I have some agreement with your comment. However we are not talking proof here, just a suggestion. Correlation implies causation. It is hypothesis generating.

But a brief survey with biases may still be hypothesis generating, it is the more detailed study that confirms or rejects this. And my comment about the onus being on the person denying it is because no matter how good a study is there will always be flaws, and your suggestion allows people to continually say that correlation does not equal causation.

Fine, deny it, but give a feasible explanation. For a weak study (Vox's humourous tally) you can give a general response (self selection of autistic types on forums), for a strong study you need to give a better response. No response is a cop out.

Summarising my various responses

kelly78 wrote:Because of this, I find it necessary to give you the actual definition of “science”:... There are other, more precise definitions, but this is a decent general overview. Notice the emphasis and repetition of words like “systematic,” “knowledge,” and “facts.”

Notice the lack of the word "naturalism"

kelly78 wrote:Experimentation is the foundation of science and without it, science is merely a naturalistic philosophy with no real answers or solutions.

What? Without experimentation science does not exist! It does not reduce to naturalism. Naturalism is not even part of it, save for naturalists poisoning the well: "naturalism is true because science is true and, um, science is X, Y and Z and, um, naturalism."

kelly78 wrote: Vox “…The very existence of the Intelligent Design movement is a testimony to a respect for scientific methodology…” (p. 33) Excuse me? Their attempt to redefine science to include supernatural explanations is “respect,” but Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion was a useless distortion of science? Interesting.

No, that would be your artificial definition which, rather than having a concise applicable definition, has a list of convenient exclusions that say X is science except when it could be applied to God and that part is excluded, and Y is science, except when the supernatural may be suggested and that is excluded too.

Unlike Vox, I think Popper's criterion is useful, though incomplete.

And the IDer's are not redefining science, the evolutionists are by insisting on an unnecessary addition of naturalistic philosophy. Given that science was invented by theists, and the definition had nothing to do with naturalism, your accusation is both false and anachronistic.

Further, the idea that some design is permissible if the designer is natural and not permissible if they are supernatural is special pleading. How can seeing design in a plane be acceptable but not that in a bird? Archaeology is acceptable because we know the designers of arrowheads were Indians. How much do we need to know about them? They existed, their name, how many kids they had, their favourite colour?

If something seems to be supernatural is that outside science until we discover the designer was in fact natural then the same topic suddenly comes within the domain of science?

kelly78 wrote:His rhetorical question about the hazard posed to science by religion and the resulting “hostility” betrays his lack of awareness of just how detrimental religion has been to science. He busts out this gem: “Some of history’s greatest scientists are known to have been men of great Christian faith.”(p. 34) Well, if I lived in a time period during which I could be tortured, killed, or otherwise persecuted for my lack of belief, I’d likely be a “christian” as well.

Except that they were men of great Christian faith. Which means that didn't just say yes God is real and attend the odd mass to keep everyone happy, they were great defenders of the faith. They strongly believed in God, more than the average man. They claimed science was them thinking God's thoughts after him. The wrote defences of the existence of God, Euler debated heretics, Pasteur opposed Darwin and performed experiments to disprove abiogenesis, Newton (though slightly unorthodox) wrote more on theology than science.

kelly78 wrote: The “monolithic church” was one that varied from country to country or region to region—nobody I know of ever asserted that one church had power over the entire known world. The fact remains that religious motivations and prohibitions caused most of what was essentially a millennium-long scientific void. Pointing out the various sects of christianity does nothing to disprove that.

More historical ignorance, the dark ages were not scientifically void, they were pre-science. Prior to science there was just technology, and the dark ages were far from technologically void. Christian Europe had great advances in technology during the dark ages (which the non-Christian continents, while having some minor gains, failed to match).

In his defence of the Dark Ages, Day mentions that an Italian Christian actually “coined” the term, so to speak, and that its meaning has been perverted by those who assign an anti-religious bias to it. I don’t know that there is a fallacy specific enough here, but it would seem to be similar to an etymological fallacy in that he is using a definition that has no support or relevance in modern society. The term “Dark Ages” may or may not have been anti-Germanic in origin—it is not now.

This appears to miss the point. The original meaning meant something. The adopted meaning implies something else but is not reflective of history.

kelly78 wrote:He finishes off the chapter with more seemingly unrelated arguments concerning the (apparently) evil Enlightenment, never realizing that the reason why modern atheists seem to share so much with them is because that was essentially the birth of rationalism and empiricism, not some kind of ancient idol worship.

Except that empiricism pre-dates the Enlightenment.

kelly78 wrote:the fact that there’s no proof for the existence of god and science just doesn’t apply to the supernatural

We have already been here, but the supernatural can be examined indirectly. If the supernatural has effects in the material, these effects can be examined after the fact the same way that other historical events are examined.