Demarcation

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People keep telling me ID is not science.

They are unable to say why. Every one of them.

Well, they make some attempts. They say ID is not falsifiable. But then again, neither is evolution: can you come up with any imaginable experiment to show that evolution is false? (No, you can't.)

They say ID is not testable. Well, testability has its own problems, which is why Popper invented falsifiability. Which doesn't work.

Demarcation, as I noted recently, does not work. Do not tell me ID is not science because it doesn't fit some preconceived criteria, because you are just demonstrating that you really don't understand the issues involved.

People say ID is not science, it is philosophy; the problem with this is that science is inherently philosophical itself. Science is about conducting experiments, making observations, drawing conclusions, and forming hypotheses.

How do you conduct an experiment without some philosophical idea of what makes for a proper experiment, following certain guidelines that will lead to reasonable results?

Collecting data and making observations may be mostly empirical, but you have to have some idea of what to observe and which data to collect.

As to drawing conclusions and forming hypotheses: that is nothing *but* philosophy. Reason, logic, imagination are all philosophy.

I don't know if ID is science. But I do know that the people who tell me it is not don't know what they are talking about.

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<pudge/*> (pronounced "PudgeGlob") is thousands of posts over many years by Pudge.

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