It is good to hear from you again.
At 09:41 PM 10/7/97, Paul A. Nelson wrote:
>
>The Internet, however, gobbles up one's time like a hungry shark.
Lets gobble up some time.
>I could spend an evening explaining why your "personal knowledge"
>objection to Dembski's notion of specification, for instance, is a
>non-starter. [If you were right, anyone could justifiably complain to a
>skilled archeologist that he didn't really find the pottery shard
>which others didn't even notice, as they walked over the same field:
>because that was just his "personal knowledge" at work. But of course
>that's nonsense. He did find the shard, it's real, and he found it
>precisely because he knew which specifications to look for.
Woah here now. The finding of a shard is not the same as recognizing a
shard. The personal knowledge does not come into play until everyone looks
at the found shard and tries to decide whether or not it is a shard.
Dembski's rules have nothing to do with FINDING a shard as with DETERMINING
whether or not it is a shard. He defined specification as
'the actualization of a possibility (i.e., information) is specified if the
possibility's actualization is independently identifiable by means of a
pattern....For example, a cryptographic transmission, whose cryptosystem we
have yet to break, will constitute unspecified information. However, as
soon as we break the cryptosystem, the cryptographic transmission becomes
specified information." Dembski "Intelligent Design as a Theory of
Information", PSCF Sept 1997, p. 184-185.
This is the same as two people looking at the shard, one saying it isn't a
shard and the other saying it is.
Which of the following is specified?
"Wo shong mao tian qu"
"Wo xi huan zhi shir"
I don't care what you know about Mandarin, one of these is specified
information and one isn't. Your personal knowledge or lack thereof does not
change the fact that one of these is meaningful and is SPECIFIED BY ME. To
put it into Dembski's terminology the cryptogram has meaning regardless of
whether you know whether it does or doesn't. All the Navajo communication
in the Pacific during WWII were quite distinctly specified information. The
Japanese never figured out how to decipher it, thus we won the war.
>The shard's
>design properties are fully objective, but one needs some training --
>some knowledge -- to see them.]
Agreed but that doesn't mean that a bunch of archeologically ignorant people
are correct in concluding that it isn't a shard. They are WRONG, even if
they think they are right. Under Dembski's definition the shard isn't a
shard until they decide it is a shard. Or more to the point, information
isn't specified until they decide it is specified. That is silly.
> We all have to make choices, however.
>And I choose to spend less time debating on the Internet.
I was forced to go to internet because until this year absolutely NO
Christian publication would publish anything I wrote. Unlike you all, I
find Internet to be nearly the only outlet for my views, poor though it is.
And I am determined that Christian apologetics MUST get their facts correct.
By the way tell Phil that whales did not evolve from rodents like _Darwin
on Trial_ indicates (2nd ed. p. 87). That is factually wrong, but easily
publishable (Since few Christians know anything about Paleontology, no one
will notice--except God). Whales evolved from an entirely different order,
the creodonts.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm