Detecting design: Specification versus Likelihood By Mark Frank
Posted July 02, 2006 The Intelligent Design (ID) movement
proposes that it is possible to detect whether something has
been designed by inspecting it, assessing whether it might have
been produced by either necessity or chance alone, and, if the
answer is negative, concluding it must have been designed. This
means there is no need to make any commitments about the nature
of the designer. This approach relies heavily on the concept of
specification. The proponents of ID have made various attempts
to define specification. A recent attempt is in a paper written
by William Dembski in 2005 which is clearly intended to
supersede previous attempts. This essay examines this revised
definition of specification and highlights some issues in
Dembski's paper. It also proposes that our intuitive
understanding of when an outcome is implausible is much better
explained by a comparison of the likelihoods of different
hypotheses. Finally the essay considers some