At 10:37 PM 10/05/2000, you wrote:
> >Richard Wein: If they have not been done yet, then it is imho quite
>important that they are done so that they can support what is now merely
>assertions.
>
>DNAunion: Very true. But does this not also apply to the origin of life?
>Why must Dembski have a 100% airtight, completely validated, empirically
>tried and true, perfect hypothesis, generated and completed within a couple
>years, before it is considered any more than an assertion, yet the
>purely-natural origin of life on earth is accepted as scientific fact even
>though it is not 100% airtight, it has not been completely validated, it is
>not empirically tried and true, it is not a perfect hypothesis, and very many
>researchers have been working on it for over 60 years!
>
>Sounds kind of unfair: absolute proof required for Dembski, while only a
>couple successes here and there - out of millions or trillions of steps - are
>sufficient to establish biopoesis as scientific fact.
Chris
The problem is, Dembski does not have, as far as I can tell, any workable
case at all. Further, his claim obviously require the introduction of
otherwise unnecessary "entities" (i.e., at least one designer), and thus
has a much higher burden of proof. We *already* know that the natural world
exists, and much about how it functions. To go beyond that involves a much
more serious burden of proof, because we *don't* already know that aliens
exist or that they have been anywhere near our planet. To go to the level
of a supernatural designer requires a radically different *kind* of proof,
because there's no way that we know of, even in principle, to argue
rationally from empirical facts to a supernatural cause as opposed to
merely a natural-world cause (including aliens, etc.).
Right now, Dembski doesn't even have a working method of distinguishing
real design from what unintelligent natural processes can do.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Oct 06 2000 - 10:51:34 EDT