No math is the worst math

As I've said many times before, one of the easiest and most consistent ways to spot a crackpot is through math. I've talked about a lot of folks who've used bad math to support invalid theories. But bad math like what's used by people like Berlinski and Dembski is really the best case for crackpot theories. What you'll often find is something worse: no math.

The explanatory power of science isn't just the ability to put together explanations that appear to fit observed phenomena. It's the ability to very precisely predict or explain real phenomena. It's very easy to make a prediction when you don't need to be precise. I can very easily say "the theory of gravity is nonsense. Everything has a natural place where it belongs, and things always try to move towards the place they belong. So things fall to earth not because the earth is pulling on them with some invisible magical gravitational force, but because they belong on the earth." And I can make endless arguments for just why my "natural place" argument works better than gravity:

1. Flies wings don't produce any lift. But they don't fall to the ground when they're alive. Why doesn't "gravity" make them fall? Gravitationalists argue that they're so small that "brownian motion" in the air makes the aerodynamic principles of flight invalid for their size, but that's just handwaving to get around the fact that if gravity were true, they wouldn't be able to fly. Flies can fly because living flies belong in the air, it's their natural place.
   
2. If you fill a balloon with helium, it will rise. But if gravity were true, it couldn't rise, because the same amount of gravity would still be pulling it towards the ground. Gravitationalists argue that there's some magical "buoyant" force created by the air around it that pushes it up. But look around you - if the entire earth was pulling down on something, does air really seem substantial enough to overcome the pull of the entire earth? Of course not! The helium in the baloon belongs above the ground, and so it pulls the balloon up to where it belongs.
   
3. Why does water "find its own level"? Look at this picture:
   
   Why does the water stop at the same level in both containers? If this gravity nonsense was true, then the bigger quantity of water in the cone-shaped container would push out the water in the smaller rectangular one - after all, there's more of it, so according to gravity, it's heavier. But it doesn't! Gravity doesn't explain that! It works because water's it's just the natural way that water works: it's natural state makes it flow so that it forms a smooth level.
   

You find things like this all over the place; some of the very best crackpots use arguments very much like this. The problem with this kind of explanation is that it's just handwaving. You can take any bit of evidence, and say that it fits the theory. You can't precisely tell what's going to happen in new, novel situations. You can't even precisely explain what's happening in known situations.

Explanatory power comes with mathematics. Gravity has been described to quite a high precision by Newton's law, and refined by Einstein. We can predict with astounding accuracy exactly what will happen in a gravitational interaction. We can explain with near-perfect accuracy why our solar system behaves the way it does, why things fall the way that do, etc - because the theory includes precisely detailed mathematics that allow us to not just handwave, but to speak and predict with precision.