[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[Chris Gehlker]

On Dec 3, 2007, at 8:37 PM, LuKreme wrote:

> On 3-Dec-2007, at 19:18, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>> Wikipedia says:
>> 'The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent
>> design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin  
>> of
>> life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do
>> not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their
>> own.'
>>
>> The problem I have with that is that it leaves out astronomy, huge
>> swaths of biology, lots of the human sciences and a lot of physics
>> since string theory came along.
>
>
> How do you figure it leaves out any of that stuff?
>
> All of those have predictive aspects and propose many new hypotheses.

You'll have to provide examples. I will concede microbiology and  
economics. Try to find a falsifiable hypothesis that has actually been  
tested in the last 10 years from any of the other fields I mentioned.

> Sure, we can't test a theory on the formation of stars, but we can see
> if the model proposed fits what we actually see better than the
> previous model, and when we discover new things (Pulsars, e.g.) do
> they fit the model or where they predicted?

The  number of types of entities proposed to exist in the cosmos  
corresponds to the  number of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum  
that we have instruments to observe going back to Galileo. *None* of  
the new things were hypothesized to exist before they were observed  
except Pluto.  There is exactly one falsifyable hypothesis from the  
astronomers, that aliens are communicating with radio waves. All the  
new cosmology came from astrophysicists working on sub-atomics. And  
string theory has notoriously failed to come up  with anything testable.

--
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and  
you are out there
  -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)