Re: [asa] STATEMENT ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY IOWA STATE

On 6/5/07, Dawsonzhu@aol.com <Dawsonzhu@aol.com> wrote:
> PvM wrote:
>
>
> Cryptography either uses known distributions of words or letters or
> becomes mostly a brute force method. Either way, it's not really about
> detecting design as much as unraveling a mapping function
> (regularity).
>
>
> Yet in application, I hardly see what the difference would
> be (other than semantics). If the enemy sends noise, and
> then at a specified time, sends signal using a very good
> code, whether you call it "mapping function" and "brute
> force" or "design" is really irrelevant (beyond semantics).
> Your interest at that point would be to spend your time
> trying to find the difference between the noise and signal
> and whose methods you employ (if you are actually intelligent)
> is of no concern as long as the method does the job correctly.

Maybe I fail to appreciate your argument. Are you saying that
detecting a cypher is an example of 'intelligent design' because we
have to use methods to unravel the code? But if the mapping is
captured by regularity and chance then how can this be seen as
intelligent design? Remember, ID is that which remains when regularity
and chance processes have been eliminated.

So how do you see encrypting message as somehow relevant to ID? What
am I missing?

> Maybe I am more interested in application so I tend to think this
> way.

> More to the point, it is hard to see what is astoundingly new
> about the Design Inference. Even Dembski's "universal
> probability bound" (p 203-217) is at best anticlimactic.
> I believe that was sometimes referred to as a "bootstrap
> value" in engineering parlance.

> Perhaps though, the hardness of their situation may help
> them open a real field of mathematics... who knows. Why
> must we always have the attitude that we must "stamp out!"
> everything we don't agree with? _Serious_ individuals do

ID would be irrelevant if it were not for the fact that IDists are
still proposing ID as a serious scientific alternative, and combined
with ID's dangerous theology I believe it behooves us to expose it for
what it really is.

> learn something even if the lesson is "don't go that way
> next time!" and "you were a fool to take that one on".
> Some of the best lessons do come from failure because
> you learn what recourse you should take to avoid repeating
> those mistakes. It is probably not a blessing to always be
> successful.

> by Grace we proceed,
> Wayne

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Received on Tue Jun 5 20:54:40 2007