Except the observations they are looking at demand explanations that are beyond testing and verifying and thats the problem becuase it allows spectualted ideas to be proposed and accepted as scientifically supported because when enough people get behind those ideas like Krausses something from nothing it becomes popular and used as proof for example that there is no need for a God.
It is common for the predictions of science to take decades before we can test them. The prediction of the Higg's boson is one example. The EPR 'prediction' is another. We are still verifying various aspects of general relativity. So this is nothing new.
Now, I agree that a clearer distinction needs to be made between established results (like the expansion of the universe and its age) and speculation (inflation is right at the border now, string theory is much more speculative).
But the argument on the religious side is that you cannot get 'nothing' from 'nothing'. What recent speculation in science, based on the ideas we *know* about quantum mechanics and general relativity, is that this position need not be valid. Which *does* mean there may not be a need for a God to explain the uniiverse as we see it.
Well known mainstream scientists like physicist Michio Kaku, Neuroscientist Christof Koch, Sir Roger Penrose, theoretical physicist Edward Witten and Nobel Laureate Francis Crick (who went on to dedicate as much time on the brain and consciousness as he did for genetics) have all supported consciousness in some way or form.
And on the other side, we have scientists like Daniel Dennett, Steven Weinberg (another Nobel laureate), philosophers like Steven Pinker, and cosmologists like Hawking and Krauss. And this fails to mention that consciousness isn't as critical to quantum mechanics as many seem to think: the work on decohertence has been verified and is even crucial for the studies we do on quantum computing.
A Neuroscientist’s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2016/09/crick-on-consciousness/
I'd point out that thi sis even admitted to be a 'radical theory'. Which means it is not very well accepted, right?
This claim was considered rather outlandish until his thought experiment, known as the “delayed-choice experiment,” was tested in a laboratory in 1984. This experiment was a variation on the famous “double-slit experiment” in which the dual nature of light was exposed (depending on how the experiment was measured and observed, the light behaved like a particle (a photon) or like a wave).
The results of the delayed choice experiments are predicted by quantum mechanics and do NOT require a consciousness to intervene. The difficulty is that if you attempt to understand quantum phenomena from a classical viewpoint, you *will* get strange results. Quantum mechanics is the more accurate description. Classical viewpoints are the old. You shouldn't attempt to understand the new from the standpoint of the old.
To say that consciousness is an invalid idea because it is untestable would rule out most of the ideas in science such as multiverses, string theory and holgram worlds. But to say there is nothing pointing to a non-material answer is incorrect considering the amount of evidence and support from highly credentialed scientists already posted and many other sources of support out there that have not been included.
Consciousness is a phenomenon that we all agree exists in the universe. ALL the examples we have happen in brains. So it is reasonable to think that consciousness is related to the activities that happen in brains and is NOT a universal aspect aside from complex organisms.
Most scientists think we will never be able to test the ideas that have been proposed for a uniting theory of everything. This has caused some scientists to propose that some of these ideas like multiverses and string theory be accepted dispite a lack of verification. Becuase these ideas eloquently explain what we see and fit so well they say they should be accpeted on that basis alone.
And I would be dead-set against this. Testing of hypotheses is the foundation of knowledge. If a multiverse description has no other testable aspects, then it should be rejected. For some such theories, however, there *are* testable aspects in our universe.
Newtons discovery and failure would not lead to consciousness anyway as it is dealing with macro observations and laws. We have only really arrived at considering consciousness as an idea since the discovery of the quantum world and it is only going to be related to such a world where things begin to break down and become non material just as consciousness is.
This is just flat-out false. Consciousness has been seen as an important aspect of human existence for millenia.
As theory pulls further and further ahead of the capabilities of experiment, physicists are taking this question seriously. “We are in various ways hitting the limits of what will ever be testable, unless we have misunderstood some essential point about the nature of reality,” says theoretical cosmologist George Ellis. “We have now seen all the visible universe (i.e. back to the visual horizon) and only gravitational waves remain to test further; and we are approaching the limits of what particle colliders it will ever be feasible to build, for economic and technical reasons.
In fact, you can reason your way to the “multiverse” in at least four different ways, according to MIT physicist
Max Tegmark’s accounting.
The tricky part is testing the idea. You can’t send or receive messages from neighbouring universes, and most formulations of multiverse theory don’t make any testable predictions. Yet the theory provides a neat solution to the fine-tuning problem. Must we throw it out because it fails the falsifiability test?
Nonetheless, to be scientific, those ideas must be testable.
As mentioned these ideas are hard to test and verify yet they are being used as support that everything began from a naturalistic origin. If scientists can use this sort of reasoning to promote their ideas then why cant ideas like consciousness and intelligence be proposed as they have as much indirect support.
One *huge* difference between the various speculative theories we have been talking about and 'intelligent design' is that they come out very naturally from what we already *know* about quantum mechanics. For example, we *know* quantum mechanics is a very good description of the universe at the subatomic level. We also know that general relativity is a very good description at the larger scale. The question for decades has been how to unite them into a single, coherent, description of the universe. These are two very non-speculative theories that are very different. The speculations you have been talking about are attempts, primarily, to unify these two viewpoints.
Every attempt we have made to unify these two viewpoints leads to multiverses of some sort. Every single one. That alone makes multiverses something that should be taken seriously. And this is completely irrelevant to questions of religion. The 'Intelligent Design' theories don't even have *this* aspect of unification to propose. They are at best an add-on to whatever else scientists have done with no link with other aspects of known science.
The Scientific method takes a certain view and uses assumptions to make its predictions. It may be that some of the fundamental ideas about reality are wrong and it is only in the past recent decades that science is reaching a point where these things are coming into doubt because of what is being found. This could not have been known until now because of the technology so back in time we were none the wiser and like you say scientific results were continuously being revised. But now that we are reaching a point in reality that is having to unite the worlds of classical physics with quantum physics the whole of scientific assumptions are being questioned.
You say that the background radiation fits well with predictions but there are glaring anomalies such as the temperature and horizon problems that call into question the assumption this was based on. Inflation is being shown to be wrong so it seems more and more evidence is showing that there may be some fundamental problems that may mean the whole idea is wrong. It seems sometimes that scientific ideas are made to fit what is being seen and then later their predictions are shown to be wrong so they are always being adjusted but it may be that the basic assumption was wrong in the first place. This seems to be what is happening with areas such as astrophysics.
I can point to other aspects that are far, far more concerning. The discrepancy between the predicted value of the cosmological constant from quantum thoery and the observed value is 120 orders of magnitude. That *clearly* shows we are missing something when it comes to quantum gravity.
So, how does ID help with this?
The evidence for an intelligent designer would be no different than what we seen now as everything still has to have laws and codes to make things work in our physical world. It is how those laws and codes came about and what is behind what we see that is important as far as intelligence or consciousness is concerned. We have gradually discovered how the physical works and this is where we are at now. Science has given its perspective and that is how we see things from a scientific point of view. But now we are looking at the point of how what we see came into reality and this is where an intelligent creator or consciousness will be most relevant.
In other words, ID has nothing real to contribute.
As far as classical science is concerned intelligence and consciousness wont give any new info because it cannot measure this. So just like the quanum world has defied classical science perspective and measuremnet there may need to be further understanding about how we can measure the effects of intelligence and consciousness.
We can and do measure intelligence and consciousness. We have many good examples of both in human affairs.That experience can be used to determine the existence of intelligence and consciousness in other cases. But we have to first know what is possible *without* such intelligence to compare.
