|
Author
|
Topic: Murder by Design?
|
Mike Baughman
Member
Member # 270
|
posted 01. October 2002 16:56
Charlie,
We seem to be talking past each other. I said elimination of chance, you said infer intelligent designer. I think this is because I want to discuss TDI (unfortunate name in this context - eliminating chance is better) in this non-biological context and you want to make a point wrt to the biological context.
IOW in both the Schoen and Schoenless cases I believe we can eliminate chance. In the Schoen case, having eliminated chance, Herr Schoen is the likely explanation; in the Schoenless, having eliminated both chance and Schoen, we must suppose that some other cause is at work. Neither time does the "elimination of chance" inference depend on knowing the agent responsible. In the Schoenless case intelligent cause should not be ruled out.
IP: Logged
|
|
charlie d.
Member
Member # 159
|
posted 01. October 2002 17:45
Cool. Then we agree one cannot infer design (nor rule it out, for that matter) simply on the basis of probability calculations, in the absence of a known designer. Whether design or non-intelligent natural mechanisms are more likely responsible for such cases (highly improbable, no known plausible designer) depends entirely on other factors in the case.
Basically, as you point out, Design Inference is a very unfortunate name for Dembski's method (and so it's EF, btw). What his method is, at its core, is just a chance elimination process based on available statistical considerations. In other words, it's what we do every day, intuitively and without the math lingo and putative precision, when we consider coincidences in our lives. This is the only sense the method was applied (again unconsciously and informally) in the Schon case, and in this sense it is essentially useless in biology.
IP: Logged
|
|
|
Printer-friendly view of this topic