More importantly, NO system has been proved to be irreducibly complex. It's
an assertion. Why should we assume there are ANY such systems?
>>You can't tell if something is designed or not, so you have to >assume
it's
>>not. If it *is* designed then it's utterly idiosyncratic >to the designer
>>and unavailable to be understood. The assumption of >design stops science
>>in its tracks.
>
>I disagree with that first sentence. Should it not be "you can't tell if
>something is designed or not, so you have to say you can't tell"? Simply
>because you can't tell something, doesn't mean you have to assume its
>negation. If you took that stance (throwing in a bit of Cartesian ideas
>here) you can't tell you are actually awake and that life isn't a dream, so
>you must assume you aren't awake.
Occam's Razor. Design is, with respect to non-design, a major positive
claim. It requires supporting evidence. The assumption of non-design does
not. They are not on an equal footing at the start. The Universe is to be
assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. Or rather, what exists is to be
assumed to be non-designed until proven to be designed. Non-design is the
minimal hypothesis. Design is to be introduced only if it becomes LOGICALLY
unreasonable to expect a less radical explanation.
> If my brain was working tonite I'd list
>other situations, but my general point is that science cannot make
>assertions either way about purely philosophical stances.
No, but it can avoid assuming anything more than the evidence requires.
Since no evidence requires design, the presumption is that there is no
design until at least SOME evidence of design is found.
>>>But those who believe the Bible may examine their interpretations >>of
>>>verses, chapters, etc. and so religions based on the Bible >>change. The
>>>numbers obtained from science don't change, the >>explanations behind the
>>>gathered data change.
>>The bible is the source of religious information and therefore
>> >static--there will be no more. The numbers obtained from science >*do*
>>change, new information comes in all the time.
>
>Not my point at all. The numbers don't change when new information comes
in,
>there are simply more of them.
Not quite true. Methods of measurement improve, yielding numbers that are
not MERELY new, but DIFFERENT, in many cases. The differences may be small,
and usually are after some time, but they are not merely more of the same.
In other cases.
Of course, if you simply mean historically reported numbers, then, yes, they
don't change, though how they are interpreted may change radically over
time, as the knowledge of their context changes.
>People have been investigating
>mathematics for just as long and look at the ambiguity it's RESULTED in!
>Math has no solid basis now, in fact it is based on a set of undefined
>terminology, determined by what you choose it to be. For just one example
of
>this, look at the different geometries. Enough information has been around
>since at least 3000 years ago, but people made assumptions that weren't
>correct (such as Euclid's 5th postulate) which led them off track.
Actually Euclid's 5th postulate IS correct, for its, and non-Euclidean
geometries are, effectively, mere extensions of Euclidean geometry, because
they effectively assume the introduction of something not present in
Euclidean geometry: Curvature of the plane (or of space). Further, geometry
is not really a branch of mathematics, anyway, and the failure to grasp this
is a major source of the confusion surrounding the status of mathematics.
Geometry is a "purified" and formalized branch of PHYSICS, which is why we
use terms like "space," "edge," "angle," "solid," "surface," "plane," and
"curve," and it's why we can so DIRECTLY represent geometrical figures with
physical drawings.
But what I wanted to remark on, mostly, was the idea that "Math has no solid
basis now." This is not true. Math has a solid basis, but many (if not most)
people don't know what it is because of confusions caused by bad philosophy,
especially bad epistemology. The basis for mathematics is logic and the fact
that one thing is more than no thing, or: 0 < 1. The rest of mathematics is
the working out of the implications of this fact.
Okay, I may exaggerate a little, but you get the idea: The foundation of
mathematics is no big mystery, unless it's a mystery that one apple is more
apples than no apples at all. That this is true doesn't seem mysterious to
me.