Scientism & Philosophical Arguments

[RoadRunner79]

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The exact definition or limit of what is specified is difficult to nail down. Precisely, because the specification changes and we may not always know why it's specified.  I would point out that the demarcation of science has historically also been a difficult to set exact restrictions on.  Would you say, because we cannot find an exact limit of science that science has no real life examples?

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There is a difference in that we can investigate whether some practice epitomizes science or not, we're not trying to devise a test for what is or isn't science.  But just such a test of design is exactly what is required by the ID programme.  Besides being a tu quoquish swipe at science, it's an implicit acknowledgement that ID has failed to deliver such a test.

We can investigate whether something demonstrates specified complexity.  I actually think that it is often intuitive and not merely from pattern recognition.   Although sometimes we may not recognize a specified complex pattern that is foreign to us. 

We do this by observing similarities between the designed object and other examples of design by known designers.   How would we tell that a structure on Mars was designed if it in fact looked like just a pile of rocks?  We would be looking for walls and roofs in a structure that doesn't obviously have them.  However specified complexity is different in that it aims to identify a unique signature of design, of how designed objects are different from natural objects.  That's a different type of task than identifying similarities.  That's trying to find out in what way designed objects are uniquely a certain way.  And so far, ID has come up empty in describing what that certain way designed things differ from natural objects is.

If it looked just like a pile of rocks, we may not be able to infer design. A Rorschach test, may just look like random ink blots. However if upon further investigation, I find a number of these sets of cards with the same ink blots on them in multiple phycologist office, I may infer design. Perhaps not for the original cards, but from the copies, I have specificity and complexity. Why specified complexity leads us to an inference of intelligent design, is because it requires choice and purpose. One of which may be to make it appear natural.

Would you agree, that specified complexity; that is a quality which is both ordered and varying in parts with a low probability requires an intelligence to make a choice? There was no answers to this question at uncommondescent. Perhaps you would like to take a crack a similar question. You come across a table with 500 quarters on it in the formation of an array equal distance apart. Every third quarter is facing heads up, the remaining are tails. Would you assume chance and natural forces for this configuration or something else?