From: FMAJ1019@aol.com <FMAJ1019@aol.com>
>In a message dated 9/16/2000 8:28:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
>ccogan@telepath.com writes:
>
>
><< >If Dembski's analytical techniques cannot resolve the issue of
>>possible cheating in the "Algorithm Room", how does he hope to
>>resolve the issue of whether certain features of biology are
>>necessarily the work of an intelligent agent or agents? If
>>Dembski has no solution to this dilemma, the Design Inference
>>is dead."
>
>
>Chris
>It was stillborn anyway.
>
> >>
>
>I disagree. It took the analysis of people such as Wesley to show the
>problems with the design inference. Nor does it mean that the design
>inference is totally useless. As Wesley seems to argue there are cases
where
>it could, with some adjustments, be used in such areas as archeology or
>criminology.
>Whether it has a future in biology however seems doubtful.
>
>Wesley also showed quite convincingly that the design inference can not
>exclude natural forces as the "intelligent designer" of a structure that
has
>been infered to have been "designed".
>People seem confused by ID in that they believe that it has infered
>intelligence but in fact all it has done is excluded chance and regularity
>(Dembski) or "known evolutionary mechanism(s)" (Behe).
I agree with Chris. The Design Inference is useless. It is trivial
probability theory, dressed up with a lot of flim-flam and equivocation.
(The parts of TDI that attempt to define specification precisely are
non-trivial, but fatally flawed.)
Because of the equivocation, no-one knows for sure exactly what the method
of the Design Inference is. Wesley and I have come to two different
conclusions about it. But either way the Design Inference is useless.
Wesley's interpretation is that the relevant probability/CSI is calculated
on the basis of "pure chance", i.e. that all possible combinations of
components are equally likely. But this is just the old creationist/Hoyle
canard of assuming that a biological system is a random assembly of
components, ignoring the effect of natural selection.
My interpretation (which I claim is based on a literal reading of Dembski)
is that the relevant probability/CSI must be calculated for each relevant
chance hypothesis. For a biological system, this includes the hypothesis of
evolution by random variation and natural selection. Such a calculation
appears impossible, and anyway has not been performed yet. I have
personally asked Dembski to cite such a calculation, and he has failed to do
so. Therefore, it has not been demonstrated that CSI actually exists in
nature. Even if CSI were detected, that would only rule out the specific
chance hypotheses actually tested, and would not necessarily mean that an
inference of ID was justified.
Richard Wein (Tich)
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