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To: betty boop
Dembski's "complex specified information"

Pure non-mathematical tripe.

L. Ron Hubbard built a religion the same way. Write a bunch of vaguely plausible sophistry with liberal usage of scientific terminology and sell it to people who like the conclusion too much to bother investigating the credibility of the axioms.

Dembski is an idiot and/or charlatan, and I would love to get into a mathematical Metal Cage Death Match with him, preferably televised for posterity.

91 posted on 08/26/2004 2:02:03 PM PDT by tortoise (All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.)
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To: tortoise
Dembski is an idiot and/or charlatan, and I would love to get into a mathematical Metal Cage Death Match with him, preferably televised for posterity.

www.arn.org - he posts there all the time. Before you do that, though, you may want to have a look at this:

Information as a Measure of Variation and determine whether or not you have the necessary credentials to understand what he is saying, let alone the maths he uses.

93 posted on 08/26/2004 2:12:44 PM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
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To: tortoise
Besides, Dembski is used to dealing with detractors. He talks about it on his Designinference website:

"One of my friends at Oxford, a senior scholar who works in the history of physics, has watched the vituperation and storm of controversy that surrounds my work and continually counsels me to keep my polemical streak in check. Yet when I referred him to Gross’s article, here’s what he wrote:"

My goodness, Bill, this is loaded with extreme polemical language almost from the first sentence. I find it so biased that I simply cannot get beyond the first page. That the editor is proud to present this polemical babble is astonishing. If this is the best that the “scientific establishment” can do, then that establishment is culturally decadent. It confirms what I have worried about for a long time: that science today simply does not have the cultural depth, the conceptual and linguistic resources, to conduct civilized scholarly debate about its foundational commitments and assumptions. Thomas Huxley would be deeply embarrassed by this article. If you have to deal daily with this kind of low polemic, there is a real danger of being dragged down to their level. I am more sympathetic than ever with what you have to deal with.

98 posted on 08/26/2004 2:20:32 PM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
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To: tortoise
If you read Dembdki's comments on "Panda's Thumb," it becomes evident that is a charlatan, and an arrogant one at that. When several (rather good, in my opinion) mathematicians (that Dembski sent his paper to) criticized his stuff, he just claimed that they weren't good enough to understand him.
100 posted on 08/26/2004 2:49:16 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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