Originally posted by FreakyKBH
Your wall of text notwithstanding, here's a few musings which were not copied and pasted--- excepting, of course, quoting and dissecting your annotated work.
[b]ID is a religious and not a scientific proposition."
Is observation the main criterion for science?
Can something be both religious and scientific?
Moreover, defense expert Professor ...[text shortened]... g for all the right reasons.
They're still wrong, but that doesn't make their opposition right.
I think you've got a few things backwards. Let's see if we can clear this up.
Religion essentially acts like a poison to scientific progress.
Now, now, calm down and let me explain this.
You seem to think that there's nothing wrong with mixing religion and science. But science is not merely a quest for knowledge. Science is a tool that we can use to not just better understand how the world around us works, but also find ways to better our natural condition. Science has consistently provided us with better technology, medicine, agriculture, and even allows us to better understand and deal with human behaviour and psychology. Why is religion like a poison to this method? Well, if we look at what happens everytime someone tries to invoke the supernatural in the scientific endevour, scientific progress invariably grinds to a halt. Take Newton for example. Undeniably one of the greatest scientists of all time. When he came up against the problem of unstable planetary orbits, he had reached the limits of what his math could explain - and he lacked data to help him understand it. What did he do? He ascribed this phenomenon (the fact that orbits appeared stable when they shouldn't be) to the mind of god, for if it doesn't make sense that orbits are stable, then surely only god being so perfect could hold them in stable orbit. At that moment, when he explained it with the god hypothesis, his scientific progress grinded to a halt. It was only a century later that Laplace pushed science further, by excluding the god hypothesis, showing that planetary orbits can be described mathematically over an extended period of time. No god or supernatural force needed. *
Every single time a scientist says: "I don't understand how this could have a natural explanation and so therefore it must have a supernatural explanation", (s)he immediately fail as a scientist. His/her explanations (on that specific problem) from that point on are unreliable, untestable and therefore unuseful in a practical sense.
Behe looked at the complexity of natural cells and thought to himself: "Wow, that's amazing! I don't see how that could be the result of a natural process". Sounds familiar?
He decided that certain features of biological life was irreducably complex, because he assumed that if you remove just one part of a given organ (or organell), the entire organ would be useless, and so couldn't have come about through a natural, gradual process. This irreducable complexity therefore, was a sign that some supernatural intelligence must have designed biological complexity. Sounds familiar?
When asked how come it appears that organisms from all over the world are related (as evolutionary theory predicts) when we look at DNA and the parts of different cells, he replies: "that's just how god did it". Sounds familiar?
Where Behe differs from Newton is that Newton lacked the necessary data to see the bigger picture. Behe has been presented with perfectly useful explanations as to how biological complexity can arise naturally, but he still rejects it, because he really, really, really wants to believe that god did it in six days, six thousand years ago, and scientific knowledge contradicts that claim. But how is creationism useful in a practical, scientific sense, if it ignores scientific evidence and scientifically useful explanations for that evidence? Well, it's not.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, evolutionary theory, being real science untainted by the god hypothesis, continues to inspire new and promising scientific research - epigenetics and ERV research to name two of the most interesting (in my opinion) - leading to new and better medicines, among other things.
Science and religion deal with two different aspects of human reality. Science deals with the natural, observable and testable reality, and is used to improve our physical well-being. Religion deals with spiritual matters, and could be useful to some. When religious claims about the natural world clashes with scientific discoveries, that's when religious zealots wish to muddy the waters of scientific knowledge, not realising that by doing so, they slow scientific progress down, eventually to a halt. We must always fight this impulse to trust our religious convictions over our scientific discoveries, because the former is simply not as useful as the latter.
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* 😵 Actually, I just realised I'm a bit confused about the details, as this link demonstrates:
http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/universe/211420/the-perimeter-of-ignorance
But the gist of my argument still stands.
02 Nov '14 09:48
Creationism smack-down!
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