lpetrich

What is it supposed to be? Have the ID guys tried to give a reasonable definition of it? Or is it as nebulous as the creationists' "kinds"?

Malaclypse the Younger

lpetrich

Supposedly a predictable outcome, without the prediction.

No.

Yes.

Automaton

It's "complexity" that has been designed. So by arbitrarily assigning it to life, they can define life as designed. The argument from specified complexity is circular, and is the same as "life was designed because it is designed". It demonstrates nothing.

Undercurrent

It's very simple. They used to say that any complexity had to have a designer behind it. When it was repeatedly pointed out that a great number of systems are "complex", (and, in fact almost all the systems that aren't "complex" are the ones that are human-designed), they added the "specified" modifier in the hopes that people will believe that they can tell the difference between "specified complexity" and "complexity" to they won't look so damn foolish.

m.

Richiyaado

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Richiyaado ]</p>

S2Focus

Here's how Dembski's EF *really* works:

1) You tell the EF that a certain object is intelligently designed.

2) The EF then tells you that the object is intelligently designed.

It's really quite simple!

Richiyaado

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Richiyaado ]</p>

theyeti

I gave an explanation of what 'specified complexity', as defined by Dembski, is on <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=58&t=000275&p=4" target="_blank">this thread</a>. Scroll about 3/4 of the way down the page. Basically, SC is defined, but it is NOT defined as a property of living things (or anything else for that matter). Instead it's defined as something that's so improbable that it couldn't have occured naturally. And I don't just mean "natural" in the sense of natural vs. manmade; I mean natural vs. supernatural. If humans evolved naturally, then none of our creations, like that perrenial favorite Mt. Rushmore, can be said to have SC. Things that contain SC could not have happend in this universe according to any natural law, known or unknown. So to claim that SC exists and is a property of living things is to beg the question.

Basically, it's a highly confusing way of saying that such and so must have come about by supernatural means (which oddly enough does not imply design -- not everything designed is supernatural, and not everything supernatural, if it exists, is designed). It's not necessary to be that confusing, but I suspect that Dembski prefers it that way.

theyeti

[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: theyeti ]</p>

Richiyaado

[ August 28, 2002: Message edited by: Richiyaado ]</p>

theyeti

This is basically the concept of the EF is as I understand it. But SC/CS/CSI is something which gets thrown in to the "design" (really supernatural) bucket due to low probablilty. I'm pretty sure that SC is defined so that anything with a probability, specified in advance, that is less than 1 in 10^150 is SC. So the EF says that we should take SC and call it "designed".

My sentiments exactly. Claiming SC requires not just rejecting any hypothesis that we have, but rejecting every potential hypothesis, even ones that we haven't thought of yet. For example, if we didn't have a hypothesis about how crystals formed due to electromagnetic interactions, then we would think that they had SC because the chances of the molecules randomly falling into place are much too low. So in this case one could have easily made a false positive due to ignorance. How do we know that making similar claims today won't also generate false positives? We don't. The only way to conclude SC is to assume that no new knowledge about a system will ever be found, which history teaches us is a very bad thing to bet on.

theyeti