Bill Dembski has a new job as the "Phillip E. Johnson Research Professor of Science and Culture" at the Southern Evangelical Seminary. I know all readers of this blog will join me in congratulating Prof. Dembski in obtaining this position, for which he is most suited.
Southern Evangelical Seminary's doctrinal statement says "We believe in the special creation of the entire space-time universe and of every basic form of life in the six historic days of the Genesis creation record. We also believe in the historicity of the biblical record, including the special creation of Adam and Eve as the literal progenitors of all people, the literal fall and resultant divine curse on the creation, the worldwide flood, and the origin of nations and diverse languages at the tower of Babel." I wonder if Prof. Dembski will be required to recant his belief in an old earth?
Showing posts with label Dembski. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dembski. Show all posts
Friday, March 30, 2012
Thursday, December 15, 2011
You Can Lead a Creationist to Knowledge...
...but you can't make him think, as this post at Uncommon Descent makes clear.
It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.
Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.
Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.
Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.
Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.
Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.
That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.
It doesn't matter if bad creationist arguments are debunked, because they just keep bringing up the same bad arguments over and over again, as if no one ever explained why they are bad.
Here we have lawyer Barry Arrington (not a mathematician or biologist, as far as I can see) explaining Dembski's concept of design detection and making exactly the same bogus claims we debunked long ago.
Problem #1: the notion of "specification" is incoherent. Arrington says “ten straight flushes in a row" is a legitimate specification because "This pattern is not post hoc". OK, how about "100 straight flushes in a row, except one is not". Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "50 out of 100 deals are straight flushes"? Is that legit? Why or why not? How about "one straight flush, then a straight, then a flush, then 3 consecutive 4 of a kind, then two more straight flushes"? Why or why not? We explain the problem in detail in our paper.
Bottom line: there is a good way to decide about the reasonableness of a "specification" -- namely, Kolmogorov complexity -- but it is not anywhere near as simple as "valid" or "invalid" or "independent" or "not independent". When you use Kolmogorov complexity as your basis for deciding about specifications, then you get the theory of Kirchherr, Li and Vitanyi, not Dembski's theory.
Problem #2: Even if you can make the notion of "specification" reasonable, we showed that Dembski's claim about the "law of conservation of information" is bogus. The result is that his conclusions about design don't follow.
Problem #3: The proper way to do probability, the way that everyone else except creationists does it, is to pre-specify a region and then see if your observation matches that region. If you do so, and the probability of hitting the region out of the whole space is very very very small, then the proper conclusion is not "design"; it is simply that you estimated the probabilities wrong. It could well have occurred because a person arranged it that way, but it could also be because you didn't know about some non-human process that could result in the same observation. In our paper we illustrate this with some examples.
That's what makes creationism different from legit science: creationists just pretend that criticism doesn't exist and recycle the same bad arguments over and over.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Nobody - Even Creationists - Seems to Know How To Calculate Dembski's "CSI"
Back in 2001, when I was on sabbatical in Tucson, Arizona, I decided to spend some time trying to understand Dembski's "complex specified information" (CSI) to see if there was anything to it. The result was my long paper with Elsberry, where we concluded that CSI was a hopeless, incoherent mess that didn't have the properties Dembski claimed. A shorter version of the paper has recently appeared in Synthese.
Now, over on Uncommon Descent, there is an amusing thread which demonstrates our conclusion. Nobody, not even the creationists, can seemingly agree on the most simple assertions about CSI. That's because it's a hopeless, incoherent mess.
Now, over on Uncommon Descent, there is an amusing thread which demonstrates our conclusion. Nobody, not even the creationists, can seemingly agree on the most simple assertions about CSI. That's because it's a hopeless, incoherent mess.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Dembski: Prayer Can Change the Past
If you have time to waste, listen to this podcast of Bill Dembski being interviewed about his latest book.
I haven't read the book, but apparently one of his claims is that all evil - even natural evil like typhoons and earthquakes - is ultimately due to human sin. For Dembski, human sin is so corrosive that it has the magical power to have causation backwards in time. While Christians claim to be humble, this seems to be one of the most megalomaniac religious claims of all time: that the ancient physical history of the Universe, which developed over billions of years, is dependent in part on the "sin" of humans today and in the recent past. Earthquakes may have occurred millions of years ago, but they're still our fault.
Another of his ideas seems to be - I kid you not - that the effect of prayer could go backward in time. He cites as an example this story told by Helen Roseveare. When working as a medical missionary, she needed a hot water bottle to keep a premature baby warm. Lacking one, a child at the mission prayed that one would arrive - and that same afternoon, one did. A miracle, obviously, and an answered prayer. Even more miraculously, the parcel had been sent 5 months earlier -- so if the prayer were really effective, its effects would have had to go backward in time.
What do you think of Roseveare's story? If it really happened as recounted (which I doubt, since stories like these are notoriously exaggerated - witness the claims of "leg lengthening" at faith-healing ceremonies - and get more and more elaborate with each telling), then was it really a miracle? Surely people send packages to medical missionaries all the time, and it is not a stretch to think that people would include all sorts of objects that might be useful, including a hot water bottle. And even if it was a miracle, wouldn't it have been easier for their god to simply arrange for the baby to arrive at the usual time, instead of being premature? And how about all the millions of people who have prayed sincerely without relief? Why did Mike Turner die, trapped by a boulder in Wyoming, while his prayers went unanswered?
It's extremely hard, seeing all the suffering in Haiti, to maintain that the Christian god is a loving one. So Christians are forced to develop an elaborate edifice to justify suffering. A more honest and realistic view is that, if a single god really exists, then he's a nasty son-of-a-bitch. I once asked a famous Catholic theologian if anyone had ever tried to develop a theology about the characteristics of a god based on what we actually see in the world: suffering, pain, natural catastrophes, etc. He seemed very surprised by the question, thought about it for a bit, and answered, "no".
Although Dembski thinks prayer might change the past, he also seems to think that once we know that an event has occurred, then there's no point praying about it. But why couldn't his god then change everyone's memory of the past, too, so that no one knew the event occurred, and then change the event itself? The rules for Bill's god seem completely arbitrary.
Along the way, we learn other aspects of Dembski's "thought". He is an old-earth creationist and he also subscribes to the "vaccines cause autism" woo. He believes in a literal Adam and Eve, specially created by his god, but he also thinks that evolutionary biology is compatible with this: biology, according to Dembski, speaks of "breakaway populations" and "genetic evidence" that there was an "initial pair" starting a new population. (This, of course, is not true. Founder effects occur with a small population, not necessarily an "initial pair". And while the genetic evidence points to a "Mitochondrial Eve" and a "Y-Chromosomal Adam", these two people did not live at the same time.)
What do theologians make of his book? No surprise: they lap it up. J. P. Moreland says, "I have read very few books with its deep of insight, breadth of scholarly interaction, and significance. From now on, no one who is working on a Christian treatment of the problem of evil can afford to neglect this book." It seems no idea is too silly for credulous theists to take seriously.
I haven't read the book, but apparently one of his claims is that all evil - even natural evil like typhoons and earthquakes - is ultimately due to human sin. For Dembski, human sin is so corrosive that it has the magical power to have causation backwards in time. While Christians claim to be humble, this seems to be one of the most megalomaniac religious claims of all time: that the ancient physical history of the Universe, which developed over billions of years, is dependent in part on the "sin" of humans today and in the recent past. Earthquakes may have occurred millions of years ago, but they're still our fault.
Another of his ideas seems to be - I kid you not - that the effect of prayer could go backward in time. He cites as an example this story told by Helen Roseveare. When working as a medical missionary, she needed a hot water bottle to keep a premature baby warm. Lacking one, a child at the mission prayed that one would arrive - and that same afternoon, one did. A miracle, obviously, and an answered prayer. Even more miraculously, the parcel had been sent 5 months earlier -- so if the prayer were really effective, its effects would have had to go backward in time.
What do you think of Roseveare's story? If it really happened as recounted (which I doubt, since stories like these are notoriously exaggerated - witness the claims of "leg lengthening" at faith-healing ceremonies - and get more and more elaborate with each telling), then was it really a miracle? Surely people send packages to medical missionaries all the time, and it is not a stretch to think that people would include all sorts of objects that might be useful, including a hot water bottle. And even if it was a miracle, wouldn't it have been easier for their god to simply arrange for the baby to arrive at the usual time, instead of being premature? And how about all the millions of people who have prayed sincerely without relief? Why did Mike Turner die, trapped by a boulder in Wyoming, while his prayers went unanswered?
It's extremely hard, seeing all the suffering in Haiti, to maintain that the Christian god is a loving one. So Christians are forced to develop an elaborate edifice to justify suffering. A more honest and realistic view is that, if a single god really exists, then he's a nasty son-of-a-bitch. I once asked a famous Catholic theologian if anyone had ever tried to develop a theology about the characteristics of a god based on what we actually see in the world: suffering, pain, natural catastrophes, etc. He seemed very surprised by the question, thought about it for a bit, and answered, "no".
Although Dembski thinks prayer might change the past, he also seems to think that once we know that an event has occurred, then there's no point praying about it. But why couldn't his god then change everyone's memory of the past, too, so that no one knew the event occurred, and then change the event itself? The rules for Bill's god seem completely arbitrary.
Along the way, we learn other aspects of Dembski's "thought". He is an old-earth creationist and he also subscribes to the "vaccines cause autism" woo. He believes in a literal Adam and Eve, specially created by his god, but he also thinks that evolutionary biology is compatible with this: biology, according to Dembski, speaks of "breakaway populations" and "genetic evidence" that there was an "initial pair" starting a new population. (This, of course, is not true. Founder effects occur with a small population, not necessarily an "initial pair". And while the genetic evidence points to a "Mitochondrial Eve" and a "Y-Chromosomal Adam", these two people did not live at the same time.)
What do theologians make of his book? No surprise: they lap it up. J. P. Moreland says, "I have read very few books with its deep of insight, breadth of scholarly interaction, and significance. From now on, no one who is working on a Christian treatment of the problem of evil can afford to neglect this book." It seems no idea is too silly for credulous theists to take seriously.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Ol' Information Bait-and-Switch
It seems that my criticism of aging philosopher Thomas Nagel has got the folks at Uncommon Descent running scared. That's because they know their bogus claims about information are being exposed.
I gave an example that trivially refutes Stephen Meyer's claim that "information always comes from a mind": weather prediction. Meteorologists record information such as wind speed, wind direction, and temperature to make their predictions. Under both the informal definition of information used in everyday life, and the formal technical definitions of "information" universally accepted by mathematicians and computer scientists, these quantities indeed represent "information". What is the response?
Of course, it's the old information bait-and-switch trick: Dembski is now claiming that my example was "unspecified information", whereas Meyer was talking about "specified information".
Dembski is an old hand at the information bait-and-switch game, as Elsberry and I showed in detail in our peer-reviewed article. He moves from one definition to another seamlessly, as it suits him, for whatever argument is at hand. This is most apparent in his estimation of probabilities, where he switches back and forth between the uniform probability interpretation and the causal-history interpretation, depending on which one gives the answer he requires. We discuss this at length in our article.
Furthermore, the notion of "specification" comes from Dembski himself, and as Elsberry and I showed, it is completely incoherent. Nobody can say whether a given string is "specified" or not, and "specification" fails to have the properties Dembski claims it has. No mathematician or computer scientist, other than Dembski and his intelligent design friends, uses Dembski's measure or does any calculations with it. To pretend that it is meaningful is not honest.
Just to give one example, here is Dembski and his deep technical and mathematical "proof" that "the [sic] bacterial flagellum" is specified:
"At any rate, no biologist I know questions whether the functional systems that arise in biology are speciļ¬ed." (No Free Lunch)
So, a challenge: which, if any of the following strings constitute "specified information"? Be sure, in your answer, to give all the things that Dembski says are required before one can be sure: the space of events, the rejection function, the rejection region, the "independently-given" specification, the relevant background knowledge, the independence calculation, and so forth.
1. VUIAPIDESFFGWNHCOIDTGLTJCITMTRITIEIISPOFKAAMORSFEOSDSCDNNRHTEHETCOSOUNETNGQBJINB
2. INFORMATIONCSFVICJUWOEFNLMICPTHOPIISDSTNFJABGEODTQIITUNDHGASTRDNEIKTGSBTOHEERCSE
3. UOTDCTTADWDHINEEFVJETIIICIRPAQDCFLNTNOGROFSGOEFRNSSKTIOPTJMBNMSSUNIHOCEGTAEHISIB
Meanwhile, Dembski needs to inform his acolyte "Joe G", who thinks that the proper definition of "information" is "the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects". Well, by that definition, my example of the information used in weather prediction is indeed information -- there are many alternatives in wind speed, direction, and temperature, and no one can doubt that different arrangements of these quantities produce different effects -- namely, different weather.
Joe G, get with the program! Just say my example is "unspecified", and be done with it! No need to trouble yourself with actual thinking.
I gave an example that trivially refutes Stephen Meyer's claim that "information always comes from a mind": weather prediction. Meteorologists record information such as wind speed, wind direction, and temperature to make their predictions. Under both the informal definition of information used in everyday life, and the formal technical definitions of "information" universally accepted by mathematicians and computer scientists, these quantities indeed represent "information". What is the response?
Of course, it's the old information bait-and-switch trick: Dembski is now claiming that my example was "unspecified information", whereas Meyer was talking about "specified information".
Dembski is an old hand at the information bait-and-switch game, as Elsberry and I showed in detail in our peer-reviewed article. He moves from one definition to another seamlessly, as it suits him, for whatever argument is at hand. This is most apparent in his estimation of probabilities, where he switches back and forth between the uniform probability interpretation and the causal-history interpretation, depending on which one gives the answer he requires. We discuss this at length in our article.
Furthermore, the notion of "specification" comes from Dembski himself, and as Elsberry and I showed, it is completely incoherent. Nobody can say whether a given string is "specified" or not, and "specification" fails to have the properties Dembski claims it has. No mathematician or computer scientist, other than Dembski and his intelligent design friends, uses Dembski's measure or does any calculations with it. To pretend that it is meaningful is not honest.
Just to give one example, here is Dembski and his deep technical and mathematical "proof" that "the [sic] bacterial flagellum" is specified:
"At any rate, no biologist I know questions whether the functional systems that arise in biology are speciļ¬ed." (No Free Lunch)
So, a challenge: which, if any of the following strings constitute "specified information"? Be sure, in your answer, to give all the things that Dembski says are required before one can be sure: the space of events, the rejection function, the rejection region, the "independently-given" specification, the relevant background knowledge, the independence calculation, and so forth.
1. VUIAPIDESFFGWNHCOIDTGLTJCITMTRITIEIISPOFKAAMORSFEOSDSCDNNRHTEHETCOSOUNETNGQBJINB
2. INFORMATIONCSFVICJUWOEFNLMICPTHOPIISDSTNFJABGEODTQIITUNDHGASTRDNEIKTGSBTOHEERCSE
3. UOTDCTTADWDHINEEFVJETIIICIRPAQDCFLNTNOGROFSGOEFRNSSKTIOPTJMBNMSSUNIHOCEGTAEHISIB
Meanwhile, Dembski needs to inform his acolyte "Joe G", who thinks that the proper definition of "information" is "the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects". Well, by that definition, my example of the information used in weather prediction is indeed information -- there are many alternatives in wind speed, direction, and temperature, and no one can doubt that different arrangements of these quantities produce different effects -- namely, different weather.
Joe G, get with the program! Just say my example is "unspecified", and be done with it! No need to trouble yourself with actual thinking.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Paper Rebutting Dembski Finally Out
Back on my previous sabbatical, in 2001-2, I spent a couple of months reading WIlliam Dembski's book, No Free Lunch, which he was kind enough to send me. I chose to do that for a number of reasons: first, I was interested to see if his claims about a mathematical refutation of Darwinism were true; second, a sabbatical is the time to tackle some unusual project you don't usually have time for; and third, I have an interest in pseudoscience and pseudomathematics. Reading it led to some fun discussions with Wesley Elsberry and we eventually produced a long, 54-page refutation of many of Dembski's claims.
But then, what to do with it? I had heard Dembski and Ruse were co-editing a voume, so I briefly entertained the idea of submitting it for inclusion there. But I was worried Dembski would refuse because the paper was sharply critical of his work, and after talking to Ruse I had second thoughts and decided to look for another venue. We chose a journal whose subject matter included biology and philosophy, but the paper was eventually rejected -- not because of the quality of the paper, but because the referees felt that spending 54 pages to debunk what they perceived as anti-evolution crackpottery was not a good use of their journal's space.
Finally, we were invited to submit the paper to a special issue of the journal Synthese, and we did so. The paper went through multiple rounds of refereeing, with the referees suggesting that more and more be cut. Now that it has finally appeared, it is down to a measly 34 pages. Luckily the long version is still available online.
If you can't read the Synthese version because you don't have a subscription, just write me and I'll be happy to send you a copy.
This is the longest interval I've ever had between finishing a paper (2002) and the time it appeared (2009). And it's likely to be my only paper in a philosophy journal. I predict that the intelligent design community will continue to ignore all the criticisms (which have been available to them for years) and continue to pretend that CSI is actually a coherently-defined entity, and that the "law of conservation of information" holds. I predict lots of breast-beating, and excuses for not addressing our criticisms, but no response that deals forthrightly with all the errors we found in Dembski's work.
But then, what to do with it? I had heard Dembski and Ruse were co-editing a voume, so I briefly entertained the idea of submitting it for inclusion there. But I was worried Dembski would refuse because the paper was sharply critical of his work, and after talking to Ruse I had second thoughts and decided to look for another venue. We chose a journal whose subject matter included biology and philosophy, but the paper was eventually rejected -- not because of the quality of the paper, but because the referees felt that spending 54 pages to debunk what they perceived as anti-evolution crackpottery was not a good use of their journal's space.
Finally, we were invited to submit the paper to a special issue of the journal Synthese, and we did so. The paper went through multiple rounds of refereeing, with the referees suggesting that more and more be cut. Now that it has finally appeared, it is down to a measly 34 pages. Luckily the long version is still available online.
If you can't read the Synthese version because you don't have a subscription, just write me and I'll be happy to send you a copy.
This is the longest interval I've ever had between finishing a paper (2002) and the time it appeared (2009). And it's likely to be my only paper in a philosophy journal. I predict that the intelligent design community will continue to ignore all the criticisms (which have been available to them for years) and continue to pretend that CSI is actually a coherently-defined entity, and that the "law of conservation of information" holds. I predict lots of breast-beating, and excuses for not addressing our criticisms, but no response that deals forthrightly with all the errors we found in Dembski's work.
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