syamsu writes:
It is not neccesary for God to be an object to create an object...
Agreed.
syamsu writes:
...rather then that God is inherently not an object.
While you can say it is not necessary for God to be an object, and that common conception is that God is not merely an object, the statement "God is inherently not an object" is blank assertion.
You need more to support this statement, doubly so because Dembski's strict logic and CSI theory has raised the bar above this kind of argument.
syamsu writes:
You seem to be in effect saying before that Dembski asserted that you have to be an elephant to design an elephant, you have to be an object with the same CSI which you create, which would be ridiculous.
This is not at all what I was trying to say. I apologize if it came off that way. I will try to make it clearer.
According to Dembski any designed object must have a creator. And while that creator may itself be an object, it must inherently (according to his conservation law) have more CSI than the object it created.
He uses an "pencil analogy" to show this. A sharpened pencil is an object which is "created" by a pencil sharpener (another object). The sharpener must contain more CSI than the pencil, because it contains both the CSI of the pencil and the added CSI of its own function.
Where then did the sharpener get its CSI? From the human that manufactured it. Thus the human has more CSI than the sharpener. Not that the human was a sharpener, only that as a sentient being the human was able to come up with the CSI necessary to make the sharpener (come up with, meaning "mentally design" before the physical design).
Where then did the human get his CSI? Now that's the interesting question. Evos would ask, why are you judging a living being the same as an object? Why MUST a sentient creator be like an object and be designed rather than simply have grown over time (and generations) into a more complex being capable of creating CSI in objects?
Dembski's argument, ala Paley's watchmaker, is that evos cannot simply stop at the living sentient being and say "done". To them it is intuitive that one can look at a watch and at a human being and see no difference. Where there is a certain level of CSI there MUST BE design, and so a creator.
The PROBLEM, is that once Dembski (or any IDer) makes such a bold claim, such a strict formula, he cannot simply take it back or throw on ad hoc (and more importantly: unsupported) exceptions to that formula.
If one cannot simply stop when the line is crossed from unquestionably designed object to the organic being (which creates objects), why is one able to stop when the line is crossed from organic being "creator objects" to supernatural beings(which created the creator objects)?
Wow, now that I set it out this clearly it occurs to me Behe's criticisms of evo come into play against Demski (and syamsu) at this point. While Dembski might wish to say the supernatural is the final box of CSI (as Behe says biochemistry is to biology), in fact the supernatural is simply another "blackbox".
According to Behe's arguments, until we know more about the supernatural, until we investigate it thoroughly, we cannot make claims on it, ESPECIALLY claims that the supernatural is simple (ie that there is one God that does everything and that is it).
Anyway, I hope you get the idea of what Dembski is arguing and so why it suddenly snaps back to strike ID claims that the Xtian god is the IDer of ID theory.
The IDer needs more than God is inherently not an object.
------------------
holmes