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.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Let’s take that same string, and put it through a standard encryption algorithm, and see what we get.
Here are five alphabetic strings. Four of them are just random strings of letters. The fifth string is an English sentence encoded using a standard cryptographic technique that does not require the use of a computer.
String 1: qxoigpfrrqnglbn
String 2: jezpnmtottrtwci
String 3: zzvxtodudponqxb
String 4: rgsojkybqxjdqwu
String 5: ahxfsfyevzyozcg
Can you identify the designed string, and tell me how you used Dembski’s “explanatory filter” or any other technique proposed by ID advocates to identify it? Mind you, I am not asking you to decrypt the designed string. I am only asking you to use Dembski’s techniques (or some other technique of your choosing) to do what he claims to be able to do: to detect design.
The encrypted string is every bit as “designed” after it was encrypted as it was before the encryption. In fact, we might say that it has gone through an additional design step. Likewise, this string has the same information content as it did before it was encrypted: it carries the exact same information as it did before.
So, can you determine which string carries “specified complexity”?
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None of the encrypted keys conform to an independent pattern (English). They have no function any more, they are NOT designed in the way intended.
In the biological world, the independent pattern is biological function. If the sequence has biological function then it conforms to a pattern of having biological function. If you “encrypted” a sequence of amino acids (how would that even work?) then the sequence would no longer fold up into a functional protein, just like the encrypted strings no longer have function as English sentences.
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The encrypted string most certainly has function. It has the function of communicating a message to the intended audience, exactly like Dembski’s example from the Gettysburg Address has the function of communicating a message to the intended audience. Moreover, it has the additional function of obscuring that message from the audience for whom it is not intended.
The encrypted string also has a definite pattern–if it did not, then the intended audience would not be able to read it.
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I want to play Scrabble for money with you, dude. I’ll just dump my letters on the board in any way I want and then claim that the letters are “encrypted”.
The encrypted string communicates NO MESSAGE TO ANYONE unless it is first decrypted. It has to be decrypted in order to fulfill the function of communicating because only the decrypted string conforms to an independent pattern that is detached from the physical medium – namely, the English language. The encrypted string does not conform to the English language.It has no function unless you add decryption software, which is itself DESIGNED with complex specified computer code. If there were no complex, specified computer code, then the encrypted string would convey NO MEANING. So you are just smuggling the design out of the message and into the decryption software.
Please explain how encryption applies to concept of specified complexity in biology. What is the biological function of an “encrypted” sequence of amino acids? What does that even mean?
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Just to play the devil’s advocate.
If the chances of something happening is one in a zillion. Whatever combination happens to randomly fall into place has the same odds as anything else. For example, when buying a lotto ticket you have to match 7 numbers. It is just as likely that the numbers 1234567 happen as any other formation. If say, 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 happened you could think that the odds are so remote as to not happen by random chance but it did and it is just as likely a combo as anything else.
Having said that, I think the odds argument (put forth by Hoyle) is a great argument but only as a support argument. Wintery, you said “how would that even work?” as almost a secondary thought. I think this is a much more solid argument. Never mind the sequence of acids, where did they come from? What random processes “created” these little nuggets of life? The cell totally smashes naturalistic explanations for life. With enough information to fit in a library, to the cell membrane, to the translation process of the information, to the ability to transform energy, to the instinct to search out for energy and move away from danger… believing in naturalistic explanations requires one to accept way too many brute facts. I don’t have faith like that!
Reminds me of something Paul said,
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools,”
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The difference with Lotto is that the chance of a person winning it is not mathematically impossible.
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Thanks, Wintery! This lays it out nicely.
Justin: The lotto ticket is complex, but not specified.
Bobby: The whole point of encryption is to take information and turn it into junk, such that the information can only be retrieved by decryption.
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True story. Years ago I built a database system for this company.
One day, a user tried to explain to me about an incorrect data entry. He blamed it on the cleaning lady, saying that she must’ve accidentally entered his (at least 6 digits) password and entered the incorrect data (which was a meaningful data even though incorrect) when she cleaned the keyboard.
Being a theist, I didn’t buy that excuse.
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Stephen C. Meyer does a fabulous job addressing the difference between information and specified complexity in his book Signature in the Cell.
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