SCT: Intelligent Design on Target
This article includes games
you can play with kids to teach
them about intelligent design
Originally published in Science & Culture Today.
Intelligent Design on Target
by David F. Coppedge
Science & Culture Today, January 14, 2016
In his second major treatise on design theory, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, William Dembski discusses searches and targets. One of his main points is that the ability to reach a target in a vast space of possibilities is an indicator of design. A sufficiently complex target that satisfies an independent specification, he argues, creates a pattern that, when observed, satisfies the Design Filter. There are rigorous mathematical and logical proofs of this concept in the book, but at one point, he uses an illustration even a child can understand.
Consider the case of an archer. Suppose an archer stands fifty meters from a large wall with a bow and arrow in hand. The wall, let us say, is sufficiently large that the archer cannot help but hit it. Now suppose each time the archer shoots an arrow at the wall, the archer paints a target around the arrow so that the arrow sits squarely in the bull’s-eye. What can be concluded from this scenario? Absolutely nothing about the archer’s ability as an archer. Yes, a pattern is being matched; but it is a pattern fixed only after the arrow has been shot. The pattern is thus purely ad hoc. [No Free Lunch, pp. 9-10, emphasis added.]
Most people have experience with target shooting of some kind, whether with bows and arrows, guns (including squirt guns), snowballs, darts, or most sports like baseball, soccer, basketball, hockey, and football. Children laugh when they picture an archer who “couldn’t even hit the broadside of a barn” and rushes up to the arrow and paints a bull’s-eye around it. Grown-ups might compare that to a biologist looking at an irreducibly complex biological system and simply stating, “It evolved.” In each of these cases, Dembski would say that since the pattern was not independently specified, therefore it is ad hoc. He continues:
But suppose instead the archer paints a fixed target on the wall and then shoots at it. Suppose the archer shoots 100 arrows, and each time hits a perfect bull’s-eye. What can be concluded from this second scenario? Confronted with this occurrence, we are obligated to infer that here is a world-class archer, one whose shots cannot legitimately be attributed to luck but rather to the archer’s skill and mastery. Skill and mastery are, of course, instances of design.
That last sentence is important. We often think of intelligent design in terms of information content, but a little reflection shows why skill and mastery are equivalent design indicators….
Click here to continue reading and learn about games for children to teach intelligent design.