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Member (Idle past 1424 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Intelligent Design Creationism | |||||||||||||||||||
JonF Member (Idle past 199 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
If I appear to "leave" a discussion or thread it is most likely because there is nothing worth responding to. Such as your failure to respond to Message 6? Sure, you stop posting because there's nothing to respond to ... or maybe because you've run out of psuedoscientific gibberish. From
TheologyWeb Campus
(which was not addressed to JP, but is relevant):
quote:
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JonF Member (Idle past 199 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
Your reference, by Casey Luskin, does not contain any examples of the application of the filter (whic is whaat was requested). It merely contains a claim that applications exist, with no references at which one could verify or debunk that claim.
Granted, the explantory filter may not be 100% perfect, but science is a constant process of revising and improving your work, as perfection in science is the unreachable holy grail. The EF is an abject failure. A few of the fatal flaws:
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JonF Member (Idle past 199 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
I will admit that it is hard to find published examples (but that's an entirely different subject, or maybe I'm just not looking in the right spots), but a biology class wouldn't have the time to analyze such applications case-by-case. For the purpose of biology class, it would probably be enough to know that the explanatory filter exists, explain how it works, and then know that people do use it (and then dig up an example or two of it). However, we're still looking for evidence that people use it and that there exist any examples of it.
It's quite odd. Your evidence refers to the "straw man," but the use of the bacterial flagellum example to prove that it's impossible to calculate the probability of chance is by itself a straw man. Really. Exactly in what way does the reference misrepresent what Dembski did?
OK, maybe Dembski did mess up his calculations with the flagellum, but does that mean we can't calculate the chance of anything? No, it doesn't mean that. It just proves that nobody's demonstrated such a calculation yet. It's the fact that doing a meaningful calculation requires knowing all ways that any equivalent system could (not necessarily did) arise is what means that we can't calculate the probability of any protien or biological system arising by chance. Nobody has the required data.
Your comment on assuming design by default doesn't hold much weight as well. I could easily turn this and argue that evolution assumes chance by default, so this is non-unique. Well,your turning around would be wrong. First, the theory of evolution is not an eliminative process like the EF. Second, in all science the default result is "insufficient information to reach a conclusion". That's why the EF isn't science.
Or, I could point out that specified complexity is a two-fold criterion (speficied and complex). Irrelevant.
Considering that something has to meet a criterion to be design, I wouldn't exactly call that design by default. In the EF something does not have to meet any criterion to be called design. It must instead fail to meet the "regularity" and "chance" criteria. That's a very different kettle of fish. If the EF were to be formulated as a real test it would be something like:
Since the last possible conclusion of Dembski's EF is not "insufficient information to reach a conclusion", it's snake oil. No matter what the nature of the tests are, the wrong last possible conclusion dooms it. Added by edit: The EF just as flawed as I've said, and more. I've just listed the fatal flaws that are easily explained and established in a short message. There's plenty more fatal flaws that are more complex.
Some of the finer details of it will be hashed out and debated by scientists, but you can't put up a good enough case that the explanatory filter is so flawed that we can't teach it at all in the classroom. We don't teach unsupported unscientific hypotheses, which a kind way to characterize the EF, as science in public schools. When and if it gets formulated as a scientific hypothesis, when and if it is tested against the real-world evidence and passes the test, we'll teach it as science. Don't hold your breath. This message has been edited by JonF, 04-19-2005 09:25 PM
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JonF Member (Idle past 199 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
This is basically a repeat of what you just said in the last post, and what I refuted in my last post. I'm not going to refute this again. It is indeed a repeat of what I have asked before, but you have not provided any refutiation or answer to the question. You claimed that people are using the EF, and your reference to someone else who makes the same unsupported claim is not evidence for the claim. Who is using the EF?. The way to support your claim is to proivide a reference to someone who is using the EF. You haven't even tried.
Here's what the evidence says: Dembski can not calculate the probability of chance for the backerial flagellum. Here's what you say: Noone can calculate the probability of chance for anything. As I clearly stated, twice before and now for the third time, I do not claim that Dembski's failure to calculate the probability of chance for the bacterial flagellum leads to the conclusion that no-one can calculate the probability of chance for the bacterial flagellum. It does not lead to the conclusion that no-one can calculate the the probability of chance for the bacterial flagellum. What does lead to the conclusion that no-one can calculate the probability of chance for the bacterial flagellum is the fact that nobody has the data required to do so. All you have to do is demonstrate that data, as I discuss below.
Although there are a lot of possibilities as to how something could have happened, many of these can be discounted because the probability is so minutely small (it's like we have a million grains of sand). What we instead must consider is the more probably ideas. Sure, we lose some accuracy doing this, but if the calculations lead to a 10*-20 probability when we only need a 10*-10, then that margin of error would be a nonfactor. Interesting assertion. What evidence and/or calculations do you have to support it? How do you know what are the most probable dseas? What are the most probable ideas for the bacterial flagellum arising by chance, and why are these the most probable ideas?
Irrelevant.
I'm glad to see that you can refute what I said in a one-word, unexplained response I expanded on that one word, and explained exactly why your response was irrelevant, in the rest of the post (to which you did not respond). As I wrote:
quote: See that "No matter what the nature of the tests"? That's why the complexity/specification criterion is irrelevant.
Sure, you can list these flaws, we can debate them, but are any of them a true science-stopper? Yup. Absolutely, unless the EF is totally reformulated, and maybe not even then. As I wrote,
quote: And the total inability to get past the second test in the filter also dooms it. And there are other fatal flaws, that are too complex and technical to go into detail here. See The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance:
quote: and Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's "Complex Specifed Information":
quote: There's a difference between being not perfect and being fatally flawed. Yup. But the EF is fatally flawed, as I pointed out over several messages now. And your only response has been more unsupported assertions and more failure to even try to support your previous asserions.
Neither evolution or ID are perfect, so we give them their proper treatment and teach the controversy in our schools. Evolution is so far the best and only scientific theory extant. There's nothing else to teach. There's no scientific theory of ID. There's no applications of the EF; you have failed to come up with one despite repeated requests. There's no scientific controversy, just a few "Christian" sects trying to force their religion into science classes; note that they've totally given up on establishing ID as science and are concentrating on school boards. There's no disagreement among experts.
However, to exclude a certain form or origins science does not just mean that it's inferior, it means that it is completey and undoubtedly unscientific. You can nitpick mistakes with the EF here or there, but you can't prove it be completely and undoubtedly unscientific. Sorry, the burden of proof is on you. You want the EF accepted as science, you (or the ID community) need to demonstrate that it is such and realistically address the criticisms. Not with mere assertions, not with packing school boards with creationists, but in the arena of science.
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JonF Member (Idle past 199 days) Posts: 6174 Joined: |
So you want to claim without any evidence to prove this that Luskin lied and that all of these examples were fabricated? We don't know. Remember the default "insufficient information to reach a conclusion"? Well, we have insufficient information to reach a conclusion. Maybe he lied, maybe he's 100% right, maybe he's honestly mistaken, maybe he's stretching the truth a bit to make a better story, mayybe all sorts of things I haven't thought of. What we do know is
It's just another guy making an unsuported assertion. The fact that someeone else makes the same unsupported asserion that you do is not evidecne for your assertion.
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