Re: [asa] ID-Pure&Applied:(was : Collins' book is reviewed by the Arizona Origins

Do Bayesians wear veils? If so Jack Straw will have something to say about it.

In the 2001 census in UK some 50,000 put down their religion as Jedi. That has some interesting possibilities!

More seriously I find Dembski's arguments simply too theoretical and want to earth them (I am a geologist) in actual examples and how it could work out with the succession of living forms without positing n divine interventions in geological time. Someone could have fun working out just how many! But then D did not like my chapter in Debating Design where I stress that discussion about design or not is futile until the age of the earth and the actual fossil succession is worked out.

Please don't say I am mathematically challenged!!

Michael
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Iain Strachan
  To: d.nield@auckland.ac.nz
  Cc: David Opderbeck ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2006 11:53 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] ID-Pure&Applied:(was : Collins' book is reviewed by the Arizona Origins

  On 10/8/06, d.nield@auckland.ac.nz <d.nield@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
    David O's comments suggest to me that it would be useful to distiguish
    between Pure Intelligent Design theory and Applied Intelligent Design.
    PureID is akin to Pure Mathematics and is on par with philosophy. PureID
    is Dembski's design inference stuff. It involves probability arguments in
    a pure form. It says nothing about the identity of the designer nor the
    mode of dsign. David can correctly say that PureID makes no distinction
    between cosmology and biology.
    On the other hand AppliedID refers to attempts by Behe and others to apply
    PureID to the real world. They need to do this in order to claim that
    their ID is science. In my view they fail on two counts. Firs, they do not
    know and cannot know the a priori probabilities that are needed.

  This is an interesting point. I believe the problem with the original Watchmaker argument of Paley is that we do have an a priori probability on the existence of (human) watchmakers, which is 1. But for an atheist, the prior probability of the existence of God is zero, so the argument isn't going to convince you unless you're already a believer.

  Another point here as well, is that I understand that Dembski is not in favour of Bayesian inference (where prior probabilties become posterior probabilities in the presence of measurements, and inference using Bayes' theorem). As I understand it, Dembski's design inference theories are based on Fisherian, frequentist statistics, presumably to get around the lack of a priori probabilities. There is a long running "religious war" in statistics about Frequentist vs. Bayesian statistics.

  I was kind of raised in the "heretical" Bayesian school ! My PhD supervisor is on a web page of prominent Bayesians. Even more hilariously, my external examiner once ran into BIG trouble with the US immigration authorities. He had to fill in a "landing card" on the plane, and when asked if he was a member of any religious cult, he put, for a joke "I'm a Bayesian". That was when he discovered just what a lack of sense of humour immigration authorities really have!

  Interestingly, Collins gives a very good Bayesian argument in his book as to why Christians can rationally believe in miracles (because our "prior" on God's existence is non-zero).

  Iain

    Second,
    they are unable to say any thing about how and when the design is
    implemented.
    Since biology obviously post-dates cosmology,and since some features of
    biology obviously postdate other features of biology, it is a reasonable
    inference for Collins to make that *"ID portrays the Almighty as a clumsy
    Creator, having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the inadequacies
    of His own initial plan for generating the complexities of life"* .
    Collins is talking about AppliedID. ID applied to biology is indeed
    different form ID applied to cosmology. In my view, Collins is talking
    very good sense.
    Don N

  --------

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Oct 8 17:04:07 2006