When I wrote my recent post on the alleged circularity of specified complexity, I did so in a deliberately provocative way. I wrote it emphasizing my agreement with keith s, in an attempt to shake things up and make people think. I felt that both sides of the debate here on uncommon descent were speaking past each other. I wanted to people to re-evaluate their understand of specified complexity. It seems many people found the result confusing. I’m sorry about that. My attempt was prompted by this portion from a recent post: We can decide whether an object has an astronomically low probability of having been produced by unintelligent causes by determining whether it has CSI (that is, a numerical value Read More ›

The materialists have been doing a little end zone dance over at the The Circularity of the Design Inference post. They seem to think that Winston Ewert has conceded that Dembski’s CSI argument is circular. Their celebrations are misplaced. Ewert did nothing of the sort. He did NOT say that Dembski’s CSI argument is circular. He said (admittedly in a rather confusing and inelegant way) that some people’s interpretation of the CSI argument is circular. Ewert is making a very simple point. To make a design inference based on mere probability alone is fallacious. I don’t know what all of the fuss is about. But just in case this is not clear by now, let’s go back to basics. The design Read More ›

Against the ID arguments based on improbability and specification some evolutionists oppose the “snowflake objection”, which sounds something like this: “Also snowflakes are highly improbable, yet it snows, then the ID arguments fail”. Such objection is baseless. To understand why we must first state a premise. Probability is not an absolute concept or measure. The probability of an event must always be contextualized. It must be related to the whole scenario, the boundary conditions, and — mainly — to some potential cause or generator of that kind of events. Example: suppose I ask “What is the probability of hitting the center of the target?”. Such question, as stated, is perfectly undefined. It says nothing about the context. The more important Read More ›

Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal has written a comic that attempts to rebut a common criticism of atheism: the link between atheistic regimes and crimes against humanity. The dialogue proceeds as follows: A: You argue that some of the worst atrocities in history were done in the name of religion, but plenty of atheists did terrible things too! My pastor told me that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were BOTH atheists!* [Author’s note: Hitler wasn’t actually an atheist. He was a Christian.] What does that tell you about atheism? B: First off, just because they were both atheists doesn’t mean that their atheism caused them to do terrible things. They both had mustaches too. Does that mean that having a Read More ›