I have sometimes had the idea that the best way for Intelligent Design advocates to make their case would be to build a giant museum replicating the complexity of the cell on a large scale, so that people could see for themselves how the cell worked and draw their own conclusions. Recently I came across an old quote from biochemist Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985) which put paid to that idea, but which raised an interesting philosophical puzzle for people who adhere to scientific naturalism – which I define here as the view that there is nothing outside the natural world, by which I mean the sum total of everything that behaves in accordance Read More ›

Over on another thread, there has been some discussion (among other things) about whether the concept of CSI must include a calculation of probabilities under all natural processes.  There are a number of interesting issues relating to CSI that might be worth exploring in more detail (including Learned Hand’s comments @47 of that thread, and the issues I mentioned @139). For now, however, I want to simply flag an issue that has been harped on for years by various individuals (Liddle, ribczynski, and in the recent thread, keith s and wd400).  In summary, the argument is that without knowing all the probabilities of all possible natural processes we cannot ever be certain that some natural process didn’t produce the biological system in Read More ›

In his 1973 book The Origins of Life Leslie Orgel wrote: “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.” (189). In my post On “Specified Complexity,” Orgel and Dembski I demonstrated that in this passage Orgel was getting at the exact same concept that Dembski calls “specified complexity.”  In a comment to that post “Robb” asks: 500 coins, all heads, and therefore a highly ordered pattern. What would Orgel say — complex or not? Orgel said that crystals, even though they display highly ordered patterns, lack complexity. Would he also say that the highly ordered pattern Read More ›

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Last week, one of my comments relating to the KS “bomb” argument was made the subject of an OP, which can be found here. In that comment, I had offered a few preliminary thoughts on Keith’s argument (originally found here, and summarized by him here) and asked a few questions to better understand the assumptions informing his argument. Unfortunately, the issues raised in my OP comment, as far I can tell, were never actually addressed. Instead, the ‘responses’ in the ensuing conversation revolved almost entirely around what the participating ID proponents considered obviously false analogies, which invoked “Planetary Angels”, “Rain Fairies”, “Salt Leprechauns”, and “Toilet Whales”. Regarding these analogies, Keith, Zachriel, and other ID opponents, seemed to be arguing as though ID Read More ›

Bill Dembski often uses the term “specified complexity” to denote a characteristic of patterns that are best explained by the act of an intelligent designer. He defines the term as follows: What is specified complexity? An object, event, or structure exhibits specified complexity if it is both complex (i.e., one of many live possibilities) and specified (i.e., displays an independently given pattern). A long sequence of randomly strewn Scrabble pieces is complex without being specified. A short sequence spelling the word “the” is specified without being complex. A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified. William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), xiii.   Read More ›