All posts by Wintery Knight

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Commentary

How can you tell whether something is designed or not?

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In honor of William Dembski’s debate tonight at 8 PM Eastern time, I present this article from Access Research Network.

Excerpt:

Instead of looking for such vague properties as “purpose” or “perfection”—which may be construed in a subjective sense—[intelligent design] looks for the presence of what it calls specified complexity, an unambiguously objective standard.

That term sounds like a mouthful, but it’s something we can all recognize without effort. Let’s take an example.

Imagine that a friend hands you a sheet of paper with part of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address written on it:

FOURSCOREANDSEVENYEARSAGOOURFATHERSBROUGHTFORTHONTHISCONTINENTANEWNATIONCONCEIVEDINLIBERTY …

Your friend tells you that he wrote the sentence by pulling Scrabble pieces out of a bag at random.

Would you believe him? Probably not. But why?

One reason is that the odds against it are just too high. There are so many other ways the results could have turned out—so many possible sequences of letters—that the probability of getting that particular sentence is almost nil.

But there’s more to it than that. If our friend had shown us the letters below, we would probably believe his story.

ZOEFFNPBINNGQZAMZQPEGOXSYFMRTEXRNYGRRGNNFVGUMLMTYQXTXWORNBWIGBBCVHPUZMWLONHATQUGOTFJKZXFHP …

Why? Because of the kind of sequence we see. The first string fits a recognizable pattern: It’s a sentence written in English, minus spaces and punctuation. The second string fits no such pattern.

Now we can understand specified complexity. When a design theorist says that a string of letters is specified, he’s saying that it fits a recognizable pattern. And when he says it’s complex, he’s saying there are so many different ways the object could have turned out that the chance of getting any particular outcome by accident is hopelessly small.

Thus, we see design in our Gettysburg sentence because it is both specified and complex. We see no such design in the second string. Although it is complex, it fits no recognizable pattern. And if our friend had shown us a string of letters like “BLUE” we would have said that it was specified but not complex. It fits a pattern, but because the number of letter is so short, the likelihood of getting such a string is relatively high. Four slots don’t give you as many possible letter combinations as 143, which is the length of our Gettysburg sentence.

So that’s the basic notion of specified complexity.

This is something you really need to understand in order to understand the arguments from biological building blocks and biological information in DNA.

Videos

Democrat Congressman says that country’s debt is a “myth”

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Wow. Watch this video of Rep. Phil Hare (D-IL).

Transcript:

And we will see a terrible price that we will pay years down the road for letting our children down when they need us the absolute most.  I’m not going to be part of that, so every minute that I have here is going to be spent debunking the myth that this country’s in debt and we just can’t spend.

He says that we have to keep spending… for the children?

Um. The annual budget deficit under Obama is about 1.5 trillion. The national debt has increased 3 trillion so far under Obama to 13.3 trillion. Our total GDP as a nation is only 14.5 trillion. By next year, our national debt will be higher than our GDP. The children are inheriting a lower quality of life than we have today. They’ll have to pay for our spending today.

Oh, here is his previous video:

In which he says that he doesn’t care that whether health care mandates are unConstitutional.

News

Israeli education minister dismisses chief scientist for asking questions

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Scary story from Haaretz.

Excerpt:

The Education Ministry’s chief scientist sparked a furor among environmental activists and scholars Saturday with remarks questioning the reliability of evolution and global warming theory. The comments from Dr. Gavriel Avital, the latest in a series of written and oral statements casting doubts on the fundamental tenets of modern science, led several environmentalists to call for his dismissal.

“If textbooks state explicitly that human beings’ origins are to be found with monkeys, I would want students to pursue and grapple with other opinions. There are many people who don’t believe the evolutionary account is correct,” Avital said yesterday.

[…]Avital, who received bachelor’s and advanced degrees from Haifa’s Technion Institute of Technology, previously directed the aeromechanical arm of electronic-systems manufacturer Elbit.

Avital is the ministry’s first chief scientist to be drawn from outside the community of education scholars. A 20-year Likud member, he represented the party in an unsuccessful 2006 Knesset run.

[…]”Why are environmental organizations pressuring the government over alternative energy that is both unattainable and probably very costly? These questions cannot be avoided,” Avital wrote. “The answers to them are likely to surprise and possibly disappoint. But the moment science is enlisted for political ends – that is, in the name of ideology – questions arise as to the scientific basis of environmental organizations.”[…]In an article published last year in the newspaper Israel Hayom and other media outlets, Avital wrote, “There is no scientific proof that the rise in carbon dioxide leads to a rise in temperatures – I would recommend to scientists not to join this intimidation campaign, which is entirely predicated on the basis of dubious science.”

Now, let’s take a look at the “arguments” of the people who are trying to silence him.

Prof. Hava Yablonka of Tel Aviv University said Avital’s statements are tantamount “to saying that space should be given in textbooks to the view that the earth is flat and the sun revolves around it. It’s astonishing that the chief scientist of a government ministry can say such bizarre things.”

“Avital must resign from his position,” said Dr. Lia Ettinger, academic supervisor of the Heschel Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership in Tel Aviv. The chief scientist’s remarks, she said, “are similar to the Health Ministry’s chief scientist declaring that all the research linking cigarettes with cancer are nonsense. …Avital has removed himself from the consensus,” she said.

Notice how they take their questionable theory and say that it is similar to a completely unrelated theory for which we have observational confirmation. And then they say he stupid for not equating the two things, which is the very point under debate – is there evidence for the weaker theories like there is for the stronger theories, which he obviously accepts? Notice that none of the people who are trying to silence him brought up arguments. They just commit the fallacy of begging the question, and then they demand that he agree with them. It really just amounts to insulting him rather than refuting him. Is that science?