Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Does Dawkins’ forum evidence “Intelligent Design”?

David L. Hagen
August 18, 2009
Atheism, Evolution, Informatics, Intelligent Design, Irreducible Complexity
Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
arroba Email

Consultant Rick Ferguson quipped that the hacking of Dawkins’ website “is proof there’s no “Intelligent Design” on Dawkins’ forum”:
Dawkins’ website forum hacked to send spam: God! What a nuisance By John Leyden

A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday.
Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was back, and apparently fighting fit. . . .
Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro, quips the the attack is proof there’s no “Intelligent Design” on Dawkins’ forum.

Profanity aside, let us debate:

Taking the opposite of Ferguson, I hold that Dawkin’s forum is hosted using computer systems, software systems, and communication systems, each of required utilize encoded design specifications, controlled energy systems, and controlled material processing systems to be assembled. Each person participating in Dawkins’ forum furthermore uses other software, computer, and energy systems to participate on that forum. Each of these in turn are only known to occur by the explicit cause and design of intelligent agents. There is no known process by which the four forces of nature has been scientifically proven to form any of these measures. Consequently, I hold that Dawkins’ forum evidences “Intelligent Design”.

What say you?

Comments
MeganC, Why don't you offer something of value once in a while instead of perpetual sarcasm? I am tempted to moderate you until you do. Snide comments and sarcastic remarks that add nothing whatsoever to the discussion won't be tolerated to the extent that you do it. Clive Hayden
DLH, Congratulations in recognising the hallmarks of human design! MeganC
Any sane person who has ever been to Dawkins forums knows that there is no intelligence there. Just Neaderthal's posting gibberish and... ahum ... colorful superlatives which they hope make them look fully human. Therefore, such binary mutational havoc can only be explained by environmental pressures and natural selection. Perhaps toxins in the subroutine modules. My guess is some form of P.E. since the new functions appeared so suddenly in the software record and it all LOOKS designed but isn't. Borne
Boulderdash, DLH. Obviously this hack attack is the result of random bugs on the internet slowly developed over a long period of time by numerous, slight, successive modifications. Bit by bit, they became more and more adapted to attack networks and computers. This is self-evident, as any random viruses which could not hack it would be eliminated, and those that would would replicate preferentially. Unfortunately for this particular virus, it found itself on a doomed branch of the evolutionary tree, having run into an intelligent hostile force well adapted to destroy it. I have no comment on whether this makes intelligence more powerful than random evolution at this time. tragic mishap

Leave a Reply