Intelligent Design is not scientific …

Re: Intelligent Design Is Not Intelligent, letter to the editor, Oct. 7. Your readers must be confused by Steve McKay’s use of the term “falsifiable.” Since he was responding to Father de Souza’s column (Bad Science, Bad Philosophy, Oct 6), I thought the good priest had used the term, but he did not.

“Falsifiable” was introduced in the 1930s by the philosopher Karl Popper. He was looking for a clear line separating science from non-science. In particular, he wanted to see if Freudian psychoanalysis could be shown to be scientific. Looking at good theories like atomic theory or the theory of thermodynamics, Popper realized that it was easy to imagine a situation in which a good theory could be false. For example, if heat flowed from cold to hot that would make thermodynamics false. Thermodynamics is falsifiable.

But psychoanalysis is not falsifiable — if you proposed some contrary fact, Freud would change his theory to accommodate it. Psychoanalysis is not scientific.

Darwin’s Origin of Species is eminently scientific. In about a dozen places he wrote that if X were not found in nature, then his theory was false. No such Xs have been found. Evolution is falsifiable; evolution is scientific.

So we can agree with Mr. McKay and Father de Souza that Intelligent Design is not scientific. Nor is theology — you cannot falsify “Sacred Scripture reveals that God created man out of the slime of the Earth.” James MacLachlan, historian of science, retired, Toronto.