Is ID Scientific? (was "Abusive Assumptions")

Isn't it interesting that despite objecting to people suggesting that you have been decieved by propaganda all you can do to support ID is - quote propaganda.Funny, that.

That does happen, but I rather doubt that it is the case for the CUP volumeAnd they are leaving out one rather important detail on the Michigan book - it was published in the "Rhetoric and Public Affairs" series.

Abuse ? Let's be clear that instead of evidence you quoted unsupported assertions from ID supporters. There's nothing frivolous or crude in pointing that out. If you want "crude" I can easily find worse from prominent ID supporters.Let's face it - it is certainly not a problem with this forum that people are allowed to express views you dislike. Nor is it a problem with this forum that you are unable to refute those views, even though the onus is properly on you to do so. Those are your problems and getting angry will not help you solve them,

You are right to say that "specified complexity" is vague - in fact it has two quite distinct meanings.In the first sense it is true that we find it in life - but that is not surprising. Indeed, life is necessarily both complex and specified and scientists were talking in those terms before the current ID movement started. Evolution is a pretty good explanation for this sort of specified complexity so it isn't much of a point for ID in that case either.In the second sense coined by Dembski, it would help ID. It's just that nobody has actually FOUND it in life. Dembski's most famous attempt was a complete botch (he didn't do ANY of the calculations he needed to do, and the calculation he did do was irrelevant).For some reason ID supporters almist never boother to explain which definition they are using.

Well the general use of the term was never intended to be a strict quantitative measurement.Dembski's usage is strictly two-valued - yes or no. However, it does require a measure of Specified Information which would be exactly what you ask for (it reqires defining a bound and if the Specified Information measure exceeds that bound it is dubbed "Complex"). Unfortunately actually performing the measure for non-trivial examples seems to be impractical which makes Dembski's idea a theoretical curiosity at best.

Dembski deals with that objection quite simply. His measure of "information" is improbability (or to be more precise the base 2 logarithm of the probability multiplied by -1, so the sign is positive).He then tries to calculate a universal probability bound such that it is unlikely that any event so improbable will happen even once in a time confortably greater than the current age of the universe. And that is the usual limit used for "complexity".

You've pretty much got it. As I mentioned earlier there has been only one "serious" published attempt to apply Dembski's definition to biology. And that was a total disaster.