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

[Anthony Morton]

>> '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.

They do, but there's also whole branches of astronomy, biology and 
other sciences that come down to just cataloguing observations of 
what's out there, and this is still considered to be a legitimate part 
of science, even though there are no experiments, no predictions and no 
hypotheses.

Really this is the old distinction between 'natural history' and 
'natural philosophy': one was about observation and recording, the 
other about hypothesis and experiment.  We now use the term 'science' 
to cover both, but naive descriptions of 'the scientific method' can 
exclude much of what we consider to be science.

Tony M.