I find it ironic that they rank Expelled as #12 in the Christian genre when the main proponent is Ben Stein who is Jewish.

That’s probably because it would hve ranked #2 in the all-time list of top Jewish documentaries, after “The Ten Commandments” with Charleton Heston.

“He is also deleting statements showing evidence favorable to Expelled.”

You’re one to talk about censorship! You’ve not allowed a single post I’ve written, and frankly what this does is readily define your morality– that which you insist is unexplained in materialists, but superior in IDers such as yourself.

This comes across as hypocrisy in the extreme, and while I know you will never let this post through, I challenge you to allow my voice to be heard, or at least contact me at ktr@high-concepts.com and let me know why you have EXPELLED me from discourse here.

It’s a little hard to explain but I’ll do my best. For any config space there are an infinity of functions that can be used to search it. Some perform better than others – for example, with the dictionary, searching the book at a position determined by alphabet is a lot better than, for example, an evolutionary search which evolves an algorithm to map words to page numbers.

However, averaged over ALL POSSIBLE DICTIONARY ARRANGEMENTS, the alphabetical search will fail more times than it will succeed and be no better than random chance. That’s what Dr Dembski means (at least, I hope – do correct me if I have made an error).

It is the same for all algorithms, and has no relevancy to the ability of chance-based searches such as evolution, which perform very well in the search spaces to which they are suited, such as the fitness landscape of nature where the best camouflaged, or the fastest are more fit.

Because the results of that search are more specified than random chance (there are fewer good solutions than there are bad ones), they are therefore less probable, and this is where the probabilistic resources of, as you call it, chance and necessity come from.

I see your:

the argument of improbability doesn’t really apply to sentences formed by people, since we don’t do a random walk across that search space, any more than we do when we look up a word in a dictionary.

If you will look more carefully at what I said above [and in the always linked, esp. app 6], you will see that this is EXACTLY what I said — we can do it by intelligence, but chance + necessity acting on matter + energy soon runs out of probabilistic resources. (In short you have made an inadvertent strawman fallacy.]

And, indeed, our brains are highly organised.

But, the neurones in that organisation are based on DNA [3 bn bases] and are subject to mechanical necessity and and chance forces, which runs right back into the issue of getting to intelleigently functional states in the scope of the config spaces that soon exponentiate themserlves into being vastly beyond the resources of the cosmos to search by chance + necessity.

So, absent intelligent direction we have no base to get to intelligent action from brain tissue.

Again, I excerpt Plantinga:

. . . evolution is interested (so to speak) only in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. Natural selection doesn’t care what you believe; it is interested only in how you behave. It selects for certain kinds of behavior, those that enhance fitness, which is a measure of the chances that one’s genes are widely represented in the next and subsequent generations . . . But then the fact that we have evolved guarantees at most that we behave in certain ways–ways that contribute to our (or our ancestors’) surviving and reproducing in the environment in which we have developed . . . . there are many belief-desire combinations that will lead to the adaptive action; in many of these combinations, the beliefs are false.

On the issue of natural regularities, observe: we invoke mechanical necessity to explain just the opposite of high contingency — consistent, repeatable patterns. High contingency in our observaiton traces to chance and/or intelligence. And so that is the challenge: chance or intelligence.

Of these, chance-based searches as Dembski and Marks have discussed, will onb afverage do no better than random search. it is intelligently supplied active information that gets us to the superior performance we have when we write a sentence etc.

As to identifying the improbablility of any given microstate, what happens is that we cluster them into observably distinguishable macrostates, and see that the functionally specified information rich ones are exceedingly rare in the config spaces. Cf the always linked app 1 and point 6 to illustrate. (In the case of DNA, for instance, the high probability of a stop codon by chance is a strong guarantor of the rarity of functional states by chance. That holds for OOL and it holds for body-plan level biodiversity.]

GEM of TKI

For example, if I want to find ‘god’ in a dictionary, I don’t start at page 1 and go through every single word in the book to find it. If it’s a 1000 page dictionary, I open it about one third of the way in, then look forward or backward. More than once I have even opened it exactly on the page I wanted (how unlikely is that to happen by chance!)

I can do this because it’s sorted. A random walk on sorted data is not necessary as all the computer pros here will tell you. If you know how it’s sorted, you know how to search for it.

Similarly, our brains are organised, not random. Whether this has anything to do with a supernatural mind has yet to be seen.

I’m afraid I can’t see how improbability can ever apply to anything except unknown design, since most outputs of any system can be DEFINED as improbable (this changes depending on what you’re looking for – the chance of a slug leaving a trail across your floor is close to 1, but the possible paths it can take are enormous, and the arrangement of the atoms in the trail even more so). Improbability only comes into the argument when one is trying to rule out natural causes (the more possible causes, the less improbable it is). Once we have ruled out all natural laws, and defined intelligence as being outside them, we have then reduced the problem to one of either intelligent design, or supernatural forces that we do not understand.

I myself, however, do not yet understand how it is possible to rule out all natural laws, which would require a complete body of science (an impossibility by definition) or an exhaustive algorithmic search, which may be impossible if I understand the works of Goedel and Turing. I hope the Biologic Institute can solve that problem.