Intelligent talk on Intelligent Design

By Aussiegirl

Tom Bethel has an excellent article on Intelligent Design on NRO that should get the evolutionists knickers in a knot. His most interesting observation is that evolution fails Popper's falsifability test -- thereby dooming it to the realm of scientifically unprovable. Well, back to the drawing boards you evolved bits of protoplasm, maybe you can evolve a few more brain cells to deal with this conundrum. Read the whole thing -- fascinating.

Tom Bethell on Evolution & Intelligent Design on National Review Online

George Will has made one accurate criticism of the idea he so dislikes: "The problem with intelligent design is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis." This is true; but he should have added that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is not falsifiable either. Darwin's claim to fame was his discovery of a mechanism of evolution; he accepted "survival of the fittest" as a good summary of his natural-selection theory. But which ones are the fittest? The ones that survive. There is no criterion of fitness that is independent of survival. Whatever happens, it is the "fittest" that survive — by definition. This, just like intelligent design, is not a testable hypothesis. As the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper said, after discussing this problem that natural selection cannot escape: "There is hardly any possibility of testing a theory as feeble as this." Popper was the first to propose falsification as the line of demarcation between theories that are scientific and those that are not; both intelligent design and natural selection fall by this standard.