A man for all reasons

A lesson from Glenn Reynolds in amiably agreeing to disagree.  We had been stewing over Hugh Hewitt's embrace of ID and wondering how to blog about it without stepping on big toes.  Take a lesson from InstaPundit:

I LIKE HUGH HEWITT'S BLOG BOOK, and I think Hugh understands a lot about blogs, but I think that "intelligent design" theory is, um, highly unpersuasive.

Nice, friendly but uncompromising in expressing his own views. A man for all reasons. Professor Reynolds links to an elegant explication of why "Intelligent Design," by definition, isn't science by Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings, who notes that "Proving that theories are correct simply isn't how science works":

Proof of the validity of the theory (and there's nothing about that word that should shake our confidence in evolution or any other scientific theory) of evolution does not, and cannot, exist. And that's true not only for evolution, but for gravity, quantum chromodynamics, and any scientific theory that one wants to consider. Proving that theories are correct simply isn't how science works.

How science works is by putting forth theories that are disprovable, not ones that are provable. When all other theories have been disproven, those still standing are the ones adopted by most scientists. ID is not a scientific theory, because it fails the test of being disprovable (or to be more precise, non-falsifiable), right out of the box. If Hugh [Hewitt] doesn't believe this, then let him postulate an experiment that one could perform, even in thought, that would show it to be false. ID simply says, "I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer." That's not science -- it's simply an invocation of a deus ex machina, whether its proponents are willing to admit it or not. And it doesn't belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what's not science.

Yah. That's what we've been trying to say all this time.

Comments

[Sydney Carton]

Um, your categorization of ID is inherently contradictory. You say its: ""I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer."

But notice your use of the word EVOLVE in that quote. As far as I can tell, ID distinguishes between microevolution and macroevolution, and argues that the complexities of macroevolution are such that a design process is necessary. Far from positing an ignorance on how a structure evolves, it is a theory that the current system of microevolution does not adequately explain the structures necessary in macroevolution.

In effect, ID attempts to address the faults of evolutionary theory which makes it disprovable.

[Erasmo Rodriguez]

How is evolution disprovable?
You see, true unique ocurrences can not be disproved they are either observed or validly deduced from what can be observed.
But if Simburg characterization of the limits of scientific theory is correct, (and I believe it is) then it follows that concerning the question of origins (a unique non-repeatable ocurrence) ID is as unscientific as evolution in that if true neither of them is disprovable.