Richard Wein wrote:
> >[Ivar Ylvisaker quoting from Dembski's TDI page 68:]
> >
> >"The design inference is in the business of eliminating hypotheses,
> >not confirming them. .... Because the design inference is eliminative,
> >there is no "design hypothesis" against which the relevant chance
> >hypotheses compete...."
[Richard Wein wrote:]
> Yvar, I think what Dembski means here is just that the design hypothesis
> doesn't compete with other hypotheses in the design inference. Although it
> may sound like he's saying that there's no design hypothesis at all, he
> obviously can't mean that. The design hypothesis is what Dembski is trying
> to establish. The important point is that he establishes it purely by
> eliminating all non-design hypotheses, not by considering the merits of the
> design hypothesis.
>
> So I think your statement that "Dembski says that he is not proposing
> `design' as an hypothesis" is misleading, and is just introducing an
> unnecessary element of confusion.
I think that Dembski is saying that he is not proposing a scientific
hypothesis that is to be tested by searching for evidence that would
confirm or refute it. I agree that Dembski has some sort of hypothesis
in mind. But it is not a scientific hypothesis. And that is a
distinction that needs to be emphasized. Dembski is not doing science.
[snip]
[Ivar earlier wrote:]
> >The scientific approach is to propose hypotheses and then seek to
> >confirm or refute them. Dembski isn't doing this. Rather, he is
> >attempting to show that an intelligent being, hitherto unknown to
> >science, is logically necessary. He is making a kind of ontological
> >argument for God.
[Richard Wein wrote:]
> I don't agree with you. I think that in any inference of design where we
> don't have positive proof (like having actually seen the object being made),
> we must use a process of elimination, and, beyond a certain point, we must
> simply say "We consider it inconceivable that any natural process could have
> created this object, so it must be designed." Suppose, for example, that
> SETI receives an extraterrestrial message like the one in the book Contact.
> We cannot prove that the message was not produced by some unknown natural
> process, i.e. in accordance with some unknown chance hypothesis.
> Nevertheless, because we can't conceive of any natural process producing
> such an effect, we reject all such unknown hypotheses.
I don't agree with you. "A man made it" is a perfectly respectable
hypothesis. Men (and women) called mathematicians did discover prime
numbers (the initial signal in "Contact"). If signals containing
prime numbers were detected from an extraterrestrial souse, the most
reasonable hypothesis would be that man or, at least, something
intelligent, sent them. We do not have to eliminate all natural
processes to conclude this. In any case, we can't; there is always
the possibility that some natural process does generate them. Given
our present knowledge and theories, an "intelligent being sent them"
would be the current "best explanation" of signals containing prime
numbers sent from Vega. This conclusion would be reinforced if we add
the video of Hitler speaking at the 1936 Olympics -- apparently, it
really was televised -- and the plans for an interstellar vehicle that
followed in the signals that were received from Vega in the book
Contact.
Two other comments. "An intelligent being sent them" is "an inference
to the best explanation" of the signals received in Contact; it is not
a confirmation that intelligent beings did so. Someone had to go to
Vega to confirm this. One can always hypothesize that an intelligent
being secretly caused some event to occur, e.g., an evil spirit caused
a cancer. Finding evidence that confirms this is the hard part. (See
also the Concluding Comments in
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/dembski.pdf.)
Second, Dembski specifically disavows that this is what he means by a
design inference. He writes a little later in the reference cited
above:
"Thus, we shall never see a design hypothesis D pitted against a
chance hypothesis H so that E confirms D better than H just in case
P(D|E) is greater than P(H|E). This may constitute a "Bayesian
design inference," but it is not the design inference stemming from
the Explanatory Filter."
He seems to waver a bit about this conviction in his "Intelligent
Design" though the book still contains a description of the filter.
See "abduction" in the index.
Ivar
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