Re: Small probabilities

Iain Strachan wrote:

>
>
> On 1/14/06, *D. F. Siemens, Jr.* <dfsiemensjr@juno.com
> <mailto: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).

I argue that patterns can be found in almost anything if one searches
long enough. The Bible Codes seem to make for an excellent example. In
other words, while with Chess we understand the rules and limitations of
the game, with Vernon's patterns, we may very well be looking at
patterns derived after the fact, or in Dembski's words, patterns where
the bulls eye is painted afterwards around the arrows.
Received on Sun Jan 15 13:56:35 2006