From a little-read but always amusing web site called, Intellectual Conservative. Article: Darwin’s Lapdog Thinks You’re an ID-iot! By Jeff Osonitsch
Money quote:
Johnson claims that ID is not scientific because “it predicts nothing, since it essentially states that everything is the way it is because God wanted it that way.†In fact, ID begins, according to the Discovery Institute, with the hypothesis that “if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of complex and specified information. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information.†They cite the concept of irreducible complexity as one example. This conforms to the scientific method of hypothesis, experimentation, and observation, leading to a conclusion.
Actually Jeff, your offered hypothesis itself contains several unproved hypotheses. The important one is: a natural object contains high levels of complex and specified information.
ID’s pseudo-scientific project wholly turns on this fundamental violation of hypothesis generation: it takes unproved vague propositions as being proved, and then argues for a method of proving a different proposition as if it isn’t the same as what it already takes as given and proven.
Look at this way:
Rocks are hard. (posit)
Hardness is always a product of design. (hypothesis masked as posit)
Rocks are designed. (pseudo-hypothesis)
Reverse the direction of the utterance: first you have a natural object, then you decide what makes it so, next you bolt “design” onto what makes it so, and end up with: the object must be designed. “See the bolts!”
Furthermore, if one cares not a wit about design and tracks back to constituents of the object, constituents that must predate its becoming the sort of object that must be complex, it must also be so that those constituents must be complex in only slightly less ‘complex’ terms than the so-called natural object.
(I count this as the main reason why the Discovery Institute hasn’t taken on the field of cosmology.)
In any case, you can’t hide your conclusion in the hypothesis and then say you’re doing science by inferring back to the hidden conclusion using only the terms of the same.
If the ID crowd is to do science, they’re compelled to do science about the agency of the designer be it revealed in evidence of the agent’s interference, or, maybe there is evidence of the heavenly workshop.
The author is so unaware of the logical stinker he’s peddling that the rest of the article is fabulously and unintentionally knee-slapping. Jeff is, on philosophical matters, apparently, dumb as a box of rocks.
Yet, he also writes,
In lieu of any actual argument, Johnson, like all Darwin sycophants, continually uses the straw-man tactic of culling the evolutionary examples he cites from the domain of micro-evolution – the universally accepted (and scientifically observable) concept that small changes occur within a given species such as when a bacterium develops a resistance to antibiotics – rather than citing an example of macro-evolution, or how one species transmogrifies over time into an entirely new species. There is a very simple reason for this sleight-of-hand: there is virtually no compelling evidence to support this, the cornerstone of Darwin’s theory – even after 150 years of looking.
Let’s see, how many examples of transitional fossils would one need to satisfy Jeff?
1? 5? 10? A zillion?
Jeff then takes on religion,
…one simply cannot be a Christian if he rejects the concept of a Creator.
This is because, presumably, the definition of a Christian is somebody who accepts the concept of a creator? And this rule of membership is found where?
Same mistake writ in a different domain. …funny stuff.
