Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

On 4/13/07, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Where I agree with you is in the view that the strong ID program based on
> communications theory claims to prove too much. In the sense that
> communications theory cannot "prove" the existence of God, I agree there is
> a category mistake -- but it is between the category of empirical modeling
> of communications channels and the category of the metaphysics of being. ID
> tries to avoid this problem by arguing that the "designer" need not be God
> -- essentially, the "designer" can be any intelligent information source.
>

Communications theory not only does not get you to God it doesn't get you to
meaning. I always marvel at how much is made of this outside my narrow field
of electronics and communications. It's a screwdriver and everybody wants to
make it into a hammer. I think the reason why is because it's mathematics
and if you can throw a bunch numbers and formulas around people are
impressed.

 Tied with the idea that information is ontologically separate from energy
> and matter, it seems to me that this results in a "designer / God" that *
> is* *in essence* "information." My biggest beef with this aspect of the
> strong ID program, then, is really a theological one: it seems to reduce
> God to a data stream that is ontologically part of the creation.
>

What makes this palatable to evangelicals is the "god" here is the orthodox
one. But, let's change the metaphor a little and have the "god' be Gaia or
Sophia for a second. In fact the latter possibility is more plausible
because this data stream is immanent rather than transcendent. I agree
that there is great danger here.

> In more detail, Floridi summarizes different perspectives on "information"
> and how they might ultimately be unified (or not) as follows:
>

In the context of whether the syntactic and the semantic approaches to be
information can be unified, Floridi notes:

> Communication theory, as the mathematical theory of data transmission,
> provides the necessary conditions for any physical communication of
> information, but is otherwise of only marginal help.
>

>
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Apr 13 19:19:36 2007