Cubist
Posts: 262
Joined: Oct. 2007
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It really is too bad that ID is nothing but Yet Another Attempt To Court-Proof Creationism In the USA. Because the ostensibly-stated purpose of ID, i.e., "to detect the presence of Design", touches on some really, really interesting topics, and a genuinely valid protocol for detecting Design would be useful for a wide range of purposes.
For instance: Any English sentence is clearly Designed by the person who uttered it, and the sentence stays Designed when it's converted into a different means of expression, such as by translating it into a different language… or by 'scrambling' it with whichever flavor of encryption. So let's say you're a military codebreaker, and you know that your enemy is using a highly advanced mode of encryption that makes their coded messages appear to be indistinguishable from white noise. With a genuine Design-detection protocol, you can determine whether or not any given stretch of white noise is actually a coded message (and therefore needs more attention), or just white noise (and therefore can be safely ignored). In this way, a genuine Design-detection protocol would be of great value to national security!
For example: While ID does not presently claim to be able to do anything more than just determine whether or not a given whatzit actually is Designed, a logical extension of this basic capability is being able to determine whether or not two different whatzits were Designed by the same Designer. Such a capability has obvious implications for enforcement of copyright law, not so?
But of course, there just aren't any ID-pushers who are working on applying Design-detection to national security, or to copyright law enforcement, or, indeed, applying Design-detection to any purpose whatsoever other than Proving Evolution Wrong. If Jammer knows of any ID-pusher who actually is trying to apply Design-detection to any other purpose than Proving Evolution Wrong, I would be interested to hear about that person!
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