Intelligent design (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 03, 2011, 14:30 (4770 days ago) @ Abel

In reading my last few posts I realized that I should make the following clarification about time ships.

Time ships that are designed to carry conventional matter consist of a minimum of three types of matter (normal, M-matter and EM matter). Ships of this design have a singular dial on the EM-matter containment vessel that functions as a simple rheostat for that vessel. Ships designed as science vessels would have two dials that would allow one to modulate the electric and magnetic energies separately. The first ship that came to this world was probably of the latter design (but didn't have to be). The majority of alien ships that are here now are most probably of the former since they are much easier to make (but less useful).

I love your fanciful stories, but cannot take them seriously. They do not advance real study of true science. They are pseudoscience (but also great science fiction):

"My topic today is scientific heresy. When are scientific heretics right and when are they mad? How do you tell the difference between science and pseudoscience?

Let us run through some issues, starting with the easy ones.

â– Astronomy is a science; astrology is a pseudoscience.
â– Evolution is science; creationism is pseudoscience.
â– Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience.
â– Vaccination is science; the MMR scare is pseudoscience.
â– Oxygen is science; phlogiston was pseudoscience.
â– Chemistry is science; alchemy was pseudoscience.

Are you with me so far?

A few more examples. That the earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare is pseudoscience. So are the beliefs that Elvis is still alive, Diana was killed by MI5, JFK was killed by the CIA, 911 was an inside job. So are ghosts, UFOs, telepathy, the Loch Ness monster and pretty well everything to do with the paranormal. Sorry to say that on Halloween, but that’s my opinion.

Three more controversial ones. In my view, most of what Freud said was pseudoscience.

So is quite a lot, though not all, of the argument for organic farming.

So, in a sense by definition, is religious faith. It explicitly claims that there are truths that can be found by other means than observation and experiment.

Now comes one that gave me an epiphany. Crop circles*.

It was blindingly obvious to me that crop circles were likely to be man-made when I first starting investigating this phenomenon. I made some myself to prove it was easy to do*.

This was long before Doug Bower and Dave Chorley fessed up to having started the whole craze after a night at the pub."

Taken from a lecture on WUWT.com 11/1/11 (What's up with that, thank you Matt Ridley)