Allan wrote:
[...]
>I can't speak for Howard, but my guess is that it is not satisfactory.
>I say this because it looks to me like Howard's "fully gifted creation"
>view would satisfy the 4-part criterion, yet I'm pretty sure Dembski
>does not consider such a view to count as "design."
>
>The main problem arises in step #4. In Howard's view, the "surrogates"
>of the designer that carry out the assembly would be the raw material
>itself (and the laws of physics) that the Designer had created and
>gifted with all its potentialities at the beginning. I suspect that,
>for Dembski, the "surrogates" in step #4 must be intelligent agents
>external to the process who intervene in the assembly. So that not
>only the design but also some aspect of the assembly must be imposed
>from outside by an agent.
[...]
"Surrogates" sounds like the "design by proxy" response Paul Nelson
gave when talking to Wesley Elsberry about the CSI generated by genetic
algorithms. In my mind that fall-back position increases the difficulty
of reliably detecting extranatural assembly events of designers, because
now ID'ers are invoking secondary and tertiary intermediates in the
causal chain. As the chain of causation extends so does the uncertainty
-- even more so if the intermediate design proxies are natural agents
themselves.
Given Dembski's earlier writing about the relationship between ID
and theistic evolution (eg. "ID is no friend of TE"), I agree that
it's not too great of a jump to suspect that Dembski is not talking
about a "fully gifted creation" being the source of the "surrogate"-
derived information.
Regards,
Tim Ikeda
tikeda@sprintmail.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 05 2001 - 15:10:15 EDT