From: Stephen E. Jones <sejones@iinet.net.au>
>On Tue, 8 Aug 2000 02:31:19 +0100, Richard Wein wrote:
[...]
>RW>Stephen is making a very common error. He's confusing two things:
>>(a) falsification of a hypothesis;
>>(b) showing that the arguments in support of a hypothesis are invalid
>
>I am not "confusing" anything. I am well aware that a distinction can be
>made between a hypothesis and its supporting arguments.
>
>Usually on this Reflector, in the case of ID, such distinctions are not
made,
>particularly by the evolution side. For example, if only one aspect of
>creationism or ID (e.g. "a supporting argument") is claimed to be falsified
>(or is unfalsifiable), it is assumed that the entire "hypothesis" of
creation or
>ID has been falsified (or is unfalsifiable).
>
>RW>I've certainly never said that the ID hypothesis has been falsified.
What I
>>have said is that the alleged scientific arguments for ID (Dembski's and
>>Behe's) have been shown to be invalid.
>
>Well, since the Dembski and Behe's (together with Thaxton, et al's)
>arguments at this stage comprise much of the scientific content of "the ID
>hypothesis", to claim that their "scientific arguments" are: 1) "alleged"
(i.e.
>not even scientific) and 2) that they " have been shown to be invalid", is
>tantamount to claiming that "the ID hypothesis has been falsified".
Stephen, you've just made exactly the same logical error again. Let me try
to explain it in more detail.
First ,some definitions:
A "hypothesis" is an assertion, i.e. a statement of alleged fact.
"Falsifying a hypothesis" means proving that the assertion is untrue.
The hypothesis with which we're concerned here, the "ID hypothesis", is the
assertion that "an intelligent designer was involved in the origin of life"
(or something like that). So, falsifying the ID hypothesis means proving
that no intelligent designer was involved in the origin of life.
I claim that the arguments made in support of the ID hypothesis are not
valid. In other words, I claim that the ID hypothesis has not be shown to be
true. On the other hand, I do not claim that it has been proven to be false.
There remains the possibility that genuine evidence of ID will be found in
the future.
In short, demonstrating that something has not been shown true is not the
same as proving it false.
Note: I've been careful above to distinguish between "show" and "prove". As
has been frequently stated, science cannot *prove* a hypothesis to be true,
in the sense of absolute proof; it can only show the hypothesis to be true
to a certain level of confidence, which is what we mean by scientific truth.
On the other hand, a hypothesis can (in theory) be absolutely proven false,
i.e. falsified. For example, if my hypothesis is that all cats are black,
then it only takes one non-black cat to absolutely falsify my hypothesis.
So, in the case of falsification, we are talking about *absolute* proof of
falsity.
In practice, falsification is not as straightforward as this (cf the
Duhem/Quine thesis), but I won't get into that here.
Richard Wein (Tich)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Aug 13 2000 - 08:23:15 EDT