From: Dawsonzhu@aol.com
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 20:58:01 EDT
Having read "The Design Inference", I would say that design
detection in nature would depend largely on _the way_ that God
actually interacts with nature.
For example, some intellegent race of beings may have the desire
to be known by other intellegent life in the universe, so perhaps
they might chose to broadcast a regular repeated pattern over a
wave band that is carefully chosen to minimize attenuation over
the long distances of space. Likewise, from what little I have heard
of criminal investigation, criminals often leave behind various
"signatures" that help make them increasingly identifiable by the
police. Card games have very well defined probabilities, and so
game parlors would tend to have ways to detect when a person
is probably cheating.
It seems that ID would work best if there is a clear objective to
either gain something, or to be known. So if for some reason,
aliens don't want to be known, they would use methods of stelth
in as much as they could. (Note, I am not writing this to suggest
_why_ SETI has been unsucessful in finding intelligent life).
But what about God's character? Does God insist on displaying his
"Intel inside" on every production unit (made by Heaven & Sons, Ltd.)?
So a key point in the intelligent design model is that the "designer" wants
to be plainly known. If for some reason, God is not interested in
being known to this extent or doesn't care to display this clearly
human attribute, it does seem like this will greatly reduce the
likelihood that we can use a model like Dembski's design inference
to detect God's action in the world.
So by Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Aug 01 2003 - 20:58:59 EDT