Me:
> Thus, science does not take up the challenge of discovering what happened.
It >merely attempts to find the best naturalistic explanation. Whether such
an
> explanation truly describes what happened is something science does not
>address.
Chris:
>I suspect that the biologist you quoted *meant* by "intelligent designer"
>one that is not-naturalistic, as is indicated by the last few words of the
>quote. But, as I've pointed out, an intelligent designer could also be
>naturalistic, which would bring it at least marginally back within the realm
>of science.
Science is what scientists do. And there is no evidence that scientists
distinguish between a naturalistic designer and a non-naturalistic designer.
That is, if we were to conduct a survey of scientists, I would predict the
vast majority equate ID with an appeal to the supernatural. Thus, while
we can make an abstract distinction that is valid, in practice, it doesn't
matter. The way science is practiced is that any inference to ID is
rejected due to the "ID =supernatural equation." Science itself is influenced
by psychology and sociology.
A better way of seeing this is to understand that the ID debate is really
a debate between a teleological view and a non-teleolgical view. From this
angle, teleological views are indeed censored from science regardless of
the nature of the source behind the teleology. Again, that's just how things
are.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 21 2000 - 23:07:20 EST