Re: [asa] ID without specifying the intelligence?

On 9/12/07, rpaulmason@juno.com <rpaulmason@juno.com> wrote:
>
> What if one eliminates all known natural causes for a highly organized and
> information rich phenomenon - nonrandom and nonrepetative complexity. Is it
> OK intelligence if the intelligence is an alien race? We are looking for
> complex nonrandom signal in out space as evidence of intelligence beyond
> earth: SETI. Is SETI science? If ID is doing the same thing with regard to
> DNA and biologic structures, why is that not science?

Perhaps I could attempt an answer. You asked if it is OK if the
intelligence is an alien race.

The answer to that depends on the nature of the phenomenon you found. If
it's a radio signal from space containing decodable information, as in the
"Contact" movie, then the answer is "Yes, it is science". (Pim has noted
that SETI looks for simple signals but that is just a cheap shot at trying
to make you look ignorant - the argument is the same whether it looks for
simple, but non-natural or information bearing signals).

The plain fact is that we know that we exist and we generate nonrandom
complex RF signals. Therefore it is not unreasonable or unscientific to
suppose that if intelligent life arose on another planet, that they might
generate similar signals to us.

However, if you want to invoke extra-terrestrial intelligence as a reason
for our own existence, then it's not scientific. The reason is as follows.
If you invoke an omnipotent being as the "designer", then you are appealing
to something with universal explanatory power - potentially anything can be
explained by appealing to an omnipotent being. Now, if instead you appeal
to extra-terrestrial life as our designers, clearly they are finite. But
the trouble is that there is no limit on how intelligent they need to be -
you would just say they are sufficiently intelligent to have designed us.
So one is still invoking the existence of something that is smart enough to
have created us.

For the same reason invoking the multiverse as an explanation for our
existence is non-science in my view. This is not the same as saying the
multiverse doesn't exist - just that given a finite, but sufficiently large
number of universes, we may deduce our existence by chance - and that isn't
science, it's a cop out. (An expression Richard Dawkins is fond of applying
to ID, but which I don't see why it shouldn't be equally applicable to
multiverse-based "explanations").

To give another example. Suppose you had a sequence of a million heads and
tails, apparently random. You could say that a sufficiently complex
computer program would generate that sequence precisely. But if the program
is much longer than the sequence, then you have explained nothing at all -
one could only be said to have done something scientifically interesting if
the computer program was considerably SHORTER than the sequence.

The moral of the story, I think, is that in order to have a properly
scientific explanation that is of any use, then one must place a strict
limit on the explanatory power of that mechanism. Intelligent Design
(whether alien being or omnipotent being), Multiverses, and arbitrarily
long computer programs don't specify such limits, and therefore can't be
considered candidates for proper scientific explanations.

I hope this clarifies the issue somewhat.
Iain

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Received on Thu Sep 13 04:12:02 2007