Re: [asa] Science's Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism

On 7/19/07, Taylor, Howard G <H.G.Taylor@hw.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On the Q of whether engineering can be used as an analogy of the
> biological world , yes it can, but as with all analogies there are certain
> things the same and certain things different.
> As to whether the argument from design in engineering is an analogy in the
> argument from design re the origin of life, no it isn't - it is the same
> argument because there is no viable alternative to design in both worlds.
>

Dear Howard,

Could I question your assertion that there is no viable alternative to
design in both worlds. In the engineering world, what about "machine
learning" (the branch of computer science that my PhD was in). One form of
machine learning is "neural networks", which learn complex sets of
parameters via simple rules in response to repeated presentations of data
sets. They start from an initial random guess, and then home in, without
further design input, to the solution. For sure, the problem representation
has to be designed at the outset (as indeed God had to design the laws of
the universe - a statement even Darwin concedes). But after that, the
learning procedure is automatic. Moreover, it has been shown often that the
learning process improves by the addition of random noise (akin to mutations
in evolutionary processes).

Such a system exhibits design in that the design work was all done "up
front", but the process of progression from an initial bad solution to a
good one required no further design input.

I think everyone here would affirm that God created the universe, and
designed what the laws were, so that we would inevitably arise.

Iain
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Received on Thu Jul 19 11:21:30 2007