Quote:In Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins draws a distinction between objects that are clearly designed and objects that are not designed but superficially look a bit like they are – which he calls ‘designoid’.[4] Dawkins illustrates the concept of being designoid with a hillside that suggests a human profile: ‘Once you have been told, you can just see a slight resemblance to either John or Robert Kennedy. But some don’t see it and it is certainly easy to believe that the resemblance is accidental.’[5] Dawkins contrasts this Kennedy-esque hillside with the four president’s heads carved into Mt. Rushmore in America which ‘are obviously not accidental: they have design written all over them.’[6] Although Dawkins defines biology as ‘the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose’,[7] he believes that appearances are deceiving. Biological things are designoid: ‘Designoid objects look designed, so much so that some people – probably, alas, most people – think that they are designed. These people are wrong. . . the true explanation – Darwinian natural selection – is very different.’[8]
Quote:Dembski is ‘the leading intellectual theorist of Design. . .’[19] According to Edward Sission: ‘If Thomas Huxley was “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Dembski is the man with the leash and the obedience training technique to bring Darwinism into check.’[20] Dembski’s leash is an ‘Explanatory Filter’ that identifies intelligent causation by detecting what chance and natural law alone are extremely hard-pressed to produce, namely ‘specified complexity’ or ‘complex specified information’ (CSI): ‘the filter asks three questions in the following order: (1) Does a law explain it? (2) does chance explain it? (3) does design explain it?’[21] If something can reasonably be explained by chance and/or necessity, then (by Occam’s razor) it should be so explained (it is, at most, designoid); but if such an explanation is inadequate, then an inference to the more complex but more adequate hypothesis of design is warranted. Intelligence easily accomplishes what unintelligent causes find all but impossible, the creation of specified complexity; hence the detection of specified complexity, while it does not prove design beyond all possibility of doubt, does prove design beyond all reasonable doubt.
These guys are trying their best to define design
I wonder why they are trying so hard - A system with one or more set of imposed rules(s), seems to be able to do it just fine
I feel so smart
:>
