Judging from all the responses pertaining to the entropy thread posted
this past weekend when our campus mail server was down it seems it may
be a while before I get through all of my backlog. I do not expect to
have the time to make a batch of excruciatingly long detailed point-
by-point responses.
Regarding Richard Wein's comment of 22 OCT00 on the "Re: Entropy" thread:
RW>It's important to be careful with the term "specified complexity". Dembski's
>use of the term appears to mean something significantly different from the
>same term as used by other writers, such as Crick, Orgel and Davies. Thus,
>when claiming that specified complexity can or can't be generated by natural
>processes, you need to state what definition of specifed complexity you're
>using.
I agree with Richard here. Unfortunately, my post was only meant to deal
with fuzzy usages of the terms 'entropy', 'order' & 'disorder'. It had
already grown to 17+k long by its end and I was too drained to try to
also take on the task of analyzing and disentangling other multiple
meanings of what various IDers mean when they use the term "specified
complexity" as well. I used it with a vanilla non-Dembski-esque meaning
of being the (Chaitin-Kolmogorov) complexity of a particular specified
pattern when that complexity measure is "large" in some significant way.
RW>Dembski's definition of specified complexity is somewhat unclear, but, as I
>understand it, Dembski's specified complexity *cannot* be generated by
>natural processes. This follows directly from the definition and Dembski's
>own Law of Small Probability.
From what I can tell it seems that Dembski's use of (the negative
logarithm of) the probability of a particular pattern to be the measure
of its complexity is ideosyncratic. Most other authors consider
complexity to be some measure of the minimal amount of information needed
to fully reconstruct or reproduce it.
RW>However, I don't believe that Dembski's
>specified complexity exists in any natural phenomenon, and certainly Dembski
>has never demonstrated that it does.
>
>Dembski's labelling of his own concept with a pre-existing term having a
>different meaning is yet another example of the fallacy of equivocation,
>which is so common among the arguments of ID proponents. If ID proponents
>would be more careful to clearly define their terms, it would be much harder
>for them to fool themselves (and sometimes others) with their fallacious
>arguments.
Hear, Hear.
David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu
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