CSI and Design

Surgeon, heal thyself!The principle of parsimony was on topic, though I'm not sure I can remember why. Oh, right, now I remember - it's the principle of parsimony (aka Occam's Razor) that leads us to reject models of intelligent design, because intelligent design of life is an unobserved and potentially untestable entity, whereas natural processes are both tested and observed.

GR subsumes SR, so time dilation due to relativistic speeds is also GR. E.g. the relativistic corrections required for GPS clocks can be derived using SR for the speed portiion and GR for the gravitational portion, or GR for both (in the latter case the calculation looks totally different from the SR calculation).

But we did start to get way to deep into it.

You're right of course. It was a nit and in a nit picking way WRONG. :

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post by crashfrog
But there's one obvious difference - the other fields mentioned are all studies of human culture and artifacts. If I want to observe qualities about the designer of an arrowhead, all I have to do is look down at my hands. It's easy to infer that something was designed in a world full of entities capable of design.

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You can only infer design if the existence of designers is a given. What makes biology different is that there's no observed designer capable of designing life. You can't infer the existence of a designer only from a speculation that something was designed. You have to have the designer before you can conclude design. The way ID theorists try to do it is backwards.

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Your assumption is that there is no designer, therefore you cannot infer design in the biological world. Dembski's assumption is that where design exists and there is an obvious designer, it can be detected in a quantative way...therefore applying that to the biological world we can also see the marks of design.I would therefore argue that it is the non-ID folk who have the reasoning backwards. Was it Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes who said something to the effect of "Eliminate the impossible and whatever is left, however seemingly improbable must be considered"?

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posted by Rrhain

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Incorrect.

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It is the other way around. When it comes to the biological world around us, we conclude that it was naturalistic and not designed.

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Why? Because the biological world around us shows no evidence of design. Every example of design that we see shows the complete abandonment of systems in favor of more efficient ones. In biology, we find continued adjustment of the system that came before.

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If a horse were designed, it would not have bone splints in its legs that sometimes atavistically develop into extra toes. A horse, after all, is a single-toed animal so why have structures for extra ones?

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Simple: It wasn't designed.

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How arrogant!What we actually find is that time and time again, so-called inefficent designs in the biological world are just labelled as such due to our inability to understand the complexities and the system interactions that show the designs are inevitably better than what we could design. Take the eye for example: For a long time the placement of the photo-sensitive cels behind the layers of retinal cells was considered "backwards" because this is not how "we" would have designed it. It is now well known that the design of the eye is much more advanced, and the placement of the photo-sensitive cells is such that it greatly reduces the "noise" in the light signals and improves overall vision capability.Can you say "Appendix" anyone?In any case, some of the so-called inefficiencies or "mistakes" may well be the result of de-evolution or degeneration of systems which is precisely what we would expect from a creation-fall model.I suppose it comes down to "only time will tell", but this is where we have a percieved advantage...it looks like we only have to wait a lifetime or two, whereas hard-core evolutionists will have to wait a few millenia at least.

Negative. My assumption is only that a designer is not assumed, like the other fields.Clearly you missed my point. Please reconsider in light of this explanation and try again. In other words, it's a circular argument: assume there's a designer, and you can conclude there's a designer.Here's a hint - anytime your conclusion and your premise are the same thing, you've constructed a circular argument.

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posted by PaulK

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So to sum it up.

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Nobody uses the formal form of CSI on a regular basis.

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To sum up...you don't like it, so regardless of the rigour Dembski aplies you'll just dismiss it and therefore not worth examining? Dismiss him as a "creationist" and therefore "obviously" wrong to begin with?

Since I did no such thing, Dembski is proved wrong again.I note that you offer no evidence to counter any of my points. All you do is dismiss my conclusion. And since you offer absolutely no grouns for doing so it seems that your reason for doing so is just that you "don't like it"

you're operating under a false assumption: that science is predisposed against design.but so far, no refutation of natural selection in any case, no matter how small, exists. i haven't read dembski, but i've read part of behe's book, and i found major logical problems less than 40 pages in.ic is far from eliminating natural selection as impossible. as it turns out, it's a pretty standard result of selective evolutionary algorithms in computer simulations.

you know, except for that blind spot.

You know for these comparisons between evolved systems and human designed systems to really be fair we should at least give the engineers a billion years or so grace to allow them to do some catching up. After all we have only been designing and producing photosensitive cells since the last century, and we've been coming on pretty quickly with it too.TTFN,WKP.S. Haven't we already had a couple of millenia pass already with a distinct lack of the always much anticipated rapture? Maybe when the next one comes round three Jesus's will turn up at once. Or perhaps your suggestion of confirmatory proof in a couple of lifetimes was about something else.

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reply by crashfrog

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Negative. My assumption is only that a designer is not assumed, like the other fields.

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Clearly you missed my point. Please reconsider in light of this explanation and try again.

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In other words, it's a circular argument: assume there's a designer, and you can conclude there's a designer.

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Here's a hint - anytime your conclusion and your premise are the same thing, you've constructed a circular argument.

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No, the logic is that since there are cases where we know there is a designer, and we have a method of deducing that design, then we can apply the same reasoning to instances where design is in dispute and provide some objectivitiy to an otherwise subjective discussion.

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reply by PaulK
I note that you offer no evidence to counter any of my points. All you do is dismiss my conclusion. And since you offer absolutely no grouns for doing so it seems that your reason for doing so is just that you "don't like it"

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I dismiss it because Darwin was a disgruntled athiest who was angry at God for his family circumstances, and so was searching for a way to remove him from the equation. He grasped on the notion that Natural Selection + enough time = Creation. However, as we now know, Darwinian evolution is not a viable concept. Natural Selection + time = reduction in gene pool. I don't know that any modern evolutionary scientists hold fast to the pure Darwinian model.

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reply by arachnophilia
you know, except for that blind spot.

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By whose definition? As far as I am aware, most experts agree that the eye system is perfectly designed (or adapted depending on your bias) for the purpose for which it is applied. That is, we require good all round sight with depth perception and a wide range of environmental application. Its a design that provides good robust all round capability, rather than outstanding in one particular area (eg colour, range of view, precision, adaptability, night/day, distance, etc etc etc.)