Is Intelligent Design a Rational or Irrational belief (Part 4)

The majority of this post is simply repeating previous statements, and clarifying a few key points. "I am not arguing that ID should be rejected because the people that advocate may be irrational, but because the reasons given for ID is irrational." Pick any assertion/position, can you not make an obviously irrational argument for it? If so made would that then mean the assertion is irrational? Obviously not. "I never argued that peer reviewed publications aren't part of science, what I did argue was that just because something is part of science doesn't make that something rational, example my hypothesis of invisible pink unicorns or Intelligent Design." Rationality is the process of reason, reason is explicit in the scientific method. Specifically reason is the process by which observations are interpreted to verify or refute a hypothesis. If something is scientific, if something is part of the body of knowledge that is science, then by definition is was reasoned and thus is rational. "My arguments were in response to one of the most popular arguments used to support intelligent design which goes something like this....." Again, there is no contest that there are irrational arguments for ID, but there are irrational arguments for everything. Here is one : "Gravity is the result of the intense love that pixies have for quarks. As all matter is composed out of quarks so pixies are always clustered around matter. As pixes love nothing more that quarks aside from themselves, when pixies cluster around matter they pull all nearby pixes towards them. Because all matter has clusters of pixies around it this results in all matter as being attractive." Now this is clearly a nonsensical argument, however does that mean that gravity is an irrational concept, no, because a rational argument can be made for it. "If some one claims that there is an intelligent designer that is not caused by another intelligent designer eg God...." Again, ID is not about the nature of the designer, just like the theory of gravity, either through Newton or Einstein is not about who or what exactly made the gravity. Who is the gravity maker? In the exact same manner ID is not about who made the design, it is simply about the design. Now if Con wants to argue the nature of the designer and the required attributes then that is a separate matter, just like it is a separate matter to discuss what is the nature of the thing which made gravity. While an interesting question, this is not relevant to the rationality of ID, this was noted explicitly in the opening round as the theory of ID is not concerned with the nature of the designer. "Consider what Richard Dawkins has to say on this matter...... " ID is peer reviewed and published, we do not accept if something is scientific because someone says it is, even if they are a scientist. In order for it to become part of the body of knowledge that is science then it has to be published. I can trivially produce a list of quotes from scientists who say ID is scientific, how do we resolve this, put them all together and let them Thunderdome? No, we settle it where we always settle it, in the journals. "As said before, this is an argument from ignorance ..." This was already addressed explicitly in the above, specifically and in great detail referring to the null hypothesis and how conclusions are reached. And again this is not the only line of evidence, as noted design can be explicitly tested through modeling for intent vs cycle strengthening. "Consider what Eugenie C. Scott and Glenn Branch say on this issue " Again, simply because a scientist says something is or is not scientific does not make it so. If Eugenie Scott wants to refute ID as being unscientific then she actually has to refute the peer reviewed and published papers, simply claiming it is not scientific does not work, no more so than claiming it is scientific without publishing does. "So what is an example of how ID is falsifiable ?" Again, from the first post : "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection" and from the last post : "Specifically the events would better fit a model of undirected causes, really specifically, the forcing function for an undirected cause simply has a fit criteria which is based on the outcome of the system (usually its function), whereas the forcing function for a directed cause has an explicit goal which modifies the characteristics of the system." Note however, that while being falsifiable is of importance in science it is not an if-only-if criteria. While this was heavily advocated by Popper, this is not universally accepted and the demarcation problem still exists in the philosophy of science so care has to be taken. Note there many current very strong stances against Popper : "Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology." [1] To summarize : 1) ID is peer reviewed and published in many well respected journals. 2) This makes ID part of the body of knowledge which is science. 3) Science is based on observation and reason 4) Rationality is what is reasoned QED ID is rational. This stands until the papers which argue for ID are refuted and it moves out of the body of knowledge that is science. Things which are not relevant at all to this discussion are : 1) Does any particular scientist think ID is scientific or not 2) Are there irrational arguments for ID 3) Who is the the actual intelligent designer (for each system in question) [1] W. W. Bartley, III: Biology & evolutionary epistemology. Philosophia 6:3–4 (September–December 1976), pp. 463–494