Is ID scientific ? Yet another approach to the question.

I agree yet disagree. All theoretical work operates at some level of abstraction. Every theory has pieces that are "black boxes"--not specified how they work internally, just specified in how their inputs and outputs work.It's like saying classical physics of Newton was invalid because nobody was describing how the underlying "stuff" worked that allowed the system to work. Or saying that psychology is invalid because we don't know how neural computations map to macroscopic behaviors.The power of ID will reside in how much ID-ists can define and limit the "designer". A omnipotent, intelligent designer offers very little explanatory and predictive power. But the more work that is done in defining what "intelligence" is and why it's thought to be necessary to have created life, will shape the designer more clearly.Science is a progression, a step-by-step process of trying to follow a path to get closer to the answer. We're on a landscape of understanding, and we're hoping to tumble towards a minimum... and hoping the minimum is maximally minimal.Hope that made some sense.

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I don't want a large Farva, I want a goddamn liter-a-cola.

Are the continuities available the biological continuities of slow evolutionary change over long time periods? Or are they the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge that we gather through "standing on the shoulders" of those who went before us?Or maybe I didn't understand... So you, BSM, are a discontinuity. I couldn't find an understanding of what applying recursion to tissue would mean. It must mean using some tissue to produce other tissue, and the produced tissue then has the ability to produce the original tissue. It sounds like The Riddler's way of saying "cloning." Could you elaborate a bit on what you meant by this part of your post? It sounds interesting. I know you've posted some interesting proposals of how to use tissue previously, but I can't remember them well. What is the discontinuity that you suspect? Did you mention it in this thread, or in another thread?Still working hard my friend, still working hard. Thanks for all your efforts.Ben

Annafan, this is actually a reply to post 35 in "ID taken to the end". I understood your questions / points about this thread there better than here, so I'm responding to that post but pulling the discussion back over here. I look at it this way. IF we accept that evolution could not have produce, or simply did not produce, a structure that we observe (and I KNOW this is a huge IF, but let's see where it leads to), THEN we have to change the way we think about the origins of what we see today.ID is one way to do that. It allows for structures that are "designed." As I showed previously in the other thread, it also can allow for mutation, for natural selection, and evolution. ONLY if you make your designer some kind of God. As we've seen over and over, "God" cannot be scientific; "God" can do anything, anytime, any way. So, assume a non-God designer. IF we accept that some structures are not explained by evolution, can we determine if they are designed and, if so, can we determine anything about the designer? But that's what I've been trying to explain. Scientific theory often follows this path: first explain something descriptively and, if you can do that successfully, THEN derive further evidence which can tell you what's in the black box. That worked for evolution, that worked for Newton's theory of gravity... it's not out of the question it could work for ID. Now this is a completely different problem. I think we're in the business of understanding how biology on the Earth works; if we discovered we were engineered by extraterrestrials, taht would be a HUGE breakthrough in understanding, and it would fundamentally alter how we view the history of the earth and the history of how evolution has worked in our world.You're right though; we would still have other questions relating to orgins. But as we've said, evolution is NOT a question of "ultimate" origins; abiogenesis is. If we discovered we were engineered by aliens, that would be a HUGE step in another direction for chemists. They would no longer study old earth chemistry, but would need to figure out the origin (location) of the extraterrestrials, they'd have to see if they could reduce life to basic origins through a theory like evolution, and then they'd need to study the ancient chemical makeup of that origin (location). That would be HUGE, HUGE. Not irrelevant at all. You've basically just described how we study cognition. We're constantly having this problem. We have one big black box (the human mind). We propose some smaller black boxes to fill the big black box. We try to make them consistent with each other. Then, we tackle the smaller black boxes. If we discover we thought about one of the black boxes incorrectly, since all the boxes are dependent on each other, we often have to start from scratch.This is a bit of a simplification, but the basic point remains: in this point, I don't see that ID is any worse off or invalid than other approaches we accept.By the way, at this point I'm not talking about ID as the existing theories; like we've discussed, they don't even qualify. I'm talking about ID in general. In general, if we can support the major premise (that there are structures that are not explained by evolution), it's not a worthless enterprise.Ben