On 13/05/06, Ashish Gulhati <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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> Ummm ... Michelson-Morley [1]?
Was quite unnecessary.
It was the proponents of the 'ether' theory who should have
supplied evidence for it.
IIRC, Michelson and Morley were proponents of ether. They intended to
prove it's existence with the experiment. The "failure" of the test
proved the non-existence of ether.
And imaginers of imaginary entities such as the ether are
quite adept at making the imaginary entity be weightless,
odorless, colorless and otherwise undetectable, so they
continue to can claim it exists and your experiment was
not 'sensitive' enough to detect it.
Ether and phlogiston were reasonable scientific hypotheses in their
day. They were scientific because they made testable predictions. They
fact that they were proved wrong does make them less scientific. They
are merely incorrect scientific theories.
There is nothing inherently unscientific about postulating the
existence of God. The point is that if you treat the existence of God
as a scientific theory, then you have to play by the rules of science.
Either you design an experiment to prove it one way or the other or
you admit that it's a non-scientific subject.
That's what bugs me most about proponents of ID: despite demanding
recognition as science, they have no damn clue what it actually means.
Today, being a "scientific theory" confers a level of respectibility
in the public eye which creationists want to receive. The only problem
(from their point of view) is that science is not democratic -- even
if a nationwide gallup poll determined that 95% of people thought that
the moon was made of green cheese[1] that wouldn't make it true.
Science has a level of rigor that creationists simply do not
understand.
-- b
[1] Where the heck does that phrase come from? Did anyone ever really
think that the Moon was made of green cheese?
