Supernatural information supplier

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The creos have said that no new information can ever be added - and even scientists admitt this

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It is true that the creos say this but it is not the case that scientists agree in any sense that would be useful to creationists.Typically when a creationist says that "new information" cannot be added they are bluffing. They literally do not understand what they are saying. I have asked often enough for them to explain and had no real answer to know this for a fact.I have seen two versions which actually try to make an argument.Werner Gitt attempts to redefine information theory to go beyond the syntactic level up to the semantic. But as I have discussed elsewhere on this forum he does so at the cost of implying that the genome contains no "Gitt-information" at all. His argument is irrelevant until it can be shown that the genome does contain "Gitt information" - which entails showing that it was intentionally designed.Lee Spetner attempts to apply actual information theory, but he only uses a partial measure of information by his own criteria - and uses different measures with no clear explanation of why. With no consistent measure or explanation of why he uses the measures he does or even why he chose the examples he did it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his measures are chosen to give the desired result.

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The test is for complexity which would imply it is very unlikely to be the result of natural mechanisms

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Given that Dembski's definition of "complexity " IS a low probability of being the result of natural mechanisms that is misleading to say the least. There is no "implication" in it - you are simply statign the same thing in two different ways. And Dembski's idea of "complexity" has no clear relationship to the way the word is ordinarily used - so you can't jump from ordinary "complexity" to low probablity (that would be equivocation). Unfortunately for ID nobody has worked out a practical way to apply Dembski's method to biology.So for all practical purposes there is no test.

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Dembski himself addresses this issue: "..the biologist is capable of computing probabilities for nucleotide and amino acid sequences exactly Mathematicians have not muscled into the biologist's domain . Rather biologists have uncovered certain facts to which mathematics applies. ...the proper response of biologists is to meet this challenge of mathematics head on. Mathematics does indeed elucidate biological complexity. It is ignorance or dogmatism to claim otherwise."

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Of course this falls well short of addressing the issue.The quote doesn't say what conditions that this "exact" computation applies to - but it certainly doesn't apply to working out the probability of a feature evolving.Secondly how do we work out which amino acid or nucleotide sequences we need to calculate the probability for ? A big problem is that it involves working out which probability Dembski thinks is relevant - and he has not been clear or consistent on the issue. (Can you explain why Dembski did the calculation he did for the E coli flagellum ?)And why would it be the duty of biologists in general to work out how to apply Dembski's method in a practical situation ? Surely it is up to Dembski and the ID movement to show that his method is actually useful. After all they are the ones claimign that it is useful.And in context it must be remembered that Dembski actually has claimed to have successfully used his method to detect design in biology (in the book Intelligent Design published in 1999). Meyer implicitly made the same claim in his paper published earlier this year.(In Meyer's case it was probably just an error on his part - but that just highlights the appalling quality of the work published by the ID movement. They even misrepresent each other's claims).

Gould and Eldredge's P.E. doesn't "augment" the roles of antural selection or mutation at all. At base it starts with standard evolutionary theory on speciation and explains how that should appear in the fossil reocrd.TO the best of my knowledge Prigogine and Kauffman's ideas have more to do with the origin of replicators than any replacement or enhancement of natural selection or mutation.And there's no need to bother with Dembski's math - it's just a theoretical curiosity that has never been applied to any serious problem and isn't likely to be.The ID movement has come up empty. We've seen a lot of bluster, a lot of claims that have turned out to be empty and no sign that ID is even attempting to come up with an alternative theory. There's no ID curriculum - the closest they come is to try to promote Wells' lies to try to undermine the teaching of evolution.And unless you are claiming that we should reject all science except for cosmology there is no reason to reject evolution for not explaining the origin of the universe. The origin of the universe is outside the scope of biology altogether so expecting evolutionary theory to explain it is ridiculous.And there are ways to quantify information - but creationists in general don't use them because they don't help argue against evolution. It is much better to use meaningless rhetorical argments because they sound good but can never be proven false.

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As I have mentioned to Ned, ID just claims to be able to tell if an object or system is designed. It makes no claims on the possibility or
probability of evolution happening.

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That is absolutely wrong. Both Behe's Irreducible Complexity argument and Dembski's CSI are based on claiming that the evolution of particular features is so improbable that we should reject the idea.Indeed CSI is DEFINED as being hugely improbably to occur by any menas other than intelligent intervention. That is what Dembski MEANS by "complex".So ID's claims to identify design in biology ARE claims about the probability of evolution. And so far they are no more than that - just claims with no support.