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Author Topic:   Detecting Design
Percy
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Posts: 22359
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 4.7


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Message 30 of 59 (542469)
01-10-2010 8:29 AM
Reply to: Message 29 by Brad H
01-10-2010 4:21 AM


Re: identifying design based on knowledge of the designer
Hi Brad H,
What you're describing is not the ability to recognize signs of intelligence, but just the ability to recognize signs of people. And even recognizing signs of people isn't a sure thing. Drift wood in the shape of "Marooned...send help" is obviously a sign of people to you and me, but what if it was expressed using the Arabic alphabet (Arabric reads right to left):
حيلة ... يبعث المساعدة
Not so easy to recognize as the product of people, is it? And someone raised in an Arabic country would likely have difficulty recognizing "Marooned...send help" as an indication of people, too.
What you have is an interesting hypothesis, one first clearly articulated by William Paley back in the early 1800's. He stated that the involvement of an intelligence should be accompanied by certain recognizable signs. Dembski attempted to quantify the process of recognizing intelligence involvement, but with math that, to put it kindly, he has not formally submitted to the scientific community for the peer review that all scientific contributions must undergo.
So if there are no generally accepted principles for how one recognizes the influence of an intelligence in nature, how does one recognize the intelligent influences in DNA, particularly when natural processes already account for everything we find in DNA?
One of Dembski's claims about DNA is that it is not only complex, but also specified. I agree with him, it is both complex and specified, and we already know what did the specifying: eons of trial and error experimentation using mutation and natural selection.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo.

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 Message 29 by Brad H, posted 01-10-2010 4:21 AM Brad H has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22359
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 4.7


Message 43 of 59 (542676)
01-11-2010 8:02 PM
Reply to: Message 42 by Tanndarr
01-11-2010 6:45 PM


Re: identifying design based on knowledge of the designer
Tanndarr writes:
ID uses the term designer to mean creator. Their designer never stops at a design like Leonardo daVinci and his air-screw helicopter doodles. The ID designer doesn't leave designs in the form of sketches or anything that represents the idea of a thing, just the thing itself. There's no wood chips on the shop floor or meeting minutes or anything to show there was actually a design.
I have a nomenclature question. What definition of the word "design" is in play in the term "intelligent design?" Is it the "intent" definition? Is it the "devised within the mind" definition? Is it the "carefully planned out in advance before constructing" definition? Or doesn't it matter?
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 42 by Tanndarr, posted 01-11-2010 6:45 PM Tanndarr has replied

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