Knight’s proposal in the OP was a very reasonable one – not at all unlike what SETI would love to have happen.
I won't speak for Knight, but my interpretation is that you recognise design in a message from space but not in life.
Many things that look to be “design” in life can arise via natural processes in human-sensible timeframes.
That's only if you assume that everything we observe isn't designed.
I have no objection with that approach at a fundamental level in nature. But this comes very close to defining God as nature.
What are the odds that we actually catch the message from intelligent life? Like you said, SETI has only been operating a short time so what are the chances that the intelligent beings sent a message so that we caught it in that time window? I guess there are a lot of factors involved in that......
Since the message was in modern-day English, that would indicate that the sender beamed our way with the intention of us seeing it very close to the present time. (That presents a new array of unanswered questions.)
It sounds like you're trying to concede the point in a way that will only generate more disagreement. Are you saying that it might be perfectly reasonable to work under the assumption that God created the world?
Uh ... so? :idunno:
It is dead zero regardless of the time involved. A random signal will always be constrained by physical reality which will always force a 'mess' to appear. The only way to generate meaning is via intelligence. Perhaps you might want to argue that it is still possible to generate a photograph from noise or a sentence from random letters. If so I suggest you extend the odds by raising the number we already have by itself.
If God created the laws of nature that science is striving to understand, and then let them take their course, I would not mind. From a scientific viewpoint, in that case what difference would you get in scientific studies as opposed to a committed atheist scientist, who looks at nature as just the name for the way the world works?
Since you refuse to follow the math on this problem I see no point in arguing it with you.
Yes
Let me get this straight. If you read one message or a million pages and found one coherent message you would regard it as of intelligent origin, but if you read 10001000 and found one you would consider it randomly generated?
The radio signals are produced by a source that has no intelligence. We call that random. But what random means in a mathematical sense is that one bit of data has no bearing on what the next bit will be. Such randomness is impossible to generate either naturally or artificially.
If you are not willing to look beyond what you are capable of measuring then I suppose you are right.
The maths states that a random signal will just as likely produce an intelligent message as it will any other given message. The maths does not have the capacity to show us that a message is intelligently sourced. We do that ourselves because we are capable of recognising intelligence. Natural processes do not have the ability to produce intelligence, even with infinite attempts, because they have no way of controlling the physical world in order to make sense of processes that mangle meaning. If natural processes were mathematically random then you would be right in saying that there is a chance intelligence is not involved. Natural processes are not random (though we call it that). They generate noise.
Then you can go make a fortune in computer security.
That's simply unresponsive to the OP.
You think so? In order to get the odds that the maths dictate for any rare event you are going to have to have pure random numbers. Anything short of a computer capable of churning out a string of random numbers that is of the same magnitude as the odds is going to make the likelihood of noise looking like intelligence impossible. You're then going to have to keep producing those random numbers until the message is detected .. something in the order of gaboozillions the age of the universe .. when you finally do strike gold you're going to have to deal with the fact that intelligence is behind the message anyway .. :chuckle:
You're assessment does not address the issue or the scale of the problem. Yes, random numbers can be generated that look like the real thing, but that does nothing to offset the problems you have in trying to recognise intelligence in noise. The problems humans have in producing random numbers is far more problematic for natural processes to try and overcome.
