Yes, I know, nobody does this kind of distinctions, but I suggest you do.

And I would like to point to the funny spyder that his “gravity as intelligent design” was actually a theory many years ago: planets and stars were supposedly made of a substance different from earth, wind, fire and water, the four “materials” in vogue, called the “quintessence” or fifth essence. Its properties? Well, the main one was that it did not fall, like the other four substances. That is why Newton’s ideas were so startling: the heavens and earth were united, because they were made of the same stuff.

Finally, ID does make some falsifiable predictions: mainly that I am intelligently designed. ID can not explain the human embrionic evolution with gills and tail, the appendix, the senility, and all the inherited defective traits that an intelligent designer should eliminate from my body. And I am not fat nor ugly, or my complains would be louder, because the guy has had 15 billion years to get rid of those things… For an almighty being this seems to be a quite lazy design ID advocates predict I should be perfect, or they have no intelligent designer behind life. And I am not even talking of diseases, death and the Superbowl TV ordeal…

Read what (physics?) students, after they read the introductions to chapters 1 and 2 of Feynmans Six Easy Pieces, write on approximate and “slightly wrong” physical laws: When is a law not quite right?. I find this interesting as I’ve asked during m…

KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: “Gravity-which is taught to our children as a law-is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world’s leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God’s Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.
The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue “so they can make an informed decision.”

“We just want the best possible education for Kansas’ kids,” Burdett said.

Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein’s ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

“Let’s take a look at the evidence,” said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden.”In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, ‘And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.’ He says nothing about some gravity making them fall-just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, ‘But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.’ If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling.”
Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton’s mathematics and Holy Scripture.

“Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein’s general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world,” said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. “They’ve been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don’t know how.”

“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.’”

Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.

“Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the ‘electromagnetic force,’ the ‘weak nuclear force,’ the ‘strong nuclear force,’ and so-called ‘force of gravity,’” Burdett said. “And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus.”

Source: http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion. – Carl Sagan

How ’bout we take a step backward and try to establish a comprehensible definition of “science”? So far I haven’t found anyone literate (which I use as a baseline of age & education below which such discussions are useless) who doesn’t seem to get it when I say science deals only with what can be measured and tested.

This has several advantages, including that it concedes there is much of reality (religious devotion & other emotions, concepts like “America”, etc) that exists but is not in the realm of science. The “measurement” part also points to the actual daily work of science (as opposed to the Hollywood version), and the “testing” part implies the process of building & checking hypotheses, if the conversation continues in that direction.

Best of all, in present context, the question, “What in (whichever variant of) the idea of creationism can be measured or tested?” – whether in a friendly chat or a heated debate – leads one’s audience to a much better understanding of why science advocates draw the lines the way we do.

I don’t have a problem with areas of a scientific endeavour being ‘unscientific’, as I see the description as being representative of the overall whole. ID, though, just isn’t scientific in nearly any degree. The more different falsifiable statements we can make from our theory, the better, I say. I think that some areas of investigation will lend themselves better to this than others, but the damning thing about ID is that it effectively represents an attempt to try and avoid asking falsifiable statements but the IDers still put it forward as a ‘scientific alternative’.

My knowledge on this, as on many things, is severely limited. Here I am mainly regurgitating my impression of Myers knowledge on http://pharyngula.org/ . He is a biologist and an energetic evolution proponent. Read him directly for superior knowledge in this.

On the specific term ‘evolutionist’ my impression is that Myers thinks:
-creationists reads the same evangelical texts were terms like ‘Darwinist’ and ‘evolutionist’ is misused.
- he is a biologist and evolution is just one well established theory in this area that every biologist use. The specialist on evolution are probably called just that.

However, regarding falsification I heartily sympatice with your intentions. Falsificability gives trust to theories and efficiently kills faithbased reasoning; I know hands on of examples. But I don’t think that it is realistic to think that every statement of a theory must be falsificable. I don’t see why at least a single central falsifiable statement is not enough to lend trust.

I also think the ‘god of the gaps’ argument shows that one must acknowledge missing knowledge and less trustful ad hocs, else one open up a backdoor for faithbased reasoning anyway.

I’m a little late coming to this discussion but I thought my readers who do not regularly visit more main stream science oriented sites or the important political blogs could use the advice in a this morning’s New York Times…

Right, that is an interesting point. Of course, one cannot resist the mental image of the canonical Guardian reader reading this and reflecting uncomfortably that this line of reasoning, in reverse, turns him into the economic equivalent of a creationist. But no, of course, the canonical Guardian reader is constitutionally incapable of doubting that The Market is Always Evil.

‘Oh, and ‘evolutionist’ is another of Myers telltale signs of creationists. Assuming I still remember correctly.’

I’ll defer to your superior knowledge. To me it was meant to take the same role as ‘physicist’ or ‘biologist’, ‘thermodynamicist’, etc. For myself, I haven’t claimed that evolution isn’t falsifiable, I just ventured my personal opinion that it is less prone to a falsificationist investigation program than some other theories in science. But then, as I say, that doesn’t bother me much; I’m a scientist, but I don’t worship at the Temple of Science.

So far, so good. What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution – for example, many fundamentalist Christians – are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. They accept the market’s complexity without qualm, yet insist the complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.

They would reject the idea that there is or should be central planning in the economy. They would point out that simple economic exchanges which are beneficial to people become entrenched and then gradually modified as they become part of larger systems of exchange, while those that are not beneficial die out. Yet some of these same people refuse to believe natural selection and “blind processes” can lead to biological order arising spontaneously.

I’m afraid the significance of this point will go largely unappreciated.

If I paraphrase PZ Myers in http://pharyngula.org correctly, we should distinguish between the observation(s) of evolution (antibiotics resistance, fossil record, observed speciation) and the theory (theories) of evolution based on random variation (sex, mutation) and nonrandom selection (culling).

We should regard the numerous observations as well established facts and the later theories like neodarwinism as well established theories. The origin of life is irrelevant to the theorys validity (but would be nice to know some day). Randalls discussion on chromosome number or Adams on ‘exhaustive falsifiable investigation’ he would likely call old ‘god of the gaps’ arguments.

I wish he would have walked us through his reasoning again. Instead he seems to be rather upset (http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/danged_physicists/) by Randalls piece and this thread.

A propos Myers, it is perhaps also appropriate to mention that he takes Adams term ‘Darwinism’ as a sure creationist sign, if I remember correctly. (The theory has long since evolved from Darwins views.)

It is also a common creationist fallability to state that evolution theory can not be falsified. It can, and it has been modified several times, see above. See
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211.html for a simple correction and
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsify.html for a full discussion.

Rather than ‘incorrect’ we could say ‘unreflective of what actually happened’ or question the correlation of what is written with what occurred? Clearly we can systematically doubt ourselves into the ground.

I don’t care about ‘world view’, though, so I wouldn’t care to assess relative importance. I just work in, and study, science because it interests me, because I like a puzzle.

Maybe I’m not a million miles away from your position, perhaps, although I would say ‘fact’ to describe something that we can get from scientific theory (so in that sense, I wouldn’t describe either as fact, not unless I was using it as shorthand, in the sense I spoke of earlier, for ‘something we’re assuming is true for lack of persuasive reason not to’). My statement was about which was ‘more scientific’, rather than which one was ‘factual’, in any case. My personal belief is that momentum is conserved and that evolution happened (and, like you, I’d paint ‘evolution’ in broad strokes), but I’m happy (eager!) to admit that I could be wrong.

The point about scientificness (from my position as a falsificationist), though, wasn’t that evolution would be hard to disprove (because, let’s face it, ID is impossible to disprove if it is accompanied by omnipotent intelligent gawdlike force) but as to whether it is easy to make and test falsifiable statements from evolutionary theory to answer questions like “did ‘evolution’ cause the range of species, etc, that we see today”, where I’ve put ‘evolution’ in inverted commas to indicate the fuzzy vagueness of the term as we are using it, as you and I both mentioned. ID clearly fails this test woefully, but I don’t think that the lot of the evolutionist is a particularly easy one, either, in this regard, for all that they certainly can do some pretty impressive stuff with regards to falsification. The difficulty is not a flaw in evolutionary theory, nor the result of a deficiency of talent, but rather, it is inherent in the subject matter.

As I say, the idea that one theory might be ‘less scientific’ than another theory in a different (and more testable) area doesn’t bother me a jot. The key fact, when deciding what theories to explain species diversity belong in the scientific curriculum, is how scientific they are compared to each other. Consequently, one can’t make the case for including ID in a biology lesson as a competing theory to evolution.

Finally, and at the risk of being momentarily right on topic, I support the Museum of the Earth/Ithaca solution, because the silly ‘it’s only a theory’ attack on evolution is best rebutted first by an explanation of what ‘a theory’ really is, in science.

Well, I said ‘finally’, but I clearly didn’t mean it. Finally (really), non-falsificationists won’t, in all probability, be persuaded by anything I say at all; falsificationists who do believe that evolutionary theory is as scientific as anything else in science will agree with me that falsificationism is important but disagree with me (perhaps from a position of more knowledge!) on the respective levels of falsifiability. In any case, we’d both agree that ID doesn’t belong in a science classroom.

I would not use the word “incorrect”. Memories and documents are what they are.
It is our task (as scientists and in every-day life) to sort them into a consistent world view. Evolution is as important to this consistent world view as are
Newton’s laws.
Creationists on the other hand assign a high value to one document only and
ignore all other evidence.