Sunday, July 01, 2012
Intelligent Design Creationism
My presentation was titled "An Information-Theoretic Proof of God's Existence," in which I showed how the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes, so that if we backtrack this information in time, the amount of information that needs to be accounted for only intensifies. This leads to a regress of information that naturally points to some ultimate source of information. Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? From a naturalistic perspective, such a source remains a mystery. But from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God.
Labels: Designer As God, ID Not Religious
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This was nice:
"Given the hostility of our secular culture to ID, our task is to indicate that ID has more going for it than they previously suspected."
That's quite an (unintentional?) admission: after all, if ID were just science and nothing but science, then the hostility of "secular culture" to ID would be based on a substantial misunderstanding.
But the very fact that Dembski actually thinks that "our culture" (whose is that, exactly?) is "secular" (meaning what, exactly?) tells us a great deal about where he and the Discovery Institute are coming from.
"Given the hostility of our secular culture to ID, our task is to indicate that ID has more going for it than they previously suspected."
That's quite an (unintentional?) admission: after all, if ID were just science and nothing but science, then the hostility of "secular culture" to ID would be based on a substantial misunderstanding.
But the very fact that Dembski actually thinks that "our culture" (whose is that, exactly?) is "secular" (meaning what, exactly?) tells us a great deal about where he and the Discovery Institute are coming from.
that Dembski actually thinks that "our culture" (whose is that, exactly?) is "secular" (meaning what, exactly?)
The mean ol' courts won't let them use everybody's tax money to proseltyze their religion.
The mean ol' courts won't let them use everybody's tax money to proseltyze their religion.
Given the hostility of our secular culture to ID...
The hostility is towards using ID as a cloaking device to sneak your personal faith into the science classroom
It also seems to me that identifying God as the Source of all Information (for some reason, that reminds me of Mr Casaubon's Key to all Mythologies) does not solve the problem. Information is about something. But if there was nothing before God created everything then there was no information because there was nothing for there to be any information about. So what did God use to create everything? Coin-tossing? Couldn't be, there were no coins.
In other words, it raises the good old chicken-and-egg causality problem: which came first, information or that which the information is about?
The hostility is towards using ID as a cloaking device to sneak your personal faith into the science classroom
It also seems to me that identifying God as the Source of all Information (for some reason, that reminds me of Mr Casaubon's Key to all Mythologies) does not solve the problem. Information is about something. But if there was nothing before God created everything then there was no information because there was nothing for there to be any information about. So what did God use to create everything? Coin-tossing? Couldn't be, there were no coins.
In other words, it raises the good old chicken-and-egg causality problem: which came first, information or that which the information is about?
What I find interesting is that Dembski is (a) presenting as an official representative of the Discovery (sic) Institute, and (b) the title of his talk.
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