Discontinuing research about ID

Maybe the moral is not that people should give up on doing ID research, but that they should give up on doing lousy ID research. Personally I was already convinced that Star Trek was intelligently designed. Now try proving the same thing about, for example, genomes.

I think we would all be prepared to consider the existence of an agency other than chance that produces Star Trek scripts. Have you considered the possibility that it might be the scriptwriters?

On a theological note, I have to wonder why God is exerting his miraculous powers to introduce coincidences into Star Trek scripts rather than, y'know, doing something either (a) useful or (b) apparent to someone who isn't you. As signs and wonders go, this is disappointingly futile and unimpressive; one wonders if this is really the best he can do.

Twelve bar blues. Thousands of songs with identical chord progressions. That can't be by chance, so I guess goddidit.---Also, you didn't predict anything, did you? This is a flaming case of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, isn't it?

Well, every word of every script is in fact written by a human being, isn't it? You do not propose, do you, that angels are carrying Star Trek scripts down from heaven written on stone tablets and delivering them to the series producer? Hence, if God does have a hand in the scripts, it would be by over-riding the free will of the scriptwriters, but in such a way that they don't notice --- he forces them to write such-and-such a character into a scene, and he deceives them into thinking that it was their own idea.Which again would leave us with some interesting theological questions, such as what the fuck is God up to?

If you can't think of a reason why God would do it, then the existence of the alleged anomalies is not a prediction of the hypothesis that God exists.By analogy, suppose you wake up one morning and find that your house has been egged. From this, you infer the existence of a volcano in your neighborhood as the cause. Then it would be reasonable for people to ask: "Why would a volcano cause your house to be covered in egg?" If you have no sensible answer, then there's no good reason to infer the volcano. If it was molten lava, you'd have a point, since we expect volcanos to cover things in lava. But not in egg.Similarly, we do not expect God to introduce (alleged) statistical anomalies into Star Trek, so if we find such anomalies we are not justified in inferring God as a cause. If we saw a series of overt miracles tending to the well-being of the Jewish people, then we would infer the God of the Bible as a cause, since that is the sort of thing we'd expect him to do. But meddling with Star Trek scripts is not.

"Could" is not good enough. I could egg your house, but if it happened, why would you infer that I did it?

It's not an answer to my question at all.

Yeah, the Sharpshooter Fallacy. But why limit ourselves to natural explanations? I'm leaning towards the hypothesis that it was caused by three magic invisible unicorns with a keen interest in science fiction. You should be more open-minded.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

No it isn't. Here's a short list of other things that aren't answers.* 17.
* Marmalade.
* Yes, but only if you use plenty of lubricant.
* Wuthering Heights.
* Excuse me, my yak has overheated.

Wow, you're saying that there's a process other than chance involved in the production of Star Trek scripts? And there was I thinking they were produced by randomly picking words out of a dictionary blindfold. But now I've heard your theory it makes so much more sense.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I have a Ph.D. in math. However, it seems superfluous to check your calculations when everything else you're saying is nonsense. If you figure out that the total number of human legs is 18, based on the premise that the world population is six and that every person has three legs, then it's not your arithmetic that's your problem.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Let me try and set out the problems in your work as I see them. (1) Inappropriate use of statistical methodsStatistical methods are good for sorting out signal from noise, causation from randomness. But you are for some reason trying to do something else: to sort out a signal from a signal, and an intelligent cause from an intelligent cause. To apply statistical methods, you have to assume that the known intelligent cause is in effect a random process, and that the known signal is in effect noise. This is not going to work, or to convince anyone.Why not work with a sequence that is in fact randomly generated? Try tossing a coin a hundred times, but first pray to your "triune god" that it should always come up heads. When you can get that to work, let's talk. (2) The Sharpshooter FallacyCalculating the odds of you finding the patterns you did in fact find is the wrong calculation. What you need to do is to calculate the chances of getting any pattern that you'd have found equally impressive.By analogy, suppose a guy prays for a miracle and then draws four cards from a deck, and they come out as a 5, 6, 7, 8, in that order. "A miracle!", he cries, "what are the odds of that!" And he calculates the odds and they are indeed quite long. But he'd also have been equally impressed if it had been 2, 3, 4, 5, or 2, 4, 6, 8, or all the kings, or all the 7s, or his birthdate, and so on. What he should be calculating are the odds of him getting anything that would make him shout "A miracle!" These odds against this are much shorter. (3) Hindsight and biasYou got to decide yourself what would fall into what category. There's no reason a priori why we should class Romulans with the color silver, or that lack of knowledge should be classed with the number 4. You didn't decide on this classification scheme before you'd ever watched Star Trek, did you?You then get to decide for yourself what things fall into these categories. I just looked on YouTube for full episodes of ST:TNG. As you know, YouTube represents every video with a representative still picture. In every one I could identify something black. Do you have a rigid objective criterion for when this counts as P.BW?This is a problem. Given the latitude to create arbitrary classes ad hoc and to decide for myself what falls into those classes, I could prove any number of things similar or indeed identical according to my classification scheme. (4) The theological / statistical problemFinally, as I have pointed out, this isn't remotely evidence for a triune god, because we have no prior expectation that this is the sort of thing he'd do.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Let's look at the sort of decisions you get to make. You have shown the nature of these decision more clearly in your appendices than in your main articles, so I'll look at that: Now, there are so many subjective decisions here that it is going to be boring and tedious for me to list them all. I shall focus on the way you award + and - to each person.Jesus leaves the house of Jarius. Now, it's sad when you say goodbye to a friend. So this is arguably P.Je-, but you didn't class it as such.Now, Jarius had as his houseguest the most amazing person who ever lived. who was God incarnate, and now he's leaving him behind, never to return. Isn't that P.Ja-? But you don't class it as such.Then he meets the two blind men. You class this as P.B1-, PB2-, although the text doesn't say that they were suddenly struck blind at this point. They were not "negatively affected", they already had their handicap.Arguably you could have classed this as P.B1+, P.B2+. These blind men have met Jesus. What could be more amazing? They are positively affected. But you write it down as - because they've been blind for a long time, rather than writing + because they've met God incarnate and the one person who can heal them.Then the first blind man glorifies Jesus, calling him "Son of David" and you don't class it as P.Je+, even though you're going to class it as P.Je+ a few sentences later. I'll come back to this, it's the most flagrant example of your methods.Then the first blind man says "Oh! our saviour, I am able to see you." And according to your classification, this is not P.Je+. Jesus has successfully healed the blind man, and is praised for it as "our saviour", and yet that's not a + for Jesus, according to you.Then the second blind man exclaims "What a miracle? I am able to see." Stilll not P.Je+.Then Jesus says "Do not tell this to any one what I had done." Doesn't that count as P.B1-, or P.B2-, or most especially P.Al-?Then Jesus leaves. He does so, presumably, because he wants to, and yet you classify this as P.Je-. Why? And consequently, the blind men are deprived of his company, their savior, God incarnate, and yet you don't class this as P.B1- and P.B2-.Then the first blind man remarks that "Jesus cured us from blindness." You have decided that this should be P.Je+, but the point at which the first blind man said "Oh! our saviour, I am able to see you." is not P.Je+. Apparently when the blind man looks back at his cure, when Jesus is no longer there, that's P.Je+, but when he acknowledges his cure when Jesus is there, that's not P.Je+. Surely if anything it should be the other way round.Then blind man #2 remarks that "He is my lord, I glorified him [P.Je+] he is the one who gave me vision by grace." So this counts as P.Je+ because blind man #2 is reminiscing abut how he glorified Jesus in the past, but it didn't could as P.Je+ when blind man #2 actually glorified him by saying "What a miracle? I am able to see." And also, it doesn't count as P.B2+ when he reminisces about Jesus healing him. P.Je+, yes. P.B2+, no. When he says (looking back) "I glorified him", that's P.Je+. But when he says (looking back) Jesus "gave me vision by grace" that's not P.B2+. Why not?So, there are two things that we might think about this:THING 1: Perhaps your patterns would work equally either way. Perhaps you'd be able to find a pattern just as well if we declared that Jesus leaving the house of Jarius was P.Ja- and that the second blind man remembering his cure was P.B2+, and so on. But in that case your pattern is defined so broadly that it is not strange or at all impressive that we can find the pattern.THING 2: But perhaps your pattern is very narrowly defined. But in that case, we would suspect that you have made your decisions in order to fit the pattern. As I have shown, many of your assignments of + and - could plausibly be made very differently. It's not cut and dried like deciding whether a coin came down heads or tails. You get to decide in a fairly arbitrary way whether each instance should be classified as +, -, or neutral. Given this freedom of decision, you can make the decisions which fit your pattern. In that case it is not strange or at all impressive that you can find your pattern.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

So you are still in the position of trying to separate a signal from a signal, and trying to distinguish intelligent design from intelligent design.Why don't you look at a source that we would truly expect to be random? Take your classes of P.Ya and M10 and P.BW and so forth, write them on bits of paper, put them into a bowl, draw them randomly out of the bowl, and see if you get the same results. A fortiori, if God can deprive the scriptwriters of Star Trek of their free will in order to create statistical anomalies, he could do the same for you. But the stuff after "because" is not a reason. God could as well fiddle with the results of a coin toss as with anything else.But if you really don't like "two digits", then again I propose the test I just proposed. Write "P.Pi" and "M5" and "P.Ya" and so forth on bits of paper and draw them randomly. See how that turns out. I don't think you understand science at all. Read my comment again. But the pattern was created so broadly as to fit the data source it was created for. Once you have created something so broad and loose that it will fit seasons 1, 3 and 4, I would not be at all surprised if it fit season 5 as well. By analogy, if you can find something that is true of three randomly selected men, let's call them Tom, Dick, and Harry, then I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was also true of George. We would indeed expect God to perform healing miracles, since that is exactly what he is reputed to do. According to the Bible, God does indeed perform miraculous healing as a result of prayers issued by the faithful. I do expect that if Jesus was God, then his statement "Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven" would be true. I do not expect that if there was a god, he'd spend his time fiddling with Star Trek scripts when no-one even petitioned him to do so.