It's designed if it looks designed?

Here we go again. "The Scientific Status of Design Inferences" by Bruce L. Gordon is Chapter 25 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God. It begins by doubting that methodological naturalism must be the necessary limit on the scope of science. With liberal use of technical terms from the philosophy of science (without citations), Gordon considers three accounts of "what it means to offer a scientific explanation for a phenomenon." These are the deductive-nomological model, the causal-statistical model, and the pragmatic model. They appear to be different ways of identifying causes that are both necessary and sufficient to explain any particular phenomenon. And they're quite interesting, though Gordon gets bogged down in the minutiae — which would be excusable if it was going somewhere useful. But as usual with intelligent design proponents, he promises much and delivers next to nothing. There's stuff that sounds a bit sciencey, but no actual science.

As William Dembski points out, drawing design inferences is already an essential and uncontroversial part of various scientific activities ranging from the detection of fabricated experimental data, to forensic science, cryptography, and even the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). He identifies two criteria as necessary and sufficient for inferring intelligence or design: complexity and specification. Complexity ensures that the event in question is not so simple that it can readily be explained by chance. It is an essentially probabilistic concept. Specification ensures that the event in question exhibits the trademarks of intelligence. The notion of specification amounts to this: if, independently of the small probability of the event in question, we are somehow able to circumscribe and define it so as to render its reconstruction tractable, then we are justified in eliminating chance as the proper explanation for the event. Dembski calls such an event one of specified small probability.

Sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Except that it's no practical advance on saying "it's designed if it looks designed." Note the use of "somehow" — this ought to be a teaser for what's to come, but despite not-so-vague promises, we never find out how this specification is to be assessed. (Also note the inclusion of SETI in this block of things supposedly exhibiting intelligence. SETI, however, is not expecting — or hoping — to receive signals containing information, and without information there can be no intelligence.)

One of Dembski's important contributions has been to render the notion of specification mathematically rigorous in a way that places design inferences on a solid foundation.

That's a big claim to rigour and solidity, but where is this rendition? It's often parroted by Dembski's acolytes, but never delivered.

The mathematical analysis used to determine whether an event is one of specified small probability rests on empirical observations set in the context of the theoretical models used to study the domain (quantum-theoretic, molecular biological, developmental biological, cosmological, etc.) under investigation, but the design inference itself can be formulated as a valid deductive argument. One of its premises is a mathematical result that Dembski calls the law of small probability. That the design inference lends itself to this precision of expression is significant because it enables us to see that a rigorous approach to design inferences conforms to even the most restrictive theory of scientific explanation, the D-N model. In fact, even though the accounts of scientific explanation we considered were inadequate as universal theories, all three of them captured important intuitions. Furthermore, it is short work to see that rigorous design inferences satisfy the conditions imposed by all of them.

But we've yet to see the touted "precision of expression". Where are these "rigorous design inferences"? Are they anything more than "if it looks designed, it must have had a designer"? Gordon mentions "design-theoretic analysis" several times in this essay, but gives no actual examples of it (or any references). Why is this? Is it, perhaps, because such analysis has never actually been done?

---

4truth.net
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952949

Dembski claims to identify design — we're still waiting

Are we on to the big guns yet? Maybe, maybe not. William Dembski's first contribution to his book Evidence for God (co-edited with Michael Licona) is "Intelligent Design — A Brief Introduction". SETI, Mount Rushmore, the bacterial flagellum — all the old favourites are lined up to illustrate the contention that intelligent design "...purports to find patterns in biological systems that signify intelligence. ID therefore directly challenges Darwinism and other materialistic approaches to the origin and evolution of life." (p 104.)

Hang on a minute. Dembski is clearly saying that ID is a challenge to "materialistic approaches". That means he's proposing an immaterial intelligence. He's going beyond what ID proponents normally admit, which is that ID doesn't say anything specific about the designer. ID proponents say that the designer isn't necessarily God — it could be aliens, but presumably these aliens would be material aliens. Dembski is saying, however, that the designer is — or could be — outside the material realm. Therefore, for ID to be science, and for the designer to be at the same time immaterial, science needs to be able to say something about the immaterial realm — such as, that it exists. Science of course says no such thing; speculations about the existence or non-existence of an immaterial realm are beyond its remit.

Dembski's problem is this, which he acknowledges in his third paragraph:

What has kept design outside the scientific mainstream since Darwin proposed his theory of evolution is that it lacked precise methods for distinguishing intelligently caused objects from unintelligently caused ones. For design to be a fruitful scientific concept, scientists need to be sure they can reliably determine whether something is designed. (p 104-5.)

For ID to be scientific, it needs to be able to distinguish actual design from the illusion of design. Dembski claims that this can be done, but examination reveals only buzzwords and vague promises. He's constantly running up blind alleys:

As a theory of biological origins and development, ID's central claim is that only intelligent causes can adequately explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable. To say intelligent causes are empirically detectable is to say there exist well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected material causes. (p 105.)

The problem, however, is that these well-defined methods are ... never defined. Dembski repeats that there are methods to detect design, but again and again these methods are revealed to be nothing more than, "If it looks designed, it must have had a designer."

That Dembski includes SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, as an example of design detection, is surprising, because SETI researchers are emphatically not looking for patterns in radio signals from space. What they're looking for is a narrow-band signal — any modulation of a potential carrier wave is expected to have been smeared out with time and distance, so there's likely to be no information present.

Dembski elaborates on his favourite buzz-phrase, specified complexity:

Within the theory of intelligent design, specified complexity is the characteristic trademark or signature of intelligence. It is a reliable empirical marker of intelligence in the same way that fingerprints are a reliable empirical marker of an individual's presence at the scene of a crime. Design theorists contend that undirected material causes, like natural selection acting on random genetic change, cannot generate specified complexity. (p 106.)

Unfortunately he never elaborates on how to identify specified complexity, other than variations of "if it looks designed, then it must have had a designer."

At the top of this post I wondered if we were on to the big guns. Apparently not, for this pea-shooter consistently fails to fire:

ID's chief claim is this: the world contains events, objects, and structures that exhaust the explanatory resources of undirected material causes and can be adequately explained by recourse to intelligent causes. Design theorists claim to demonstrate this rigorously. (p 107.)

That's what they claim, but they don't do it — not rigorously, or at all.

---

4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952955

Paul Davies and John Lennox discuss SETI on the Unbelievable? radio show

Here's the opening post of a thread I started in the Premier Community regarding the April 17 edition of Unbelievable? The mp3 of the programme is available here:
http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/f4ca1408-1cd8-4aea-ab73-231910f8a76c.mp3

A remarkably civil discussion about SETI and its implications. Paul Davies isn't one of those nasty New Atheists^™ — rather, he could be classed as an accommodationist, and was indeed a recipient, in 1995, of the Templeton Prize.

Wearing his "philosopher's hat" Paul Davies thinks that the human ability to unravel and understand the workings of the universe is of fundamental cosmic significance. This to me seems like a version of the anthropic principle: we can understand the universe — therefore it was made to be understood (tacit subtext: "…by us"). He said you have to ask, "What is this big universe for?" No, you don't have to ask this. It's begging the question to assume the universe has a purpose before asking what that purpose is. The correct, prior, question is "Does the universe have a purpose?" Davies is imputing teleology without establishing that such teleology exists. We can understand the universe (to a degree) because we are intelligent products of the universe. It is an obvious fact that the universe is susceptible to rational analysis.

John Lennox asked why we might consider a stream of recognisable DNA sequences originating from space to have an intelligent source, yet the same sequences present in DNA itself are not thought to be from an intelligent source (except by intelligent design proponents). But the probability of random chance replicating a specific sequence is extremely low, and if we recognised such a sequence from a source other than DNA we would have to conclude that the source was likely to be intelligent. If you produce a genuinely random number of many digits' length, the chance of replicating that number by chance is practically zero. DNA sequences, however, are not produced by chance. I find it astonishing that a professor of mathematics seems not to appreciate this.

John Lennox presupposes mind/body dualism in order to argue that supernatural power can affect the natural world. (This isn't surprising — I'd hardly expect him to accept that he doesn't have a transcendent soul, but it's a bit cheeky of him to use such a presumption in his argument. Davies didn't pick him up on this — I wonder where Davies stands on the existence of souls.)

Davies asked Lennox, "What's God doing now?" Lennox replied, "God is upholding the universe." This is the height of meaningless obfuscation. Earlier Lennox objected to Davies' distaste for a god that "manipulates molecules", and yet "upholding the universe" isn't a comprehensible description of any kind of activity. (I'm assuming here that Lennox doesn't have in his mind's eye an image of Atlas supporting the celestial spheres on his shoulders.)

Interesting discussion, but hardly satisfying. 

Go to the Unbelievable? website to follow the online discussion.