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.