How is it that scientists see something happening the same way all of the time and understand it as necessarily happening that way? Light must travel at the speed at which it travels (then again, who "sees" light travelling?). Could it be that necessity in nature, is a common sense notion, one that is derived, like the notion of identity through time, reliability of the senses, etc. from our life-world? But where in our everday, not-necessarily-scientific experience do we encounter necessity? In the relation between moments (the term "moments" here used as Husserl used it).
Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
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