2014

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 ›

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 ›