Steve Peterson wrote:

Science has no high priests. I already covered this: no Pope, no bishops,
either. It is actually very anarchic. However, this statement doesn't

It's time to put this foolish claim to bed. Science has no hierarchy
of *knowledge* but it absolutely has a social/funding hierarchy; an
"establishment" (aka High Priests) that decides what gets published,
what doesn't, and who get's funded. Every Ph.D. candidate has witnessed
it. The Science Establishment is not some cabal or planned collusion,
but a lose federation of people who share the view that Science is
the epitome of human knowledge and that any attempt to question its
methods or assumptions is a kind of secular "heresy". You can deny this
all you like, but it exists and is easily visible upon casual observation.
This is not, BTW, a power structure that is innate to Science, but a
reflection of the fact that Science is done by people. Science may be
more-or-less objective, but people are not, and that's how we get
the High Priests of Science.

offend me at all, and it will fit very nicely into a philosophy course,
maybe into philosophy of science. In those courses, it can be talked to
death, as it (apparently) is in this news group. It does also state, quite
clearly, that it is not science although it discusses meta-science. It is
about science, a philosophical approach.

What it doesn't do is teach us how to recognize anything in evolution data
or theory that cannot be explained by natural science and therefore must be
due to the influence of an intelligent designer. What are such criteria?

The problem is that we cannot have the conversation you want to have until
you concede that the first conversation has to be about how we know what
we know. If we accept todays Scientific presumptions about he efficacy of
reductionist materialism, then there is no need to further discuss
the innate boundaries of evolutionary theory. The question is begged:
Reductionism is assumed in the premise and claimed in the conclusion.
The *real* question - that you want to so arttfuly dodge - is about the
sufficiency of your assumptions. That is, is materialist reductionism
in fact a good and sufficient basis for knowing everything that can be
known by means of Science. But you dodge that question vigorously.
In effect, you are saying "Show me the limits of my system without
questioning its premises," when the claimed limits of your system
are *innately* its premises. You cannot have it both ways. You can
either open up that conversation, or extend your first proposition
of Science (unprovably) to say: "Materialist Reductionism is both neccessary
*and* sufficient for Science to know what it can know." But, if you
do this, then stop criticizing the IDers who have a very different
first proposition they wish to bring to the philosophy of *science*.
And, BTW, their first proposition in that scenario is no more absurd
than your own.

The mere fact that we don't currently know the natural explanation for
something does not prove that we can't learn the natural explanation. No

But neither can you claim that their *will* be a natural explanation.
You have no more basis for that assumption than do the IDers for theirs.

one claims the theory of evolution is all wrapped up with nothing left to
learn. Neither is gravity, or continental drift, or nucleogenesis, or stem
cells, or superstring theory or .... In your philosophy class you can also
discuss the nature of scientific theories, what is provable and what is not
provable, as well as religious infallibility. Be sure to discuss which
religion is infallible. Since different religions, by definition, have
different credos, tenets, rites, doctrines, ..., only one can be absolutely
correct and infallible and the others must fall short of perfection. Man,
you will have such a great time!

You keep trying to conflate ID with religion, I guess to give you
a rhetorical anchor for intitating guilt-by-association. But ID
proper is *not* overtly religious, nor does it affirm any particular
religious tradition as a movement. Certainly its adherents are often
of particular religious bents, but that is irrelevant to the discussion
at hand. Your rhetoric here smack of an attack on the speakers not
the ideas.

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Tim Daneliuk
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