A note to Keith Miller:
Just because an all powerful God COULD design life just like a semi intelligent alien biologist does not doesn't mean you have to jump to the supernatural before you eliminate the alien. How would you know a microbe was genetically engineered by a human? You certainly don't need to know the motive. One could determine that a death was not an accident but a murder without knowing who the murderer was or the motive of the killer. ID is not the null hypothesis because we don't know exactly how an IDer would act. Random mutations is the null hypothesis just like random shuffling of chromosomes during independent assortment for genetics. You can still continue to look for secondary causes even if you have concluded an intelligence is behind it. It doesn't stop science. People thought an Intelligence was more directly involved in rain production now we know there are more secondary physical causes such as evaporation and condensation. With ID we may be getting closer to the first !
cause but there could be radiation or viruses carrying genes etc. Science goes on.
And so I ask again - how would you recognize the action of an alien biologist from this universe? How would you recognize an alien biologist from outside THIS universe (he or she could still be natural and not GOd). What fingerprint would you accept if not the fingerprint of outragious probability and complexity - the very thing that would cause one to recognize a heart drown in the sand as coming from an intelligence.
Do theories have to "contribute" to be true? Im making a list of contributions of ID. What has SETI contributed? Would you ban it?
Paul Mason (ASA member)
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Received on Sat Sep 15 07:58:05 2007
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