Has Michael Egnor shown that everything is intelligently designed?
Michael Egnor, by all accounts a talented neurosurgeon, has come up with an extraordinary argument at Evolution News, the Discovery Institute's site where they attempt to excise evolutionary thinking. His argument, which is aimed at Jason Rosenhouse's book The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism, can be found at this link. Thanks to Jack Krebs for pointing out this extraordinary paragraph, about Jason's analogy to coin-tossing:
For Rosenhouse’s analogy to point to unintelligent causes — to Darwinian natural selection — he would have to invoke the analogy that we leave a block of silver on a table by itself and wait for it to (by erosion and wind) sculpt itself into 100 coins, each of which would then spontaneously fall off the table, and the coins that landed tails up would then spontaneously (perhaps by earthquakes!) jump back up onto the table and spontaneously fall again, with this mindless but amazingly specific cycle repeating itself until all 100 coins lay heads-up on the floor (and the floor would first have to assemble itself!). This is a fine model of Darwinian natural selection.What is Egnor trying to argue? I think a major issue is, to what does this argument not apply? Is it arguing that natural phenomena are intelligently designed, or that models of natural phenomena are intelligently designed? To find out, first read Egnor's whole post at the link above. There has been a brief discussion of this at Peaceful Science but I think there must be more to say here. To show the post with its comment section, click on the title of this post.