Re: Small probabilities

On 1/14/06, D. F. Siemens, Jr. <dfsiemensjr@juno.com> wrote:
>
> Iain,
> Here goes four for the day.
>
> I agree that you did not intend my problem, but I don't think you can
> quite get out of it. Your revision has A and B specified. There is no C. One
> has to decide between A and B. But reality does not specify strict
> alternatives. That is, you don't know that there is a B.
>
> Where does one draw the line? If A and B are specified, we can be fairly
> confident that an instance belongs in one rather than the other. But we
> can't be certain. Unless we know relevant facts about A and B, we cannot
> exclude either A+B or C. It looks to me as though you are thinking of A Xor
> B, but even that does not necessarily exclude additional possibilities.
>

Dave,

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at here. Let's make it a situation
where you don't even know there's an A or a B. You walk into a room and
there's a piece of paper on which an chessboard and an arrangement of pieces
is printed. It looks pretty random to you, but as you study the position
you discover that it's arrivable at by a long series of admittedly
implausible but legal moves. I'm saying there are two possibilities:

A - random
B - intelligently designed position

It doesn't seem to me that in my example there can be any other explanation
- I don't see what the C could be.

I guess that what you might be saying is that there could be a C in the case
of Vernon's patterns. Remember, however, that I'm just trying to establish
_intentionality_ of the patterns, a first step before we could progress to
trying to find what that intention means. So if what you consider to be a C
is "a human scribe tweaked the text to make the patterns", then I'd agree
that this is a possibility, but it comes under my B as the alternatives
are "unintentional coincidence" (A) and "intentionally inserted design"
(B). I personally do not think that it's likely that the complex series of
patterns could have been inserted by a scribe, having studied this area in
some depth and found genuine human instances of writing under numerical
constraints - all are ingenious, but the text produced is unnaturally
stretched drivel, whereas as far as I'm aware, Gen 1:1 is perfectly natural
Hebrew, and a statement which we all as Christians accept (though differing
on the nature of how God created).

The best shot at a (C) is Jim's point that maybe the patterns could have
arisen naturally because of the inherent structure in language. That is a
good point - I thought I had answered it, but Jim has further points to
make, so I'll have to take a look.

Iain
Received on Sun Jan 15 04:17:54 2006