Re: Small probabilities

Iain Strachan wrote:

> I'll reply to a three posts to avoid replying several times.

...

> Would you not then be justified in deducing that the position had
> indeed been designed by a very clever person who knew the rules of
> chess? And if you were, what would be the basis of that deduction? I'd
> suggest it would be low probability. The number of possible
> arrangements of chess pieces on a chess board must vastly outweigh the
> number of arrangements of legal positions, and that in turn must
> vastly outweigh the number of positions that are suitable for
> retrograde analysis, where you can deduce e.g. what the last several
> moves must have been.
>
> Hence it is a small probability that determines design in this case.
> I'd be interested to know if you agree, or if maybe this is a good
> illustration of what Dembski means by "specified AND complex". Or
> would you perhaps say that even if you found such a position set up on
> a chess board, that there was no justification for concluding that the
> position was intentionally designed that way?
>
> Vernon's patterns, I would also say I believe to be both specified and
> complex, and that it was justifiable to conclude intentionality (let's
> leave open the question of whether it's a "message" for the moment).
>
An interesting analogy but I argue that this example conflates regular
design with rarefied design (see "The advantages of theft over toil: the
design inference and arguing from ignorance", Wilkins and Elsberry,
2001, /Biology and Philosophy/ 16 (November):711-724.)

I understand that you are using Dembski's latest 'explanations' of how
to detect design using the analogy of a chess game
(http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/79). Only because we
know the rules of the chess game, can we detect a possibility of design
behind the arrangement (ignoring for the moment the lack of non-design
alternatives). In the examples proposed by Dembski, the alternatives are
mostly 'design' and 'chance'. In other words, complex merely means
unlikely given our present understanding.
We know that chess pieces do not self arrange and the mere fact that
there is a chess board with pieces on it, all standing up, is by itself
a good reason to believe that someone arranged them.
So now the question becomes: Given the known rules of chess, can we
determine the probability that any particular arrangement shows a match
to the specifications (the rules of chess that are known to us) allowing
us to do what exactly? We already know that design was involved in all
instances since chess pieces do not arrange themselves. Since we know
the rules of chess, the probability of the arrangement seem to be quite
high and complexity seems to be close to zero. Complexity would arise if
we could not use the rules to explain the arrangement. But then
complexity merely becomes equivalent to our ignorance.

On Uncommon Descent Dembski shows the plasticity of the analogy by
arguing that the arrangement of pieces which are impossible to be
achieved from an initial position shows evidence of 'design'.

<quote author=Demski>But the point of the analogy still holds. Whenever
you have a theory about process — how one state is supposed to progress
into another — it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether the process in
question is capable of accounting for the final state in terms of the
initial state.</quote>

This is a valid question but ID proponents are too quick to argue that
the inability to describe such a process should be seen as evidence for
design. Simplistic analogies of design are the reasons why people seem
to be so confused about these concepts. Yes, under certain circumstances
one can make a pretty good analysis of whether or not something is
designed. In chess, we can use the KNOWN rules, to infer if a particular
design matches the specifications of the rule games. How to interpret
the findings seems somewhat uncertain: If something does not match the
rules was it designed? Or if something does match the rules was it
designed? These analogies are very poor in arguing for or against design
in instances where we lack much of any understanding as to plausible
mechanisms or are unable to calculate probabilities.

So let's go back to Vernon's patterns. How likely or unlikely is it to
find similar patterns in any given book? Remember the bible codes?
Specified yes, complex? Well only until one realizes how one may find
'matches' almost anywhere.
And let's assume that we accept these patterns as found by Vernon, it
does not help us decide who or what 'designed' them and how this
withstood ages of transcription and translation.

To end with Dembski

<quote>To sum up, Yglesias and company present us with a false dilemma:
either science must be limited to “natural explanations” (taken in a
highly tendentious sense) or it must embrace “supernatural
explanations,” by which is meant magic. But there is a third
possibility: /neither matter nor magic but mind/. ID theorists are not
willing to concede the materialist claim that a designing intelligence
(mind) interacting with matter is “supernatural.” Indeed, investigations
by ID theorists are beginning to demonstrate that this interaction is
perfectly natural — that nature cannot be properly understood apart from
the activity of a designing intelligence.</quote>

So far this seems mostly wishful thinking and only by moving away to
front loading can such a position be scientifically defended. Dembski
has proposed that God could interact via an infinite wavelength and thus
zero energy channel. Too bad that while mathematically interesting, it
also suffers from the problem of zero bandwith, or in other words, no
messages can ever pass through.
If interactions are perfectly natural then ID can never hope to displace
(methodological/philosophical) naturalism since it hopes to establish
design through elimination of natural processes of chance and regularity.
It's this conflation and internal self contradictions which, while
understandable, also make ID highly irrelevant scientifically. It makes
for a great rethorical tool to those who have accepted religion on faith
but if Dembski is right, science does not need ID since the interactions
are all perfectly natural. How we intend to separate God's mind from
nature seems to have become an intractable problem.

So is this the end of ID? If ID has nothing to contribute to science,
other than 'keeping it honest' what purpose can ID play? Dembski seems
to accept Keith Miller's explanation that we cannot separate God from
nature and thus any hopes of detecting God through science will remain
unresolvable. Which is the position of many Christian scientists who in
one form or another have come to realize that science and faith need not
be in conflict and that insisting on such conflicts makes for poor
science and poor theology.
Received on Sat Jan 14 14:21:33 2006