Intelligent Design

First, welcome aboard Eric and thank you for your first UD post . Eric uses the rings of Saturn to illustrate his point that natural objects, in and of themselves, do not “contain” information by their mere existence.  I disagree.  I am certainly not an information theorist, but I do have the advantage of having read an advance copy of Bill Dembski’s Being as Communion, a Metaphysics of Information (which I understand is due out in August). Eric says that the act of measurement of a state of affairs by an observer creates information; that the state of affairs in itself has not produced information.  You will need to wait for the book for a more complete explanation (the wait will be worth it; Read More ›

First of all I want to thank the Uncommon Descent moderators for allowing me to post, with a particular hat tip to StephenB.  As I indicated on a prior thread, I am not sure how often I will take the time to create a new thread, but hopefully I can occasionally post something of interest.  Kudos to gpuccio for a wonderful first thread, relating to the basic definition of “design”.

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Intelligent Design Basics – Information

In this post I want to consider a fundamental aspect of intelligent design theory: the concept of “information”. Read More ›

As known, complex numbers are numbers of the form: z = x + i y where x is the real part, y is the imaginary part and “i” is the square root of -1. Complex numbers have many applications in science, where it is necessary, in the same time, to collect together and discriminate two heterogeneous entities. Here, as brainstorming, I propose to consider complex numbers when we deal with the complexity/organization of systems. We could define the measure of the “complexity c(S) of a system S” as a complex number z: c(S) = z = x + i y = quantity + i quality = matter + i information where x is a measure of its quantitative aspects (mass, Read More ›

Professor Larry Moran thinks macroevolution isn’t terribly hard to understand, if you take the time to do some reading on the subject. He also thinks that Professor James Tour, the world-famous organic chemist who has declared that he doesn’t understand macroevolution, is lazy and opinionated. Professor Moran singled out Professor Tour for attack in a recent post titled, A chemist who doesn’t understand evolution. (Before I continue, I’d like to thank Professor Moran for linking to my article, A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution, in his post.) Here’s a relevant excerpt from Moran’s post: Normally you’d have to be an expert on evolution in order to claim that all other experts are Read More ›

I was very gratified to read Professor Larry Moran’s recent post, On teaching creationism in American public universities (17 March 2014). Professor Moran not only believes that Intelligent Design qualifies as science, but he also believes that it should be legal to teach science courses in Intelligent Design at university. To be sure, Moran thinks that ID is very bad science; nevertheless, he insists that “university students are mature enough to handle diverse points of view.” Good for him, I say. While Professor Moran and I have had our disagreements about evolution in the past, I salute him as a fair-minded man. Professor Moran’s post concludes with a zinger aimed at Professor Jerry Coyne, who maintains that “although it’s illegal Read More ›