. Smack your bitch up.

[Alyrium Denryle]

posting under my old SN of moonblade

[Alyeska]

Many thanks to everyone, and especialy Chris for that serious piece of total ass kicking.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Many thanks to everyone, and especialy Chris for that serious piece of total ass kicking.

WHat am I chopped liver?

[Gil Hamilton]

Hey, Sean is coming along at least. Last I saw him, he would have argued from straight up literal creationism. College, it seems, has done him some good.

[Alyeska]

Many thanks to everyone, and especialy Chris for that serious piece of total ass kicking.

WHat am I chopped liver?

You only delivered an ass whooping, not quite an ass kicking.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Many thanks to everyone, and especialy Chris for that serious piece of total ass kicking.

WHat am I chopped liver?

You only delivered an ass whooping, not quite an ass kicking.

DUDE! I whipped out the equations. You want to see asskicking? I have a computer simulation of evolution and population biology sitting right in front of me(God I love this program)

[Grog]

many straightforward and common-sense arguments against creationism-as-science actually fail

What are those arguments?

[Kuroneko]

Which straightforward and common-sense arguments fail? Well, pretty much any that are straightforward and common-sense. For example, let's take the aforementioned McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education case. The case was concerned about Arkansas Act 590 of 1981, the 'Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science' act. The act was found to violate the Lemon test (again, see above) on all three counts, even though only one is sufficient grounds to declare unconstitutionality (one reason I'm concerned about Justice Scalia becoming Chief Justice, but that's an issue for another thread). Regarding the second part of the test, since there is no constitutional conflict if the statute religious effect is not its primary effect, it was decided that to establish failure of the second part, it was necessary to prove that creation-science is not scientific. The key expert witnesses regarding this issue were Drs. Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and a historian of science, who I'm sure needs little introduction, and Michael J. Ruse, a philosopher and also a historian of science. Collated from their testimony, science was characterized as follows, verbatim from Judge Overton's Opinion: "(1) It is guided by natural law; (2) it has to be explanatory by reference to nature law; (3) it is testable against the empirical world; (4) its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and (5) it is falsifiable." This sounds reasonable, but is it really?

When Sir Isaac Newton first published his discovery of the effect of prisms on light, he took this opportunity to also advance the corpuscular theory of light. This was met with fierce criticism from the proponents of the wave theory of light, to the point that Sir Isaac had to emphatically state several times that what he was doing is simply reporting a phenomenon, and completely disavow theoretic interpretations on this matter. Modern examples from physics are relatively rare, since much of the modern research is theoretic, but for science in general, such as biology and geology, it would still not be too peculiar for newly discovered phenomena to lack supporting quantitative laws for their underlying mechanisms. They are usually found after subsequent investigation, but it would be a grave disservice to those scientists to label their work as non-science until such laws are found. Guidance by natural law does not seem to be a pre-requisite for a body of work to be scientific.

The explanatory power of natural laws is moot at this point, but it is itself an important issue; the notion that scientific theories have as any bussiness explaining anything, or are even capable of doing so, is a product of the twentieth century, and is far from unquestionable. The long-lasting scholastic paradigm draws heavily on Aristotelian physics, the relevant parts of which can be characterized by nature and essense of objects. Why is opium a soporific? Because it has dormative potency (with apologies to Molière and Kuhn). Why do things fall down? Because it is their nature to be drawn to the Earth; 'tendency to fall' is part of the essense of material objects. As explanations, they are almost infantile to modern eyes. And yet, they are not really different from, say, what Sir Isaac did when he posited a vis intertiae and the law of universal gravitation. Certainly, there is marked difference in that his principles had much greater quantitative and hence predictive power, as Sir Isaac can tell us with great precision a falling object's trajectory, but as to actually explaining why such a force is there in the first place, the answer to that is as empty as saying that opium has a dormative potency or objects have a tendency to fall. Now, arguably general relativity succeeds in explaining much better than Newtonian gravitation, but this statement is itself contestable, and is in any case irrelevant--it is not necessary to consider natural laws in general, since the existence of laws like the universal law of gravitation is sufficient to prove that the primary characteristic of natural laws in science is their predictive rather than explanatory power. Unless, of course, we are willing to oust Sir Isaac from his position as a scientist.

Testability and falsifiability go hand in hand. The statement that creationism is untestable and unfalsifiable seems to be saying that creationism makes no empirical claims whatsoever. This is rather strange, since creationists make such claims all the time. Biblical inerrantists are commited to a multitude of historical claims, more run-of-the-mill creationists (icr.org) still insist on a Noachian deluge, which is a strong claim about geology, as well as statements about the age of the Earth and the universe. The more restrictive versions of creationism make claims about speciation--in short, taking the predictions of evolution and denying them, making it roughly as falsifiable as evolution itself. The typical proponent of Intelligent Design would claim that well, organisms are designed, in which case an engineering analysis can decide whether they were designed by something even vaguely intelligent or something more along the lines of an adaptive hack. While it is true that the Intelligent Designer is not testable in itself, that hardly seems a damning characteristic. The theory-ladedness of observation is a well-known property of scientific investigation, and in any case the scientific modus operandi is to observe effects of entities. In general, falsifiability is a scientist's best weapon against creationism, so granting this status to creationism does not have to be seen as giving ground: it is falsifiable, and has been found false.

A possible counter-argument to the above is to note that creationists are not interested in natural law at all, or that they will not accept falsifying evidence (both statements I have seen on Mr. Wong's page). Such charges can be summarized by saying that creationism is not tentative; its proponents consider it the final word. Tentativity is a purely psychological state on the part of the (purported) scientists, so it is difficult to see such charges as anything other than a blatant ad hominem. This is exactly the question of how much can scientific theories be separated from the scientists, but simply asserting that they cannot be is begging the question, not to mention the danger of giving credence to the possible accusation of tailor-making a definition of science "just to" exclude creationism. Fortunately, there is already a precedent within philosophy of science for just such a move, such as Thagard's characterization of pseudoscience, originally made mainly with astrology in mind. The key idea here is to treat science as a series of research programmes rather than isolated theories, and compare their 'progressiveness' as compared to its competitors. However, this approach leaves a fair amount of room for debate (e.g., is pyramidology a science merely because it has no competitors?), and while it may ultimately work, is far from straightforward.

The point here is not that creationism can be reasonably established as a science, but rather that proving its non-scientific status is not as straightforward and trivial as one might have hoped. Again, the usual disclaimer that proving its claims false only proves that it is at best a bad science, but not necessarily a non-science, applies.

[Darth Wong]

Philosophically speaking, you can argue that pretty much anything can be considered a science, insofar as the word "science" covers pretty much any attempt to gain knowledge about the universe regardless of method. But if the test of whether something can be considered a "science" is the correct application of the scientific method, then creationism obviously fails (as do some sociology and psychology theories, but that's another subject).

And the distinction is moot anyway, since neither bad science or non-science are acceptable in the science classroom. No one teaches Aristotelian kinematics in science class for a good reason.

[Obloquium]

But if the test of whether something can be considered a "science" is the correct application of the scientific method, then creationism obviously fails (as do some sociology and psychology theories, but that's another subject).

There are certainly some psychological claims that are ideological, but I can't think of any sociological theory that isn't falsifiable. What are you referring to exactly?

[SPOOFE]

Philosophically speaking, you can argue that pretty much anything can be considered a science, insofar as the word "science" covers pretty much any attempt to gain knowledge about the universe regardless of method.

I can't wait until the Jeezers attempt to get Intelligent Design listed as an "ongoing personal Hypothesis that is answered when you die".