The Human Question

Dembski seems to be using a quantitive approach to demonstrate that novel biostructures could not have arisen as a result of either chance (or rather, that the improbability is such that it is as good as impossilbe [he multiples the number of quarks in the cosmos by the number of plank moments or something like that to get the denominator for the inverse of his threshold of so-improbable-that-it-is-as-good-as-impossible) or necessity.  He concludes that these forms have arisen as a result of specified complexity.  But the specified in this term is another name for something that a rational being, especially an engineer, would think of.  So it's kind of a way of talking about teleology via quantification.

The discussion below is a response to S J Gould's comparison of evolution with a drunk man walking. The latter eventually walks in the gutter/groove in the road, not because he was aiming for it, but because it serves as a kind of guide, etc. No teleology, just coincidence and good fit. Something similar happens with attaining higher and higher levels of complexity. Once each level fits, we stick with it. Organisms don't aim to become more complex. It just happens. My reply is an analogy Suppose I leave a raccoon trap outside my house and a week later it catches a raccoon. It would be correct to say that the trap caught a raccoon on purpose. But if we consider the fact that many different raccoons were in the vicinity of the trap, some of them came very near to it, a few touched it, but only one took the bait, we can say that it was by chance that I caught this raccoon at this time. We can say the same about planting an IED on the road. In both cases, the very sam...