This fourth and final installment of a critique of Elliott Sober’s recent article entitled “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” will show some final problems Sober’s claim that ID is not testable because, he alleges, ID can always regress to a higher level of design. In Part I, I explained some problems with Sober’s history of ID, and in Part II, I explained how Sober eschews ad hoc explanations while ignoring how modern neo-Darwinism commonly invokes them. In Part III, I explained that Sober ignores the testable predictions of ID. In this final installment I will show that Sober is wrong to claim that ID is not testable because he bases his argument on the false claim that ID permits Read More ›

Philosopher Elliott Sober recently published an article entitled, “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” which claimed that intelligent design is not testable. In Part I, I rebutted Sober’s early history of intelligent design. Part II explained how Sober made the curious charge that auxiliary prediction weaken the testability of a scientific theory, something which Darwinists are famous for doing. This third installment will assess Sober’s characterization of ID and explain how Sober ignores positive predictions of intelligent design. Sober misses 2 key points about intelligent design, leading him to false conclusions: (1) It’s simple: intelligent design detects the past action of intelligence, nothing more, and nothing less Sober states: “We have no independent evidence concerning which auxiliary propositions about the Read More ›

In Part I, I explained how Elliott Sober’s recent attack upon ID in his article entitled “What is Wrong With Intelligent Design?” gave an inaccurate history of intelligent design. This second part will discuss how Sober’s reasoning necessarily implies that ID is testable, except for the fact that he applies a double standard and ignores the ad hoc explanations so commonly used by Darwinists to square their theory with the data. Testing by Comparing Predictions of Theories Sober concedes that “many formulations of ID are falsifiable” and meet Karl Popper’s famous criteria that a scientific theory must be falsifiable. However, Sober critiques Popper’s usage of falsifiability as a hallmark property of science because he claims it does not always entail Read More ›