Still wrong
Roddy Bullock repeats some questions, as if they get more interesting the millionth time:
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches outer space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A scientist.
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches inner space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A religious nut.
What he’s trying to do in repeating this pair of questions twice, is to suggest that the search for extraterrestrial life is the same as what IDolators do. And so long as you ask the wrong questions, the two could bear some resemblance. But here are the right questions:
What do you call a person who hypothesizes intelligent life like his/her own and searches the sky for data to test that hypothesis?
What do you call a person who assumes a supernatural being crafted the universe to be just-so, and forces anything and everything to fit that assumption?
The answers are the same as what Bullock offered.
He continues:
Surprised? You should be. How can the exact same methodology be both touted as scientific and doubted as religious? Are radio telescopes searching for Morse code-like evidence of space aliens inherently scientific while electron microscopes discovering source code-like evidence of design in the cell are not? Why are alien hunters with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) permitted to infer intelligence if ever they find evidence of specified complexity, but microbiologists who actually find such evidence are lambasted for inferring the same cause?
SETI doesn’t look for specified complexity. They look for simplicity. And any inference of intelligence that they make is based on a set of hypotheses about the natural intelligences that we know about, not about beings unbound by natural laws.
SETI researchers think about what sort of signal they would send, and look for signals like that. They do not use Demsbki’s bogus formulae, nor do they use his explanatory filter, let alone Behe’s irreducible complexity. They look for patterns that match what they think an intelligence like their own would produce.
We know of nothing but evolutionary processes that could possibly have produced DNA, flagella, or any other biological phenomenon. That isn’t to say that we stop looking, it means that we have to demonstrate that a mechanism is physically and biologically possible before we would invoke it as an explanation. IDolators skip that step.
We know nothing about what a supernatural creator could possibly do, nor what sorts of things such a being might choose to create. They offer no mechanism, and try to treat their lack of a mechanism as some sort of virtue. It is not. Without a mechanism, it’s impossible to suggest what their designer wouldn’t do, and without knowing that, it’s impossible to falsify design.
And that is why scientists and “religious nuts” are different.
0 COMMENTS
The questions are semantically similar, but empirically distinct. Whereas ‘outer’ space can be examined quite fruitfully using hypothesis and confirmatory observation, ‘inner’ space cannot. If we deliberately define something as being outside nature (outside the materialist universe), it should not surprise us that that removes it from the purview of science, since science is a tool for studying nature.
Your commentor is suffering from the delusion that people who study design actually use Dembski’s methodologies. They don’t, because his methodology is quite useless as a practical tool. Not even Dembski uses it.
As for SETI, you are exactly right. From their own website:
In other words, we’re looking for someone who designs just like us. The hallmark of human design is simplicity, not complexity.
I’d change his second point. ‘What do you call someone who searches inner space and looks for evidence of intelligence?’ ‘Done looking!’ The human genome has been on line for ten years. There are scores of other genomes. Anyone with a PC can access them and look for SETI-like intelligent messages in the code. We can be pretty darn confident, therefore, that the messages are not there.
Actually, isn’t it funny that they’ve written whole books claiming it isn’t unscientific to look for design in nature, but simultaneously science has provided them with gigabytes of raw data in which to search for obvious signs of design, and not only haven’t they found any, but there is no evidence they’ve even tried!
Didn’t you read? They’re not permitted to do research. The evil evolutionary materialists won’t let them. They’ve, um… passed laws n’ stuff.
IDolators aside, can’t we entertain the notion that SETI is a waste of money?
The SETI methodologies may be (arguably) empirical and reasonable if not hypothesis driven, but the motivation strikes me as a bit silly if not juvenile. Not to mention unlikely to succeed…ever hear of the Drake equation?
“Searching for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence”? C’mon.
I think we ceratinly can and should entertain such notions. We should also entertain the notion that International Space Station is a waste as well. As for the Drake Equation, all we can say is that the answer is somewhere between 0 and 1. I go back on forth myself.
As for the Drake Equation, all we can say is that the answer is somewhere between 0 and 1.
That’s true of any empirical claim expressed as a probability, including “leprachauns exist” and “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction”. While I think SETI is a worthy goal, I think that, at best, the Drake equation suggests that its likelihood of success is very small.
I’d say that the odds of extraterrestrial life are quite good. The odds of that life being intelligent are impossible to compute, and the odds that intelligent life would have existed elsewhere long enough ago that we’d be receiving ratio transmissions from them is sure to be small. But nonzero
And herein lies the rub. It’s not the “exact same methodology” at all. What science guys and gals do is to formulate positive testable hypotheses that flow from a theoretical explanatory framework. These hypotheses are then tested to determine if the theory is supported or not. ID does nothing like that. What they do is to deny the sufficiency of material explanations that run afowl of their faith (or ‘Darwinism’ as they call it) for some feature and to then proclaim ‘Design’ wins by default. There is no design ‘theory’ from which to draw hypotheses from. There’s nothing to test. It’s pure God of the Gaps argumentation, where God is replaced (although not really *wink* *wink*) with ‘Designer’. Sadly for them, this replacement doesn’t do a thing to enhance the argument and has proven to be weak at hiding the religious nature of the notion.
I would agree that some form of recognizable life out there has a reasonably large probability of existing. Whether there is other life of intelligence and who want to have anything to do with us, is much less likely in my opinion.
I think the bigger question, is what do we do with all the unintelligent life we have here on earth.. as in ID proponents…