CSI has come to refer to two distinct and incompatible concepts. This has lead to no end of confusion and flawed argumentation. CSI, as developed by Dembski, requires the calculation of the probability of an artefact under the mechanisms actually in operation. It a measurement of how unlikely the artefact was to emerge given its context. This is the version that I’ve been defending in my recent posts. CSI, as used by others is something more along the lines of the appearance of design. Its typically along the same lines as notion of complicated developed by Richard Dawkin in The Blind Watchmaker: complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random Read More ›

In my last post, Does scientific knowledge presuppose God?, I endeavored to show that there can be no scientific knowledge if there is no God. In this post, I’ll be responding to physicist Sean Carroll’s video, Is God a good theory?, which is about the best defense of atheism I’ve ever seen by a scientist. Professor Carroll’s presentation is clear, persuasive, refreshingly free of jargon, and very professional. Carroll is unfailingly polite, even when criticizing views he strongly disagrees with; there is not even a hint of sarcasm or condescension in his 53-minute talk, which is part of an Oxford-Cambridge Mini Series entitled, Is ‘God’ Explanatory? (This symposium, the second of its kind, was held from January 9-11, 2013.) Before Read More ›

We have art for the same reason we put windows in houses. We need to see outside. Just as a window allows us to see the physical world outside of the narrow confines of the walls surrounding us, art allows us to see out into the world of ideas, and sometimes the view is appalling. I was reminded of this a few days ago when a friend told me he had not watched more than one episode of Breaking Bad because the squalor and violence depicted was unbearably depressing. He said he finally grasped why the program might be worth watching further when he read my post, Walter White: Consequentialist. Yes, the squalor and violence in that series were awful, but they served the Read More ›

Consider the following numbers and concepts (dare I say platonic forms): 1 1/2 1/9 or 0.111111….. PI PI squared The Book War and Peace by Tolstoy approximate self-replicating von-Neuman automaton (i.e. living cells) Omega Number, Chaitin’s Constant Chaitin’s Super Omega Numbers I listed the above concepts in terms of which concepts I estimate are more information rich than others, going from lower to higher. The curious thing is that even though we can’t really say exactly how many bits each concept has, we can rank the concepts in terms of estimated complexity. PI can be represented by an infinite number of digits, and thus be represented with far greater number of bits than contained in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but Read More ›

In my first post, I discussed the importance of mechanism. In order to compute CSI you have to take into account the mechanism. Computing CSI without a mechanism is wrong. I deliberately focused on the use of specified complexity in evaluating various possible mechanisms. This is how Dembski uses CSI in his Design Inference argument. However, we are often interested in a system: a collection of artefacts and the mechanisms that operate on those artefacts. This is the context in which Dembski argues for the Law of Conservation of Information. Many of the questions that have come up are related to the context systems and who or what can generate CSI. With a large probability, closed systems do not exhibit Read More ›

The passing of the great biochemist Frederick Sanger this week reminds us of another one of evolution’s many scientific failures, namely the view that protein sequences are random. Here is how one obituaryexplains it:  Read more

A number of posts on Uncommon Descent have discussed issues surrounding specified complexity. Unfortunately, the posts and discussions that resulted have exhibited some confusion over the nature of specified complexity. Specified complexity was developed by William Dembski and deviation from his formulation has led to much confusion and trouble. I’m picking a random number between 2 and 12. What is the probability that it will be 7? You might say it was 1 in 11, but you’d wrong because I chose that number by rolling two dice, and the probability was 1 in 6. The probability of an outcome depends on how that outcome was produced. In order to calculate a problem, you must always consider a mechanism and an Read More ›