Does ID follow the scientific method?

Reply to off-topic gibberish removed at Percy's request.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

None, real scientists will do that for you.What you need is to propose a test for design.

That is a quaint use of the word "logical".It would be wrong even had you said "empirical", since we often see order without design. Of course we can. How else do people practice forensic science or archaeology or paleontology or taphonomy or, dammit, history?Perhaps the first of sciences was the interpretation of animal tracks: the ability to look at a set of impressions in the sand, and say: "two hours ago a gazelle ran this way pursued by a lion". As ineloquent as your speech sounds, yes they do. Just as our ancestors could identify a gazelle as the source of impressions in the sand. Once again, I would point out that the people who actually detect order are scientists. Creationists just sit on their bottoms and talk nonsense about order. It is indeed another thing. And it has been done. This is, of course, not true. As I have pointed out, you guys haven't got so far as framing a testable hypothesis yet, let alone testing it. Until you try, your claims to follow the same methodology as science are naked nonsense. If Intelligent Design is not about design in some way, then you guys have chosen the wrong name for your ideas, and it is not I who have done most to misrepresent your position.

Admin. I shall see what he has to say about your excerpts. They contain a number of errors that I think are worth correcting. That is certainly a test that we might apply to any ID hypothesis sufficiently concrete to deserve the name "hypothesis".

With Percy's permission ... Which is one of several ways that it resembles a snowflake rather than a Chieftain tank. What of it? Again, your point is obscure unless you believe that naturally occurring things don't start or stop, in which case you're wrong. Perhaps you could explain what significance you wish to attach to these quotations. I proved that you were wrong about that at the same time that I pointed out that these discoveries were not "recent and new". Remember?What's "recent and new" is that creationists started being wrong about non-coding DNA. Presumably because it took several decades for the facts about it to percolate from scientists to creationists.The fact that creationists finally got round to taking a half-assed interest in what real scientists had discovered decades earlier does not entitle them to any credit for those discoveries.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

If Behe was suggesting such a vague and subjective test, then I admit that what he is proposing is unscientific.In which case I am at a loss to know why you brought it up. Death would be part of the evolutionary process. Have you ever heard of natural selection?If you can think of any way that the mere fact of mortality would prevent evolution from happening, perhaps you could bring it up on a thread in which this would be on topic. Your ideas are muddled, but again I would suggest that when and if you ever manage to clarify your thinking on this subject you should find a thread where it's on topic. Well, two things.First, whether these "explorations" follow the scientific method depends on whether they do, in fact, follow the scientific method. If they are conducted by means of gyromancy, postmodern literary criticism, or Biblical exegesis, then no, they don't.Secondly, Behe was talking about something that he thinks creationists might think about doing in the future. If he suggested that one day they might think about curing cancer, would this support a claim that ID contributes to oncology? What do you find missing from my proof? I admit that I did not explicitly state that 1994 is later that the 1960s, or that causes precede effects, or that creationists haven't built a time machine, because I took this to be common ground. And yet we find that the discoveries of the various functions of non-coding DNA were in fact made by scientists and not by creationists, and were made decades before creationists boast that they suggested that it might have functions. To say that, you would have to have some sort of firm conjecture about the designer: for example that he never does anything superfluous to some given purpose which you would have to specify.At that point, you might be on to a testable hypothesis.

They say confession is good for the soul. You're right, none of that did have anything to do with what is valid or logically acceptable.BTW, could I ask again what language you speak? Only if I were you I would stick to that.

Edited: I replied to marc's message, which has been deemed off topic. I would say in his defense that much of it was on topic, or at least seemed to be intended as such. To say that he was "making no effort to address the topic" seems to me to be unduly harsh.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Does intelligent design theory implement the scientific method?

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The Short Answer: Yes. The scientific method goes from observation --> hypothesis --> experiment --> conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if objects were designed, they will contain CSI. They then seek to find CSI. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity (IC). ID researchers can then experimentally reverse-engineer biological structures to see if they are IC. If they find them, they can conclude design.

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Er ... except that this is rubbish.Their hypothesis should be that objects with CSI have intelligent designers, not vice versa. (To prove that chickens lay eggs is not to prove that all eggs are laid by chickens). And of course in order to prove this, they would have to show in particular that life (which we shall assume for the sake of argument does possess this mysterious CSI) has a designer.Which is the thing that they wanted to prove in the first place.In short, their "scientific method" is the Great Big Creationist Petitio Principii. Again. There is nothing in there where they actually test the hypothesis that life has a designer.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Sure, but not like that.If you will grant me the premise that all complex objects are made of metal, I can prove that all organisms are made of metal. That's petitio principii. This is different from the hypothetico-deductive method where the observation that all complex objects I've looked at so far are made of metal would lead me to the provisional conclusion that all complex objects are made of metal.

Which, of course, makes the concept pointless. They want to find CSI as an indicator that the thing doesn't have natural causes, and they have to show that it has no natural causes in order to show that it has CSI ...So they could drop the concept of CSI altogether if their purpose was to test their hypothesis rather than to dupe the gullible.

Quite so. They are reversing Sherlock Holmes' dictum --- their motto is: "When you have eliminated the improbable, whatever remains, however impossible, is the truth."