Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Allen Orr’s Piece in the New Yorker

William Dembski
May 24, 2005
Darwinism, Evolution, Intelligent Design
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Allen Orr’s article against ID is now out in the New Yorker (go here). It’s as bad as I thought it would be. I’m on the road right now but will comment on it later in the week. Note that I remarked last week on this blog that a fact-checker from the New Yorker had contacted me about this article. It doesn’t appear that the time I spent with this fact-checker did much to improve this article.

Comments
Casey Luskin, founder of IDEA wrote a very good refutation of Orr's piece: http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1345scordova
May 25, 2005
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WHY? Why not a simple counterexample to the mathematical notions of ID? If there’s something wrong with the math why not to show it? Why not to say “look, here in this theorem p does not entail q so your math is wrong” (“gloriously and utterly wrong” if you want). And if the math is right why not to show an instance of specified complexity where we know the causal history and it is not an intelligent cause? But no, there is no one. All that you can find everywhere against the ID-math is accusations of creationism or “as it is widely shown ‘in other places’ it doesn’t work”… the only problem is that the other places invoke the other places ;-). Please critics, be nice with us, the poor ignorant guys who don’t know mathematics and who do not understand probability (!!!!)… Please Mr. Orr, teach me how not to be impressed “by a bit of mathematics” so easily. Oh, Mr. Orr, and just a last paragraph in “independently given pattern”: it needs to be independent; in particular in biology if the pattern in question is dependent of evolution then the process is a teleological one… and we don’t want it boys, right?. Now, if the problem is with “given”, it means “for all” (you know, just a bit of math, of logic)… but don’t tell me you thought it meant given by the designer, serious? We all know you’re smarter than that. Finally if your problem is “pattern” maybe you were impressed “by a [very little] bit of biology” because independent or not, ad hoc or not, it is all about… patterns. Daniel512
May 24, 2005
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You might have read the article, Benjii. There's little, if any, outrage in it. In fact, he's quite even keel throughout, and from my perspective, is quite fair to both Behe and Dembski. For that reason, I look forward to Dembski's comments, so that I might understand why he thinks the article is so bad. It looks good to me, and my hope is that he addresses Orr's empirical and theoretical points, along with the general point that ID has spawned little, if any, empirical research.Chris
May 24, 2005
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I saw it too! I didn't feel like reading it because I knew it was the same anti-ID hogwash they that I hear all the time. Nothing but a bunch of consequentialist and arguments from outrage.Benjii
May 24, 2005
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