I thought I would give a comment by a poster with the handle “ericB” a little more publicity as it was buried deep in an old thread where it was unlikely to be seen by passing “materialists / evolutionists”.

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Calling all evolutionists / materialists! Your help is needed! Alan Fox has not been able to answer a particular challenge, but perhaps you know an answer.

The issue is simple and the bar is purposely set low. The question is whether there exists one or more coherent scenarios for the creation of a translation system by unguided chemicals. Continue reading →

In a recent exchange at Uncommon descent I was referred by the “ineffable” Philip Cunningham (BA77) to an article at Evolution News and Views by the Discovery Institute attorney, Casey Luskin. Onward links lead me on to his Amazon review of Meyer’s “Darwin’s Doubt”. The article appears to be a response to a comment appended to the review by Nick Matzke [ETA Apparently the commenter Nick is not Nick Matzke, as Nick Matzkze points out below.]:

What’s the “scientific theory of ID”? Who or what is the designer and how can we tell? What did it do and how can we tell? How did it do it and how can we tell? Where did it do it and how can we tell? When did it do it and how can we tell?

Continue reading →

Never one to turn down an opportunity for learning, I took the opportunity to read VJ Torley’s analysis of a clip of Stephen Fry on the wonderful ‘miracle of the herrings.’

Since I already know that people (even game show researchers and VJ Torley) can get facts wrong, and I am confident that most at TSZ don’t give a flying fish about the infallibility of Stephen Fry or anyone else, I’ll stick to what Torley’s article reveals regarding miracles, canonization, the Catholic Church, life, and everything.

1. The miracles performed by a candidate for sainthood don’t have to be authentic miracles.
2. One “miracle” is not sufficient to be declared a saint. Two inauthentic “miracles” are the minimum.
3. The probabilty of an erroneous witness report isn’t too high.
4. If only Hume had realised that witnesses are generally reliable, he would never had made his argument against the authenticity of miracles.
5. From 3, the probability that the testimony of a reliable witness is in error is 0.001
6. It takes 8 independent witnesses to warrant belief in a miracle.

Allowing me to conclude:

Sensory illusions are rare.
The statue of Fortuna really did speak (Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus 37-38)
Asclepius healed thousands.
Melinda Braithwate in the fourth year (eighth grade) really would have ‘done it’ for a pound.
Darren Clowes really was eaten by wolves (also eighth grade).
Belief in many manifestations of the divine is warranted.

…I am now a Hindu.

Thanks VJ Torley!

My only confusion is as to why saints have to be attributed miracles at all, if the miracles don’t have to be real ones.

I just checked out Seth Lloyd’s paper, Computational Capacity of the Universe,  and find, interestingly (although I now remember that this has been mentioned before), that his upper limit on the number of possible operations is 10^120 (i.e. 400 bits) rather than 10^150 (the more generous 500 bits usually proposed by Dembski).  However, what I also found was that his calculation was based  on the volume of the universe within the particle horizon, which he defines as:

…the boundary between the part of the universe about which we could have obtained information over the course of the history of the universe and the part about which we could not.

In other words, that 400 bit limit is only for the region of the universe observable by us, which we know pretty well for sure must be a minor fraction of the total. However, it seems that a conservative lower limit on the proportion of the entire universe that is within the particle horizon is 250, and could be as much as 10^23, so that 400 bit limit needs to be raised to at least 100,000, and possibly very much more.

Which rather knocks CSI out of the water, even if we assume that P(T|H) really does represent the entire independent random draw configuration space, and is the “relevant chance hypothesis” for life.

heh.

But I’m no cosmologist – any physicist like to weigh in?

cross posted at UD

VJ has written, by his standards, a short post distinguishing order from complexity (a mere 1400 words). To sum it up – a pattern has order if it can be generated from a few simple principles. It has complexity if it can’t.  There are some well known problems with this – one of which being that it is not possible to prove that a given pattern cannot be generated from a few simple principles.  However, I don’t dispute the distinction. The curious thing is that Dembski defines specification in terms of a pattern that can  generated from a few simple principles. So no pattern can be both complex in VJ’s sense and specified in Dembski’s sense.

At the heart of this the problem is that Dembski has written a paper that most IDers would find unacceptable if they took the trouble to understand it.  But they don’t quite have the courage to say they disagree. That is why this comment from  Eric Anderson made me chuckle:

Second, why is it so hard for some people to get it through their heads that the issue is not “order”? Is this really hard to understand, or just that so many people haven’t been properly educated about the issues?

I wonder which one it is in William Dembski’s case?

Appendix

TJ has written a 4000 word appendix to this post. I haven’t time to read it all but it appears that he accepts that some of his original OP was wrong. It is rare for people to admit they are wrong in heated Internet debates so all credit to him. In particular he appears to accept that there is considerable confusion about order, complexity, and specification within the ID community (why else the need to propose his own definitions?).

What would be really nice would a similar admission from Eric Anderson that the ID community needs to sort out its own definitions before complaining that others are incapable of understanding them.