New Contributor HeKS, has had occasion to comment a few hours ago on KS’ claimed bomb argument (cf. my own headlined for record response here, WJM’s here and here,  VJT’s here,   BA’s Black Knight Taunt summing up here and other responses at UD . . . KS’s  repeated boasts that he has not been answered are groundless).  I think his comment is worth headlining as a pivot for discussion on the issue and on what has been happening rhetorically: ______________ HeKS: >> In this thread, I noticed Keiths posting a summary of his supposed ‘bomb’ argument. I haven’t been around much lately and haven’t seen too much of the discussion around his argument that has apparently been taking place, but Read More ›

Thank you to all who have participated in the CSI debate over the last few days, especially Winston, vjtorley, keiths, KF, HeKS. It has been an illuminating discussion. Thanks especially to vjt for his effort to synthesize the various positions. I have a real job and I have already spent far too much time away from it on this subject, but I wanted to address one final topic before heading back to work. Some of our opponents have criticized my “challenge” as being impossible to meet “by definition.” They say that CSI is “defined” as that which is beyond the reach of chance/law processes, and therefore it is literally meaningless to set up a challenge that calls for a demonstration Read More ›

Amid the fog of recent controversies, I can discern a hopeful sign: the key figures in the ongoing debate over specified complexity on Uncommon Descent are actually converging in their opinions. Allow me to explain why. Winston Ewert’s helpful clarifications on CSI In a recent post, ID proponent Winston Ewert agreed that Elizabeth Liddle had a valid point in her criticisms of the design inference, but then went on to say that she had misunderstood what the design inference was intended to do (emphases mine): She has objected that specified complexity and the design inference do not give a method for calculating probabilities. She is correct, but the design inference was never intended to do that. It is not about Read More ›

(it’s designed to) These are some thoughts prompted by the recent article Arrival of the Fittest: Robustness and flexibility are basic design principles. We design modules so that they are robust against minor damage, bad inputs and changes in other parts of the code. This aids ‘evolvability’ of the whole by untangling the knots so that parts of the design can be worked on independently. Think of Dawkins’ METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL parable. The string of text can evolve because each letter is selected independently. The system is designed to evolve. By contrast, in an undesigned bag of chemicals or genes you would have all kinds of cross interaction which means a change in one chemical could have wide-ranging unpredictable effects. The chemical/genetic Read More ›

Biochemist Michael Behe has stated: “A man from a primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or by an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine he immediately realizes that it was designed. In the same way biochemistry has opened up the cell to examine what makes it run and we see that it, too, was designed.” One needs no probabilistic calculation to infer design before a car or cell. Why — as Behe says — “he immediately realizes that it was designed”? Because such dynamic systems show clear hallmarks of organization. Some of them are: (1) hierarchy of devices and functions (see Read More ›

In comment 58 to my Actually Observed thread ID opponent keith s shows ID opponent Learned Hand how the design inference works. To use the coin-flipping example, every sequence of 500 fair coin flips is astronomically improbable, because there are 2^500 possible sequences and all have equally low probability. But obviously we don’t exclaim “Design!” after every 500 coin flips. The missing ingredient is the specification of the target T. Suppose I specify that T is a sequence of 250 consecutive heads followed by 250 consecutive tails. If I then sit down and proceed to flip that exact sequence, you can be virtually certain that something fishy is going on. In other words, you can reject the chance hypothesis H that the Read More ›

In a comment to a recent thread I made the following challenge to the materialists: Show me one example – just one; that’s all I need – of chance/law forces creating 500 bits of complex specified information. [Question begging not allowed.] If you do, I will delete all of the pro-ID posts on this website and turn it into a forum for the promotion of materialism. . . . There is no need to form any hypothesis whatsoever to meet the challenge. The provenance of the example of CSI that will meet the challenge will be ACTUALLY KNOWN. That is why I put the part about question begging in there. It is easy for a materialist to say “the DNA Read More ›