ABSTRACT

Dembski has proposed an "explanatory filter" (EF) which, he claims, enables us to reliably distinguish events that are due to regularities, those that are due to chance, and those that are due to design. Such a filter is needed, he believes, to determine the reason for cases like Spade's safe, the discrimination of signals by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project (SET!) that are due to intelligent senders from those that are caused by ordinary phenomena like quasars, and most critically, whether all or some aspects of the biological world are due to accident or design. In other words, Dembski's filter is a reworking of Paley's design inference (DT) in the forensic manner of identifying the "guilty parties".