I am trying to drop the subject, truly I am, but it's out there in the ether for some reason. Just came across this James Q. Wilson piece in Opinion Journal arguing that Intelligent Design isn't science. I respect Wilson, but his piece is a perfect example of what happens when someone has been taken in by scientific overreach. All the examples he cites in the second half of his article as "proof" of evolution are precisely the cases in which ID scientists have shown that alleged "proof" does not bear much inspection. In the case of the eye, for example, no biologist has claimed he can account for the development of the eye; no biologist would make that claim since it's false. That wild-eyed claim has only been made by Tufts philosophy professor Daniel Dennett, who got it from Richard Dawkins --even though, as David Berlinski notes and Tom Bethell documents
The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim --Dan E. Nilsson-- has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye's development.So much of what people confidently state we "know" turns out to be based on mere assertion, not on anything testable or verifiable. And interesting that Wilson has the nerve to bring up "The Big Bang" which evolutionists at first opposed because they thought it would give credence to creation.
But nevermind. I am actually with him up to the point where he starts citing cases. It is not science to say "God intervenes" everytime you can't explain something (the most prominent ID scientists do not in fact say that). The point is that neither is it science to say, "it just happens" everytime you can't explain something. By Wilson's own definition, evolution isn't science either, because its central theorem isn't subject to testing and it cannot predict anything.
In science, a theory states a relationship between two or more things (scientists like to call them "variables") that can be tested by factual observations. We have a "theory of gravity" that predicts the speed at which two objects will fall toward one another, the path on which a satellite must travel if it is to maintain a constant distance from the earth, and the position that a moon will keep with respect to its associated planet.
This theory has been tested rigorously, so much so that we can now launch a satellite and know exactly where it must be in space in order to keep it rotating around the earth.
I will happily accept that definition of scientific theory --a testable model of a relationship between two or more things. "Chance" no more fits that definition than "God" does.
