information theory

On this episode of ID the Future, Robert Crowther interviews Eric Holloway, Associate Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, about Holloway’s recent article answering a common criticism of intelligent design theory. The criticism centers on William Dembski’s explanatory filter for detecting design, especially Dembski’s crucial innovation, which was to include specification as the filter’s final step. Critics say specification is an ad hoc addition, conjured up by ID theorists for no good reason except to prop up ID theory. No one else uses it, they say. They’re wrong, says Holloway. Dembski accurately formalized a filter we use so often that we’re like fish in the sea. We are unaware of it because it’s ubiquitous. To Read More ›

In this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Mike Keas interviews attorney and engineer Eric Anderson about the first of two mistakes ID antagonists often make regarding information in nature. There is information to be gained about natural phenomena, like Saturn’s rings for example, but is there information actually in Saturn’s rings, or is that information produced by intelligent agents studying Saturn’s rings? The answer to that question should be clear — and it makes a huge difference in how we understand information and intelligence. Eric Anderson is the co-author of the new Discovery Institute press book Evolution and Intelligent Design in a Nutshell.

On this episode of ID the Future, we hear the third and final portion of a talk given at the 2020 Dallas Science and Faith conference. Daniel Reeves, education outreach coordinator at Discovery Institute, rounds out his extended explanation of intelligent design theory. Far from being “Gee whiz that’s complicated; it must be designed!,” the theory relies on well-defined concepts such as specified complexity and an explanatory filter that allows one to distinguish designed events from either chance, necessity, or a combination of the two. The key in the molecular biological realm: detecting functional information.

In this episode of ID the Future, Mike Keas interviews attorney and engineer Eric Anderson about the first of two mistakes ID antagonists often make regarding information in nature. Read More ›

Materialism says that everything is an organized complexity of matter, a bottom up perspective on our world. Dembski uses Tang to describe the problem with this view: You can take orange juice and extract orange juice ‘solids’, but you can never fully create orange juice again; but that is what materialism attempts to do.
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In this clip, William Dembski discusses information realism, the notion that the fundamental “stuff” of the world is information–not matter. An example of this is found in the recent search for the Higgs boson particle. Read More ›

In this clip, William Dembski discusses how his work on intelligent design is largely inspired by famous atheist Richard Dawkins. Dembski found Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker “insightfully wrong,” and actually based his work on trying to answer some of the issues it raises. Read More ›

In this clip, William Dembski describes how his new book Being as Communion fits with the other books he has written. In Being as Communion Dembski creates a metaphysical backdrop or worldview that challenges the traditional materialistic framework, therefore adding context to his previous work. Read More ›

In this clip, Dr. Dembski discusses the meaning of information. Dembski defines information as the “ruling out of possibilities.” By ruling a range of possibilities, you learn something. Read More ›