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what is permitted. This doesn't advocate rushing to any recourse at any
opportunity. Occam's razor10has served well since the times when science was
formulated as a methodical system, and it remains one of science's most
powerful guiding principles. Once naturalistic laws were worked out, it was
absolutely correct to construct models to explore how much they could explain.
Well, I would maintain that the verdict is now in, and the limits have been
found.
But it has become the fashion to exclude any possibility of intelligence from
scientific consideration on principle. This is unfortunate, for it puts
science in the position of imposing a predetermined dogma as to what might be
admissible as fact and how evidence is to be interpreted. This represents a
complete inversion, casting science in the very role that it emerged as a
reaction against. Some go as far as defining science as the search to explain
everything in naturalistic terms, tacitly, if unwittingly, admitting prior
commitment to an ideology of insisting that naturalistic answers to everything
must exist a declaration of faith if ever there was one! And that could be
even more unfortunate. For if science chooses to define itself in that way,
and if the reality of the matter is that such answers don't exist, then
science will have excluded itself from examining perhaps some of the most
important questions confronting us.
It seems to me that two different concepts are getting mixed up. For most
individuals contemplating life and the world around them over the millennia,
and today people like many molecular biochemists
studying the nuts and bolts of life, the case for some kind of intelligence at
work seems inarguable. On the other hand, others like political and social
leaders those concerned with the need to set limits on the behavior that's
acceptable in a society tend to find common cause with purveyors of belief
systems involving supernatural intelligences that judge and reward or punish
the morality displayed in an individual lifetime, and the like. There's no
particular reason why these intelligences have to be one and the same.
They might be for all I know, but that's a question of personal conviction,
not one that can be answered by objective fact or logic, which is the subject
of this article. Such arguments are offered, of course, but I
don't find the ones that I've come across compelling. One kind of intelligence
seems to be called for by the physical evidence; the other kind seems either
to be accepted because it affords a lot of comfort, answers, and wish
fulfillment which isn't to say it's a bad thing or to have been revealed
through experiences that I haven't shared. This isn't the place to go into my
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own thoughts on the matter. The centuries that humanity has spent doggedly
hacking each other to pieces or setting fire to anyone who disagrees makes me
skeptical of the various camps in the latter category, even if they turn out
to be misguided proverbial blind men arguing over parts of the same glimpsed
elephant.
This talk about a designing intelligence is all very well, but at the end of
it all isn't it just as much a subjective impression arising from things we
find ourselves unable to understand not much different from the ancients who
conceived gods as necessary to push winds around and send rain? Is there a way
of putting it to some kind of objective test? We have no difficulty
recognizing the handiwork of intelligent agencies as opposed to results of
natural processes in the world of everyday experience words written on paper
as opposed to accidental ink splashes; a statue of Abraham Lincoln as opposed
to a piece of weathered rock on a hillside; a sand castle on a beach as
opposed to a mound heaped by the waves and tide. Such things have something in
common that we latch onto immediately, without doubts other than in borderline
cases like a chipped piece of flint that might or might not be an ancient
artifact. Is it possible to identify what it is? If so, maybe we could try
looking for the same defining features in nature and see how they compare.
The first response one hears to this question is that artificially contrived
things are "improbable." That's generally true, but as an answer it doesn't
suffice. If we find a deck of cards with all four suits arranged ace through
to king, or a line of Scrabble tiles spelling "happy birthday to you," we
wouldn't imagine for a moment that they had just chanced to come up that way.
And yet, those particular arrangements are no more probable or no less
probable than any other sequence of fifty-two cards or string of twenty-one
characters taken from twenty-six available letters and a space. Suits and
letters mean nothing to natural processes, and random chance is equally likely
to produce any combination. Every possible poker hand is as improbable as a
royal flush.
The next try is usually that the rare combinations that leap out and grab
us rare in comparison with the vast majority that we find meaningless are
different in that they carry "information." But this doesn't really get to it
either. Every sequence of cards or characters carries the information
necessary to construct it. If it's telling you how to construct one specific
(that word again) sequence of 52 cards out of all the billions of sequences
that are possible, that's a lot of information indeed. In fact, a random
sequence of anything cards, characters, numbers, the coordinate positions and
orientations of every grain in a pile of sand contains as much information as
can be carried by that length of message. There's no way to compress it into
anything shorter in the way that you can compress pages of information into a
few computer instructions to display, say, all the even numbers up to a
million.
Oh, very well, then. Every arrangement of anything carries information. But
it's the kind of information.
Now we're getting closer. Can we put our finger on what's different about it?
William Dembski is an associate research professor at Baylor University, with
doctorates in mathematics and philosophy, who has spent many years
investigating this question.11And what it is that's different
about arrangements that we recognize as the work of intelligence, he
maintains, is that they carry specified information. "Specified information"
means information that exists and can be specified independently of the
mechanical directions for constructing the particular physical arrangement
that constitutes the message. "Independently" implies that it conforms to some
language, code, or similar convention that carries the information
independently of any particular physical representation. Recognizing such [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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