English Crop Circle’s Mysterious Pattern Solved

_{William Dembski

June 19, 2008

Intelligent Design}

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Unraveling these crop circles constitutes a design inference that doesn’t just tell us that something was designed but also tells us something about the knowledge of the designer:

the pi crop circle

SOURCE: go here.

Comments

I think the "vortex" explanation was more compelling back in the day when crop circles were mainly, well, circles. When crop circles started exhibiting more, er, complexity, the vortex hypothesis was largely discounted. For some reason that reminds me of something...EndoplasmicMessenger_{June 23, 2008
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Alan wrote: "OR some other natural cause that we have yet to discover, but are certain it must be there as there can be no other cause." I recall that there is a man out there, I forget his name, who does have a naturalistic theory for crop circles. The man's theory, which I find enormously preposterous, is that some otherwise-unknown "plasma vortex" is whipping the crop circles up. How anyone could consider something so ridiculous is beyond me. In fact, I find it equally preposterous to suggest ANY naturalistic cause of crop circles, given the usual definition of "naturalistic" of course. For all the obvious reasons, and whether the intelligence is alien or human, crop circles most definitely are products of intelligent design.TRoutMac_{June 20, 2008
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I think this is an excellent example of two truths in design detection. The first is obvious - that characteristics of a phenomenon can be used to predict that the phenomenon was at least in part designed by an intelligent being. Indeed, as the crop circle demonstrates, whoever made it had an understanding of the number pi, an irrational number. So not only can we ascertain that something was designed, we can also predict characteristics of the designer(s). The second truth is less obvious at first glance. Did anyone think for a moment that the designers were aliens from outer space? Or an omniscient deity? No, each and every one of us bright people knew that the evidence for a designer considerably more intelligent than any human being was conspicuously absent from this crop circle. Besides the fact that we already know that people make crop circles, we also understand the number pi ourselves. What would be remarkable, and would give us pause to consider intelligence beyond our own. If this crop circle told us something about reality that we didn'talready know, then it would be hard to say it was designed by anyone other than a group of people who know the value of pi and how to hide it in a crop circle. Finally, let's say it did contain information that we didn't know before, (analogous to the specified information in DNA that we are now discovering) would you think aliens did it? How about your favorite supernatural being? How could you possibly tell the difference? Anyway, my point is, if I explained myself well, that this doesn't exclude natural causes, because human beings (and aliens) are natural causes, when you're talking about metaphysical materialism. What we make is surely not natural as opposed to artificial, but in the metaphysical sense it is natural.EJ Klone_{June 20, 2008
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alan: Chance works in mysterious ways.bevets_{June 20, 2008
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OR some other natural cause that we have yet to discover, but are certain it must be there as there can be no other cause.alan_{June 20, 2008
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Why have natural causes been ignored? Maybe it was wind and/or animal damage.bevets_{June 20, 2008
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would like to know why my previous nick, Bettawrekonize, was banned.
Yes, your previous account is banned. I don't know why but I can ask.Patrick_{June 20, 2008
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This man recalled Pi to 25,000 places, yet instead of using pure memory he saw Pi as a "landscape of pictures, shapes and patterns" that he walked through calling out numbers as he walked in his minds eye. Daniel Tammet - The Boy With The Incredible Brain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ssbornagain77_{June 20, 2008
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Off topic: Genetically modified mosquitoes may combat malaria http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080619/ap_on_sc/sci_britain_mutant_mosquitoesbornagain77_{June 20, 2008
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To put things in perspective; no one would argue that those crop circles were just evolved naturally over night" via random processes of the crops just bending- such an explanation is absurd and vacuous (not ot mention incomplete and wrong). Yet this is basically what Darwinism says is the truth about the origin of all life.Frost122585_{June 20, 2008
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Bill, I can't help but see this article as a sort of anecdote for what the next step forward for ID might be. It is one thing to say that something must be designed but it is another to discern where design begins and ends. It ends with the finished product but it begins with a designer- in this case we try to back trace what or who the designer could have been. While the identity of the designer is not necessary for a design inference it is interconnected with design and it is the praxis where the designer and the design meet that ID and origin science in general constantly struggles to define and understand. So the reasoning and information that we use to infer things about the identity of the designer is much like the data and reasoning we use to infer design to begin with. It is here where everything becomes blurred. This is where the road to ID is continually being paved. Interesting how ID is easily inferred from the above circles simply based on symmetry and mathematical significance. That is "design" seems to be a matter of data and not synthetic a priori commitments.Frost122585_{June 20, 2008
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I think the moderators of these forums would be interested in this. http://www.bugmenot.com/view/uncommondescent.comBettawrekonize2_{June 19, 2008
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Is there a way I can contact the moderators of these forums. They don't even have to justify why they banned me, I just want to make sure that it's the moderators of these forums that banned me. Thanks.Bettawrekonize2_{June 19, 2008
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PI is cool. Here's a little tool I'm using in my cryptography research. http://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp.html It's all by design and not by chance.GilDodgen_{June 19, 2008
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Crop circles complexity video http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=crop%20circles&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#bornagain77_{June 19, 2008
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I would like to know why my previous nick, Bettawrekonize, was banned. If it was a moderator of uncommondescent behind it, then I have no problems with this and I will respect the ban. I just want to ensure that it wasn't someone from Wordpress that was behind it or some committed naturalist who managed to get himself in a position to ban me. Thanks.Bettawrekonize2_{June 19, 2008
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I think it would be fair to say that it is far more likely that that crop circle could be formed by chance + natural forces than DNA could have been. We know, at least, that hail can flatten corn, and we know that wind can move hail. Yet still we assume design. :-).tribune7_{June 19, 2008
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