1. I would start by asking what is the environment and the composition of the boulder. The simple description of the scenario doesn’t offer the evidence required to make a firm design inference. If this boulder is located on a road in a mountainous region where rockslides are not unheard of then step 1 of the EF would conclude that the law in question is simply gravity. Yes, a false negative is generated but that’s not unexpected.

If instead this boulder is composed of granite and the country road is located along the mostly flat and sandy beaches of FL then the answer for step 1 of the EF would be no. I’m not a geologist but I’ve yet to run into natural formations of granite in Florida that could conceivably roll free…never mind for hundreds of miles on a mostly flat surface. And if this boulder had emerged from the earth due to geological processes one would surely find evidence for that event nearby. Or perhaps this “boulder” is in fact a meteor…but again evidence for such an impact would be found nearby.

One could conceivably posit a chance occurence where by which an airplane or a truck lost its cargo and the boulder came to rest in the middle of the country lane. A design inference doesn’t take place in a void so one could ask around to see if such an event had taken place. A boulder large enough to block an entire road would surely be missed by its owners.

Now for the final step of the EF. As noted the “the position and “function” of the boulder are certainly specified”…if only loosely, I might add. We’re also assuming that all evidence of this boulder’s transportation has been erased so we’re left to consider just the object, its environment, and its circumstances. So we now consider any plausible probability distribution that might account for the boulder in the country lane.

But wait, what about the UPB? The EF is a net. Things that are designed will occasionally slip past the net. We would “prefer” that the net catch more than it does, omitting nothing due to design. But given the ability of design to mimic unintelligent causes and the possibility of our own ignorance passing over things that are designed, this problem cannot be fixed. Nevertheless, we want to be very sure that whatever the net does catch includes ONLY what we intend it to catch, to wit, things that are designed. So even in a scenario with a granite boulder in flat, sandy FL there “might” not be 500 informational bits and ID “might” produce another false negative. I say “might” because I’d first want a trained mathematician do the calculations. I’d also state any conclusion as being more tentative than usual considering additional facts about the case might come to light.

2. As for scenario two, you answered the question yourself. Again, a design inference doesn’t take place in a void and the fact that “shapes are “specified” by the hydrogen bonding capabilities inherent in the “natural” shape of water molecules” would be taken into account. The question would be answered in step 1 of the EF.

I would agree with that. That is is ALL airy speculation, even evolutionary biology and especially common descent.

I am also sure that anyone can fail to understand “No Free Lunch” and “The Design Inference”.

However given the materialistic alternative to ID is “sheer-dumb-luck”, sooner or later people, ie the general population, will start to realize that all objections to ID are nothing more than philosphical whinings.

As for “unambiguously” well with science you give it your best shot with the knowledge/ data available. Then future research can/will either confirm or refute the initial inference.

And BTW ball point pens and flashlights are just as “natural” as a bacterium or a maple tree. That is they exist in nature. And although we can say with confidence that neither ball point pens nor flashlights were produced by nature (acting freely) we have no idea how a bacterium nor a maple tree was originally produced- by nature operating freely or by intentional design.

“There is lots and lots of hard evidence that intelligence agents can create CSI. There is none for NDE mechanisms. Therefore, so far, ID is the best explanation for the CSI in found in bio-forms.”

This is precisely where our seminar this summer at Cornell reached an impass. After reading and analyzing Dr. Dembski’s Design Inference and other papers updating his mathematical analysis of CSI, we concluded that, although his ideas were intriguing, there didn’t seem to be any way of actually applying them to an analysis of either unambiguously design objects, such as a ballpoint pen or a flashlight, and a “natural” object, such as a bacterium or a maple tree, in such a way as to clearly distinguish whether the object is the result of purposeful design or not.

For exampe, consider the following two examples:

(1) a large boulder placed by a human in the middle of a country lane in order to block traffic in the lane

(2) the sum total of all of the snowflakes at the top of Mount Blanc

The first object (the boulder in the lane) is unambiguously the result of purposeful design, yet its complexity (according to Dembski’s mathematics) would identify it otherwise. By contrast, the staggering complexity of the crystalline forms contained in all the snowflakes is beyond computation, yet no one that I know of would argue that they were the result of purposeful design.

Furthermore, “specification” doesn’t solve the problem, as the position and “function” of the boulder are certainly specified, yet according to the mathematics of Dembski’s CSI they would not so qualify. And, folk wisdom to contrary, given a sufficiently large number of snowflakes, the probability that more than one of them will exhibit virtually identical crystalline structures is pretty high (i.e. their shapes are “specified” by the hydrogen bonding capabilities inherent in the “natural” shape of water molecules), and yet once again no one that I know of would argue that such immense complexity was the result of purposeful design, “specified” or not.

In other words, Dr. Dembski’s mathematical models amount to interesting philosophical speculations, without any empirical application that we can infer. Simply “doing the math” isn’t what is going on, here: when one compares the results of an actual experiment with the predicted outcome, to determine if the results are “significant” evidence in favor of one’s hypothesis, one is actually doing science. However, deriving a mathematical model that has no real basis in actual practice nor any application to hypothesis testing isn’t doing science at all.

ID will be ready to take its place among the other sciences when a person schooled in its mathematical methods can unambiguously determine that the boulder in the lane is the result of purposeful design, but the collective crystalline structure snowflakes on Mount Blanc are not. Until then, it’s all airy speculation…

His response is a typical bluff and a poor one at that.

I can demonstrate all day long CSI made by intelligent agents. Can you do the same for NDE? Conjecture doesn’t count as a demonstration.

Houdin: “3) Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.
[Science says they do.]”

No. Darwinian “science” merely conjectures that they do.

There is lots and lots of hard evidence that intelligence agents can create CSI. There is none for NDE mechanisms. Therefore, so far, ID is the best explanation for the CSI in found in bio-forms.

1)High information content (or specified complexity) and irreducible complexity constitute strong indicators or hallmarks of (past) intelligent design.
[Specified complexity and irreducible complexity are produced by Darwinian evolution.]

2) Biological systems have a high information content (or specified complexity) and utilize subsystems that manifest irreducible complexity. [Agreed]

3) Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.
[Science says they do. If ID says otherwise, please show us some evidence to support this claim.]

4) Therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanations for the origin of information and irreducible complexity in biological systems.
Therefore we have two competing claims. One claim is that a designer is responsible for the specified complexity we find in living organisms. The other theory says that variation and natural selection is responsible. We can show you the second theory at work. ID has no examples of the Designer at work.]

Based upon the above post, would it be right to say that you disagree with Gould–and Talk Origins, for that matter–when he famously said that evolution is a scientific fact in the sense that it is “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent?” Just curious.

Dave

(See this link for the source of the quote:

http://www.stephenjaygould.org.....heory.html)

“Would you agree with Ernst Mayr that evolution is a fact?”

As much as I admired Ernst Mayr when he was alive ( met and talked with him when he lectured here at Cornell), and as much as I respect and honor his legacy as a giant in the field of evolutionary biology, I must respectfully disagree with him on this point:

Evolution, like gravitation, is a theory, not a fact.

Facts are what we observe, either directly or with observational aids (such as microscopes, ultracentrifuges, flourescent DNA probes, etc.). By themselves, facts are meaningless. Theories are the generalizations that we infer from facts, generalizations that help us look for more facts, which can then be used to infer yet more generalizations.

At the risk of “talking down” to the readers on this list, consider the following:

I have never tasted an apple before (you may assume that I am a former resident of Arrakis, newly arrived on Terra). I am handed a green apple and (being a person of enlarged curiosity) I taste it; I discover it is sour. What can I conclude from this observation?

Clearly, I cannot conclude that “green apples are sour” because I have only a single “fact” upon which to base this generalization. This is what is known in science as “anecdotal evidence” and is the reason why, fascinating as such anecdotes may be (I remember one about a fellow named Lazarus, for example), they absolutely, positively are not part of what anyone would think of as “science.”

So, out of curiosity, I taste another green apple; it too is sour. I taste another and another, and each is sour. Now what can I conclude about green apples (i.e. about them as a “class” or “category”)? I can now tentatively conclude that “green apples are sour.”

Is this generalization about green apples a “fact?” No, it’s an inference, and like all inferences based on inductive reasoning, it’s necessarily (indeed irreducibly) tentative.

Remember, I haven’t yet tasted a Grannie Smith – if I do, and I discover it’s sweet, what must I do with my inferred generalization? Modify it, of course: if I taste several Grannie Smith apples and all of them are sweet, then I can conclude that “all green apples, except Grannie Smith apples, are sour; Grannie Smith apples are sweet.”

This, in a nutshell, is the difference and the relationship between “facts” (i.e. individual observations) and “theories” (i.e. generalizations arrived at by inductive inference). To sum up: NO THEORIES ARE FACTS (and vice versa, OC), and to assert the contrary is to mistake fundamentally different logical categories.

As perhaps the best example of this process, I invited Hannah Maxson (founder and president of the Cornell IDEA Club) to be a full participant in the evolution/design seminar I facilitated that past summer.

And if anyone missed the UD posts on that:

http://www.uncommondescent.com.....hives/1362

http://www.uncommondescent.com.....hives/1320