Quote from: cp1 on September 25, 2013, 08:50:39 PM

Quote from: RodeoX on September 25, 2013, 08:23:24 PM

I think it's worth mentioning that intelligent design is in no way a science. It is a religion. It starts with an answer, then looks for ways to support the answer that must be true. In science you start with a question and go where the answer takes you. Even if it contradicts your beliefs.

Actually science starts with a hypothesis

A hypothesis is an assumption that looks for itself in reality. The statement is the assumption, made into a question by the looking, just as all questions are made.

Quote from: blablahblah on September 25, 2013, 08:49:33 PM

Quote from: ktttn on September 25, 2013, 07:03:09 PM

Quote from: blablahblah on September 25, 2013, 06:25:14 PM

Quote from: ktttn on September 25, 2013, 04:23:51 PM

...
We didn't make it that way. We observed it. Math is neither a superset nor a subset of nature. It's a protocol, expressed in many languages including base 12 and Roman Numerals. Our scale, the decimal point that was the atom, then the quark and string, and now this geometric construct is relative. The microcosm is the macrocosm.
EDIT: Smell consists of extremely quantifiable microscopic particles affecting our nervous system.

Don't be such a philosophical zombie! Wink

I was talking about the 100s of feelings of smell. E.g.: "wow, this rose smell is beautifully rosy!"* Instead of "Alert! My atmospheric sensors are detecting aromatic carbon chains number 485! Exterminate them!" Cheesy

*Notice how those descriptions of qualia are always tautological? A rose smells rosy. Red looks red. Blue looks blue. A high-pitched squeal sounds like a high-pitched squeal. Of course, whether my sensation of blue is the same as yours, is another matter. That's why the Wikipedia page on qualia is so huge, it seems that scientists don't know where to start with things we know absolutely but cannot prove. Blue always looks "blue" to everyone who can see blue? Or "sensory relativism", kinda like synaesthesia but mixed between different people?

I'm glad we agree. The assertion of intelligent design belongs in the hazy realm of subjective qualia, not fact, physics, math or science.
EDIT: I'm a behaviorist. I'm immune to the P zombie argument.

The sciences routinely have to deal with various assumptions, postulates, axioms, and so on -- they all rely on that hazy realm to provide a starting point with things we know but can't falsify. And indeed, facts that can't be falsified do seem a bit more reliable than 'facts' that could eventually be shown to be wrong.

And by calling the above things a tautology, that wasn't a criticism, it was merely a statement of fact. It would be equally uninformative to say that the letter 'A' looks like an 'A' instead of a 'B', unless you're like me and are able to metaphysically see those letters, in addition to behaviourally storing the data in your biological data banks.

Nope. That's where science beats speculative postulating. Science starts with things we assume, not things we know. The hypothesis is an assumption/question, rather than the answer/result.
It's based on observable, repeatable phenomena. Nothing else meets the standard for acceptable, mathematically within-a-stated-acceptable-margin-of-error scientific data on which results are published.