"Thus, even though a design inference is
frequently the first step toward identifying
an intelligent agent, design as inferred from
the design inference does not logically entail
an intelligent agent. The design that emerges
from the design inference must not be
conflated with intelligent agency. Though they
are frequently linked, the two are seperate.
Whether an event conforms to a pattern is a
seperate question from what caused an event to
conform to a pattern." (pp. 8-9)

"It follows, therefore, that how we measure
information needs to be independent of
whatever procedure we use to individuate the
possibilities under consideration. The way to
do this is not simply to count possibilities
but to assign probabilities to these
possibilities." (pp. 154)

"As a purely formal object, the information
measure described here is a complexity
measure." (pp. 158)

"There is a straightforward reason for
thinking that the observed outcomes favor
Design over Chance. If Caputo had allowed his
political allegiance to guide his arrangement
of ballots, you'd expect Democrats to be
listed first on all or almost all of the
ballots. ... The key concept is *likelihood*.
The likelihood of a hypothesis is the
probability it confers on the observations; it
is not the probability that the observations
confer on the hypothesis. ... Chance and
Design can be evaluated by comparing their
likelihoods, relative to the same set of
observations." (original emphasis)

"Dembski defines the Regularity hypothesis in
different ways. Sometimes it is said to assert
that the evidence E is noncontingent and is
reducible to law (39, 53); at other times it
is taken to claim that E is a deterministic
consequence of earlier conditions (65, 146n5);
and at still other times, it is supposed to
say that E was highly probable, given some
earlier state of the world (38)."

"Understanding what "regularity," "chance,"
and "design" mean in Dembski's framework is
made more difficult by some of his examples.
Dembski discusses a teacher who finds that the
essays submitted by two students are nearly
identical (46). One hypothesis is that the
students produced their work independently; a
second hypothesis asserts that there was
plagiarism. Dembski treats the hypothesis of
independent origination as a Chance hypothesis
and the plagiarism hypothesis as an instance
of Design. Yet, both describe the matching
papers as issuing from intelligent agency, as
Dembski points out (47)."

"The same sort of interpretive problem
attaches to Dembski's discussion of the Caputo
example. We think that all of the following
hypotheses appeal to intelligent agency: (i)
Caputo decided to spin a roulette wheel on
which 00 was labeled "Republican" and the
other numbers were labeled "Democrat;" (ii)
Caputo decided to toss a fair coin; (iii)
Caputo decided to favor his own party. Since
all three hypotheses describe the ballot
ordering as issuing from intelligent agency,
all, apparently, are instances of Design in
Dembski's sense. However, Dembski says that
they are examples, respectively, of
Regularity, Chance, and Design."

"In the first example, Dembski (39) says that
Newton's hypothesis that the stability of the
solar system is due to God's intervention into
natural regularities is less parsimonious than
Laplace's hypothesis that the stability is due
solely to regularity. In the second, he
compares the hypothesis that a pair of dice is
fair with the hypothesis that each is heavily
weighted towards coming up 1. He claims that
the latter provides the more parsimonious
explanation of why snake-eyes occurred on a
single roll. We agree with Dembski's
simplicity ordering in the first example; the
example illustrates the idea that a hypothesis
that postulates two causes R and G is less
parsimonious than a hypothesis that postulates
R alone. However, this is not an example of
Regularity versus Design, but an example of
Regularity&Design versus Regularity alone; in
fact, it is an example of two causes versus
one, and the parsimony ordering has nothing to
do with the fact that one of those causes
involves design. In Dembski's second example,
the hypotheses differ in likelihood, relative
to the data cited; however, if parsimony is
supposed to be a different consideration from
fit-to-data, it is questionable whether these
hypotheses differ in parsimony."

"The fact that the Filter allows you to accept
or reject Regularity without attending to what
specific Regularity hypotheses predict has
some peculiar consequences. Suppose you have
in mind just one specific regularity
hypothesis that is a candidate for explaining
E; you think that if E has a regularity-style
explanation, this has got to be it. If E is a
rare type of event, the Filter says to
conclude that E is not due to Regularity. This
can happen even if the specific hypothesis,
when conjoined with initial condition
statements, predicts E with perfect precision.
Symmetrically, if E is a common kind of event,
the Filter says not to reject Regularity, even
if your lone specific Regularity hypothesis
deductively entails that E is false."

"CINDE [one of the conditions] is too lenient
on Chance hypotheses -- it says that their
violating CINDE suffices for them to be
accepted (or not rejected). Suppose you want
to explain why Smith has lung cancer (E). It
is part of your background knowledge (I) that
he smoked cigarettes for thirty years, but you
are considering the hypothesis (H) that Smith
read the works of Ayn Rand and that this
helped bring about his illness. To investigate
this question, you do a statistical study and
discover that smokers who read Rand have the
same chance of lung cancer as smokers who do
not. This study allows you to draw a
conclusion about Smith -- that Pr(E | H&I) = Pr
(E | not-H &I). Surely this equality is
evidence against the claim that E is due to H.
However, the filter says that you can't reject
the causal claim, because CINDE is false -- Pr
(E | H&I) [is not equal to] Pr(E | H)."

"In fact, just writing down a tautology
satisfies TRACT and DELIM (165). On the
assumption that human beings are able to write
down tautologies, we conclude that these two
conditions are always satisfied and so play no
substantive role in the Filter."

"Suppose you know that an urn contains either
10% green balls or 1% green balls; perhaps you
saw the urn being filled from one of two
buckets (you don't know which), whose contents
you examined. Suppose you draw 10 balls from
the urn and find that 7 are green. From a
likelihood point of view, the evidence favors
the 10% hypothesis. However, Dembski would
point out that the 10% hypothesis predicted
that most of the balls in your sample would
fail to be green. Your observation contradicts
this prediction. Are you therefore forced to
reject the 10% hypothesis? If so, you are
forced to reject the 1% hypothesis on the same
grounds. But you know that one or the other
hypothesis is true. Dembski's talk of
a "probabilistic inconsistency" suggests that
he thinks that improbable events can't really
occur -- a true theory would never lead you to
make probabilistic predictions that fail to
come true."

"Here Dembski is *much* too hard on Design.
Paley reasonably concluded that the watch he
found is better explained by postulating a
watchmaker than by the hypothesis of random
physical processes. This conclusion makes
sense even if Paley admits his lack of
omniscience about possible Chance hypotheses,
but it does not make sense according to the
Filter. What Paley did was compare a specific
chance hypothesis and a specific design
hypothesis without pretending that he thereby
surveyed all possible chance hypotheses. For
this reason as well as for others we have
mentioned, friends of Design should shun the
Filter, not embrace it." (emphasis original)

"To test evolutionary theory against the
hypothesis of intelligent design, you must
know what both hypotheses predict about
observables (Fitelson and Sober 1998, Sober
1999b). The searchlight therefore must be
focused on the design hypothesis itself. What
does it predict? If defenders of the design
hypothesis want their theory to be scientific,
they need to do the scientific work of
formulating and testing the predictions that
creationism makes (Kitcher 1984, Pennock
1999). Dembski's Explanatory Filter encourages
creationists to think that this responsibility
can be evaded. However, the fact of the matter
is that the responsibility must be faced."

"To attribute an event to design is to say
that regularity and chance have been ruled
out. Referring Caputo's ballot line selections
to design is therefore not identical with
referring it to agency." (TDI, pp. 19-20)

"These two moves -ruling out regularity,
and then ruling out chance- constitute the
design inference. The conception of design
that emerges from the design inference is
therefore eliminative, asserting of an event
what it is not, not what it is." (TDI, pp. 19)

"The design inference is in the business of
eliminating hypotheses, not confirming
them. ... Because the design inference is
eliminative, there is no "design hypothesis"
against which the relevant chance hypothesis
compete, and which must then be compared
within a Bayesian confirmation scheme."
(TDI, pp. 68)

"Another problem with the argument from
imperfection is that it critically depends on
a psychoanalysis of the unidentified designer.
Yet the reasons that a designer would or would
not do anything are virtually impossible to
know unless the designer tells you
specifically what those reasons are." (Behe,
M. J., 1998, "Darwin's Black Box", pp. 223)