Myers on Nelson's Article

PZ Myers posted a response to Paul Nelson's post, in addition to mine. He goes into some aspects of the post that I did not go into, and does so quite well. I find nothing in it to disagree with. And thanks to John Rennie of Scientific American for citing both essays. Rennie says that his position is closer to PZ's, which suggests to me that perhaps he is misinterpreting mine a bit. I agree with PZ completely that ID is not even hypothetically testable and therefore there will be no such research forthcoming. My point was that if they could do so, scientists would evaluate it as they do any other such research and, if the explanation worked, would happily accept it regardless of its philosophical implications. Scientists, as a group, don't give a damn about metaphysical implications of their work; they care about explanations that work.

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"Working" is precisely what metaphysical explanations do not do. Scientific philosophy correctly notes that explanations with no explanatory power are logically equivalent to nothing at all, and so does not concern itself with what is ludicrously, but commonly, referred to as 'philosophy'.

"Love of wisdom", my left foot. "Love of nonsense and empty rhetoric" is more like it.

By Caledonian (not verified) on 06 Aug 2006 #permalink

If there was any validity to ID whatsoever, there would be scientists working on proving or disproving the "theory" today. ID supporters claim bias, and "facism," but those claims are ludicrous when there is the simple fact that there are literally hundreds of scientists who have entered the fields of biology, paleontology, etc. etc. etc. (hell I could go on for pages listing the fields directly related to evolutionary theory and testing based upon the theory of evolution) since the "creation" of Intelligent Design (pun intended).

By dogmeatIB (not verified) on 06 Aug 2006 #permalink