James Mahaffy wrote:
> So I guess I am asking for the farsighted seers to suggest how ID
> could be attractive to the mainstream scientists as a program that
> would allow him to do better science or if someone sees it being
> able to offer a critique like Kuhn, that made scientists see that
> their science is not entirely rational and should be replaced by ID
> or a paradigm influenced by ID. I am not interested in this
> degenerating into a pro/anti ID discussion but what may be the
> impact of ID and why it could have that impact.
I will hedge one charitable point here....
I read through Dembski's "The Design Inference". Although the title
suggests the usual ID stuff, there is no discussion about ID within
the pages. In a one line summary, the book explores the concept of
`randomness' and how we might discern what is random and what is not.
For example, you might draw from the book that if the SETI folk claim
that they received a signal from an extraterrestrial source with a
message "314", most of us would claim that this is nonsense. However,
if the message was repeated "3.141592654 3.141592654....", it is an
arguable knowledge claim. In principle, it is possible that such a
signal came from a random source, but because the number is specified
.AND. it is repeated, it is highly improbable that it could come from
a random source.
In that respect, I would be willing to say that ID could provide some
criteria for deciding what is reasonable to call ``random'' and what
is not. That is not a trivial issue. There are philosophical issues
about whether pseudorandom number generators (the ones on our
computers) are sufficiently accurate descriptions of ``randomness''.
In fact, most are not even close, as any real test would show. So I
can certainly see applications in cryptology. Moreover, I would even
speculate that it could provide some help in understanding chaos [hmm,
oximoron for the day].
my two cents....
Wayne
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