Barry Arrington

I come back to FG, because I think he is seriously trying to engage with ID, and I am very pleased to report that he is making significant progress.

In my post “Who Designed the Designer Argument Demolished in Three Easy Steps”  I demonstrated that the infinite regress argument has no real force by giving what FG called a “concrete example” of how a design inference can be valid in the complete absence of any knowledge of who the designer was or where he/she came from.

FG writes. “When applied to a single concrete example like the one you gave, your inference could be valid . . .”

Wonderful!

FG then slips when he says: “The infinite regress problem is real and does defeat ID the moment your argument is invoked to explain first life.” Read More ›

In response to my last post here, Faded Glory writes:  “But Barry, the way the design inference is formulated, it is not limited to a particular example like the one you present here. It is presented as a very general rule, as per your earlier post.” This statement is simply false.  ID never asks “What is the source of all design?”  It asks, “Is this particular thing designed?”  And it answers this question by determining whether that particular thing exhibits complex specified information (or irreducible complexity, which is a subset of CSI). Faded Glory writes:  “The moment someone uses the inference, in a non-controversial, way like your concrete example, anyone is warranted use exactly the same inference on any other Read More ›

In comment [25] to my last post , The ID hypothesis, Elizabeth Liddle asks about information. I think I’ve been at this long enough to predict how an exchange between me and Elizabeth would go. Barry’s Point 1: Let’s take the information in your comment [25]. I am sure you will agree your comment contains specified complex information. Indeed, your one little comment contains more specified complex information than we could reasonably attribute to chance and necessity working from the beginning of the universe to this moment. Barry’s Point 2: I am sure you will agree that the cells in your body contain more complex specified information than your comment by several orders of magnitude. Barry’s Question to Elizabeth: If Read More ›

In June we welcomed Shasta Daisy, our new goldendoodle, to our household.  I love goldendoodles.  They are beautiful and smart and full of energy.  Lots of energy.  Did I mention she is energetic?  Watching Shasta play I kept thinking about Alan Greenspan’s famous phrase, “irrational exuberance.”  After a few weeks my wife and I were worn down to a nub, so we began casting about for ways to curb or at least channel Shasta’s enthusiasm.  We rejected doggy downers and decided to enroll her in puppy school instead.

On the first day of class we showed up at the appointed time, paid the tuition, and proceeded to the training area, where Shasta and four other dogs barked, wagged and yanked on their leashes as they got to know each other.  Shasta, at least, was having a grand time, but when the trainer finally arrived I immediately began to reevaluate the wisdom of our choice, because almost the first thing out of his mouth was “there are no right or wrong answers here.”  (Am I the only one who loathes that phrase with the burning intensity of a thousand suns?)  When he said this, many questions began to run through my head such as:  “Have we enrolled Shasta in a post-modern puppy class?” Read More ›

UPDATE:  WE HAVE HAD SEVERAL FANTASTIC ENTRIES ALREADY.  BUT THERE IS STILL TIME TO POST AN ENTRY.  I WILL JUDGE THE CONTEST ON 7-26-11

A couple of  months ago a young university student contacted my law office seeking help in a dispute she was having with a university here in Colorado. [To protect my client’s privacy, I am using neither her name nor the name of the university. ] The previous week she had voiced opposition to Darwinism to her biology professor, who proceeded to scream at her, denigrate her religious views, and generally demean and humiliate her in front of the rest of the class.  After hearing her story I sent a demand letter to the university seeking redress.  Good news.  We resolved the matter on very favorable terms.

One of the terms we insisted on was a letter of apology from the professor. This is the full text of that letter:

Read More ›

A terrible thing happened to me some years ago.  I ached so badly I lay down on the floor and cried and cried great heaving sobs of anguish, and as I gasped for breath between my sobs I repeated one word over and over, “why? why? why?” 

Why indeed?  When terrible things happen, whether a personal tragedy such as my own or a natural disaster in which hundreds of thousands perish, we seem compelled to ask, “Why did God let this happen?”  Before answering this question let me discuss two extreme and equally erroneous answers to the question from two opposite schools of thought.  One school I will call the “sadistic maniac” school and the other I will call the “amiable bumbler” school. 

The sadistic maniac school asserts that God actually causes horrible things to happen in order to accomplish his purposes.  Read More ›

  A good place to begin understanding why consciousness is not strictly reducible to the material is in looking at consciousness of material objects — that is, straightforward perception. Perception as it is experienced by human beings is the explicit sense of being aware of something material other than oneself. Consider your awareness of a glass sitting on a table near you. Light reflects from the glass, enters your eyes, and triggers activity in your visual pathways. The standard neuroscientific account says that your perception of the glass is the result of, or just is, this neural activity. There is a chain of causes and effects connecting the glass with the neural activity in your brain that is entirely compatible Read More ›

 In response to my last post RabbitDawg writes: Barry, I was reading a column in Slate, and I tripped across the following: “The behavior of this bacterium, once elucidated, proved to be truly chilling. Unlike previously known E. coli, O157 borrowed a gene from a completely different bacterium (Shigella flexneri) that produces the shiga toxin, which causes dysentery. This Yankee swap of genetic bits across species is what gives scientists nightmares. E. coli demonstrated evolution in action, right under our noses and at Warp 7 speed. Creationists take notice: This is the real deal.” You’ll find the full article at http://www.slate.com/id/2296326/ Page 2, Paragraph 5. know you’re not a “Creationist”, and this is not an example of new species creation, Read More ›

Alan Prendergast has this story in Westword about Robert Hannum, a professor of “applied probability” at the University of Denver. Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.

Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.

What was the key assumption underlying the casino management’s request of Professor Hannum? They assumed that some events are just too improbable reasonably to attribute them to the interaction of random chance and the physical laws of nature working on the roulette wheel (i.e., “physical necessity”), and and if an event is not caused by the interaction of chance and necessity, the most likely cause of the event is design by an intelligent agent. In the particular case of gaming “design by an intelligent agent” goes by the name of “cheating.” Finally, the very fact they hired Professor Hannum suggests they understood that design leaves behind indicia that can be sussed out objectively.

Consider an example from poker. Suppose a poker dealer deals himself 13 royal flushes in hearts in a row in a five card game. The odds of this happening are easy to calculate. They are about 2.74^-71. To put that number into perspective, the dealer could deal the same 13 hands to every atom in the universe, and it is less than even money that any atom would receive that same series of hands. Conclusion: It is not, as a matter of strict logic, impossible for random chance to result in 13 royal flushes in a row, but the odds of that happing are so low that the inference to design is overwhelming.

Now the odds of the information content of even the simplest strand of DNA forming though pure random chance are even less than the odds of dealing 13 royal flushes in a row. Yet Neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theorists routinely discount the design inference. How can this be? Read More ›

My motorcycle gang (think “Wild Hogs”) planned to ride up to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Memorial Day weekend, but the forecast was for cold and rain, so we called an audible and headed south through the deserts and mountains of northern New Mexico. On the way down we made a detour to see the motorcycle rally at Red River. Traffic slowed to a crawl as we approached the center of town, which was crammed with literally thousands of motorcycles of every shape and hue and their equally colorful riders. We headed out of Red River along the winding mountain roads towards Taos, and as I glided around a curve a few miles from town I saw Read More ›

Here