From: Dawsonzhu@aol.com
Date: Tue Oct 14 2003 - 10:14:40 EDT
Ted Davis wrote:
> I don't agree that Dembski's ideas have all been shot full of holes. I
> believe he is *correct* to argue that numerous scientific projects (such as
> SETI, archaeology, and anthropology) *do* tacitly assume that we can detect
> the products of a mind imposing a "design" on nature, as opposed to a
> "blind" nature doing this itself.
>
This is mainly why I don't like to make the blanket statement that ID
is __pure__ bombast. The basic idea put forth in "The Design Inference"
was more applicable to the above. There were basically two main problem
I found with that book (1) you still have to find an objective way to express
the probability of whatever it is that you are examining and (2), you have
to set clearly what probability smaller than such can be considered
evidence for design. He tries to address this second point with his
1/10^80 limit (if my memory is correct), but I was not so persuaded
that this __must__ be the ultimate definitive boundary between random
and design, although it is probably not too bad for many things.
As to probabilities, his examples fall in the category of card games,
elections, as I remotely recall. Card games and elections are relatively
easy
to set up objective and accurate probability models for. However, most real
problems are not. He does not even go so far as to address how we would
assess a signal from an alien transmission, which would be getting closer to
a real applied example. I think SETI is a place where this is most
applicable,
but I don't think that would not be very popular with Christian groups. On
the other hand, I would expect it could show that crop circles are the work
of designers of terrestrial origin.
I think the main dispute that scientists have with ID with respect to the
evolutionary models is that they suspect that the probabilities are chosen
selectively by ID advocates to show their models are true. There is
sound reason to doubt statistics because of the way people have manipulated
probabilities over the years to cover up various shams. Outside of coin
tossing,
card games, and well posed textbook problems, statistics can be very
difficult
to do and proving things with statistics (even done in all earnest) is a hard
sell.
By Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
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