Allan Harvey wrote:
"Maybe a red flag should be the reference to Tipler's book. While I haven't
read it, the reviews from scientist pretty uniformly say that he has gon off
into crackpot-land and makes almost as little sense as Velikovsky."
I agree. The reference in my post to Tipler was to the fact that Goedel's
theorem did not apply to all systems. That is not crackpot land. I agree
that Tipler's book is rather odd, but I figure that he could get that one fact
right. His fact there does not involve resurrection in the mind of a
computer in the future.
Secondly, I would use the citation from Yockey, to back up my contention that
given a digital signal, it is "fundamentally impossible" to mathematically
determine whether that signal was made by a random process or by a highly
organized process. Yockey has not gone off to la-la land. (I cite this
again, Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, Cambridge
University Press, 1992, p. 82)
Finally, you have a bad habit of using ad hominem's in your argumentation.
You try to put my argument in the same category as YEC's mis-using the 2nd Law
argument, and now you are trying to use Velikovsky. Why don't you cease that
type of argumentation and simply address the issue. About 25% of my work
involves information theory. Am I expert? No, but I am familiar with it.
Can I be wrong here? Sure. But I fail to see how your references to
Velikovsky and the mis-use of the 2nd law has anything to do with detecting a
message or design is a system like DNA ( to which Yockey's statement directly
applies). The second law and Velikovsky are irrelevant to this issue!
Apologists are trying to use the complexity of DNA and the complex working of
the protein systems to prove design. My initial point in my post of Tues.
March 12, was to point out that design can not be proven from the data many
apologitsts are trying to use. I stand by that statement.
By the way, I would suggest reading Yockey's book. It is quite good.
glenn