From: Glenn Morton (glennmorton@entouch.net)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 20:48:36 EDT
Hi Josh, thanks for the note of admiration. In answer to what you wrote:
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Josh Bembenek [mailto:jbembe@hotmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, July 31, 2003 9:10 AM
I wrote:
>ID never defines what it means to be ID'd. Dembski's assertion that
>probabilities less than 10^-150 means it is designed is absolutely silly.
>The probability that the molecules in my room are arranged exactly as they
>are right now, is much less than 10^-150, yet we wouldn't claim that God
>designed the ordering of the molecules in my room, would we??? If we did
>that, then we are forced to the strong pre-determinism in which everything
>is personally controlled and discharged by God--everything, including the
>movement of molecules. There probably are those that would hold that
>position, but why couldn't God create laws and delegate the governance of
>molecules to those laws?
>
You replied:
>
>That's why they call it complex, SPECIFIED, information.
>
>Do you always have to misrepresent others in order to try and shred their
>arguments?
1. I insist upon factual correctness. Too often I see Christians simply
being loose with the facts. We are all entitled to our private
interpretation of the facts but we are not entitled to have a private set of
facts.
2. I insist upon logical consistency. If one has a theory that says A and
not-A at the same time, then it is hard to see how the theory can be true.
It is also hard to see how a theory can be true when absolutely none of them
agree on a mechanism as to how God input design into the living systems. Did
He put it in DNA, did he nudge a gamma ray to cause a certain mutation? Did
he simply insert large chuncks of DNA into various life forms? All have
been suggested.
ID meets neither of those criteria. Which criteria do you think we should do
away with, logic or facts?
And I might add a note that 'SPECIFIED' above falls into a begging the
question type of fallacy. The question at hand is whether or not God
specified the information or whether evolution brought it forth. To claim
that you have detected 'SPECIFICED' information assumes that you know where
that info came from. Yet putting a label on it is not exactly the same as
demonstration. If I call a cat, a mouse, it doesn't make that cat have
murine properties.
As I said, ID is meaningless. Define what is 'specified'? How do you know it
is specified? Dembsaki says that anything with a probability less than a
certain level is specified. But that simply defines by fiat something that
can't be defined by fiat-namely, how did the information arise.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu Jul 31 2003 - 20:49:06 EDT