A presentation without arguments: Dembski disappoints - William Dembski, intelligent design

William Dembski is a prominent advocate for intelligent design (ID). In his presentation to the Fourth World Skeptics Conference in Burbank, California, he avoided discussing the substance of the controversy, thus laying bare the futility of ID wherein specious rationalization substitutes for evidence.

One prominent feature of the Fourth World Skeptics Conference in Burbank, California, in June was the invited appearance of two prominent proponents of Intelligent Design (ID), William Dembski and Paul Nelson, to give talks and to defend their views in an open dispute with two opponents of the anti-evolution movement, Wesley Elsberry and Kenneth Miller.

This not-quite-common feature was despite the fact that the conference, organized by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), was designed as a meeting of skeptics, whose participants are squarely on the side of genuine science and are opponents of all disguised incarnations of creationism.

I cannot remember a single conference of creationists wherein the opponents of creationism were invited to give talks in open discussion.

The SKEPTICAL INQUIRER reported on this session in its subsequent Conference Report (September/October 2002, pp. 8-12), but here I comment more fully on and critique the presentation by Dembski.

The proponents of creationism sometimes accuse their detractors of being doctrinaire adherents of antireligious bias whose motivation is not pursuing the truth but assaulting religious faith. Although this may be not the most important point, still it seems worth mentioning that both Elsberry and Miller have asserted that they are not atheists. Professor of biology Miller is a faithful Catholic, and Elsberry, while vigorously defending the theory of evolution, has also said that he is a "theistic evolutionist."

Hence, both Dembski and Nelson were given a chance to argue in favor of their position using arguments of substance, based on facts rather than on ideology, in a dispute with opponents who had no reason to assault Dembski's and Nelson's religious beliefs. In this brief article I will discuss only the presentation by Dembski.

Complexity

The text of Dembski's presentation (Dembski 2002a) is available on the Internet. This text is notable by the almost complete absence of arguments relevant to the gist of the dispute between ID advocates, like himself, and the opponents of that theory. Indeed, the only instance of Dembski's touching on the substance of the dispute seems to be a paragraph where Dembski mentions his term specified complexity and unequivocally defines it as a synonym for "specified improbability." Of course, there is nothing new in that statement. Dembski has expressed his interpretation of complexity as "disguised improbability" in various forms in many of his articles and books (Dembski 1998 and 2002b). This interpretation has been criticized more than once as contrary to logic and to the accepted mathematical notion of complexity (Wein 2002, Perakh 2001 and 2002, and many others). Continuing in the same vein, Dembski repeats his often-stated thesis that what he calls "specified complexity" is a necessary indicator of design. T he fallacy of that statement has been demonstrated more than once (for example, Edis 2001, Wilkins and Elsberry 2001, Perakh 2001 and 2002, Wein 2001 and 2002, Fitelson et al. 1999, Pennock 2000, Elsberry 2002, and others). Indeed, consider an example discussed several times before (Perakh 2001): Imagine a pile of pebbles found on a river shore. Usually each of them has an irregular shape, its color varying over its surface, and often its density also varying over its volume. There are no two pebbles which are identical in shape, color, and density distribution. I guess even Dembski would not argue that the irregular shape, color, and density distribution of a particular pebble resulted from intelligent design, regardless of how complex these shapes and distributions may happen to be. Each pebble formed by chance. Now, what if among the pebbles we find one that has a perfectly spherical shape, with an ideally uniform distribution of color and density? Not too many people would deny that this piece in all like lihood is a product of design. However, it is much simpler than any other pebble, if, of course, complexity is defined in a logically consistent manner rather than in Dembski's idiosyncratic way. A logically consistent definition of complexity is given, for example, in the algorithmic theory of randomness-probability-complexity (and is often referred to as Kolmogorov complexity). The Kolmogorov complexity of a perfectly spherical piece of stone is much lower than it is for any other pebble having irregular shape and non-uniform distribution of density and color. Indeed, to describe the perfectly spherical piece one needs a very simple program (or algorithm), actually limited to just one number for the sphere's diameter, one number for density, and a brief indication of color. For a piece of irregular shape, the program necessarily must be much longer, as it requires many numbers to reproduce the complex shape and the distributions of density and of color. This is a very simple example of the fallacy of Dembsk i's thesis according to which design is indicated by "specified complexity." Actually, in this example (as well as in an endless number of other situations) it is simplicity which seems to point to design while complexity seems to indicate chance as the antecedent cause of the item's characteristics.