The Law of parsimony prefers Intelligent Design

>> I would like to ask that my opponent refrain from the use of semantics as the resolution is stated as "The law of parsimony prefers intelligent design" You see, this is the problem. You do not understand what parsimony is, and would like to teach you. I can see that you don't understand it because when I asked you to explain why the principle is useful, you just repeated it. Therefor, I will ONLY use semantics. I'm not going to debate the fine-tuning argument, if you want me to do that, challenge me to a debate about it. This is not a true debate because it has an objective answer. Even if ID were actually correct, the principle of parsimony would still favor evolution by natural selection as a scientific theory. >> It is useful, because when you have two theories like these ones, that are not completely proven, it provides an understanding that the simpler theory tends to be the correct one." Ignoring the fact that you've used the word "proven" (heresy in the domain of science!), you have not given me the reason WHY the simpler theory tends to be correct. Why should it? The principle of parsimony, as you stated it, is that "The simpler theory wins", or better yet "Choose the simplest theory that is consistent with the evidence." The problem is that this naï¿½ve definition of the principle of parsimony will always select for "magical" explanations, as they are consistent with observations and able to explain just about anything. Let's take the famous watch analogy in a new direction, and assume some alien civilization has found a digital watch, without knowledge of its origins. They don't care whether the watch was made by intelligent agents or if it came together naturally. What they want to know is: "How does this darned thing work?" One possibility is that it works by magic; that the inner workings of the digital watch are beyond their ability to comprehend. On the other hand, through considerable effort they may be able to piece together some of the principles that go into the workings of a watch. This would lead them to the possibility that the watch works through a complex series of interactions that they only partially understand. How might the principle of parsimony guide the alien researchers? Both the "magic theory" and the "complex interactions theory" explain how a watch works, but the "magic theory" is considerably simpler. Not only that, but the more complex theory fails to explain all of the parts of the watch. It would seem the magic theory wins on every account, but you should be able to grasp that science would reject the magic theory outright and pursue the more complex one. Clearly there must be something more to the principle of parsimony. Do we need to add additional rules to it, such as "The simpler theory wins, unless that theory involves magic"? Many proponents of ID seem to think that science should be redefined to allow for metaphysical explanations, as if there were some rule of science that said "Thou shalt not honor metaphysics". However, by adding such rules, we risk violating the very principle that we're trying to define! Fortunately, we don't need to twist the principle of parsimony at all: "All other things being equal, choose the simplest theory" will do. All we have to do is understand what, exactly, it means for a theory to be simple. To do that, we need to take the concept of a theory apart and prod its innards. We'll start with the ability to categorize the world into objects and qualities. We can talk of an observation (this object has these properties), and we can talk of events (these objects had these properties, now they have these properties). To use an easy example, let's consider the motion of stars across the night sky. The "objects" are the stars, and the "qualities" are the coordinates of the star in the sky (depth is ignored for obvious reasons). The "events" are the change in position of the stars each night. We can describe the motion of the stars by recording the position of each star, but this is an awful lot of information! Furthermore, we would only know where the stars were on the days that we recorded them: we couldn't say where the stars might be next week. Enter the "theory". A theory is tool which compresses information into manageable chunks that are far easier to explain, understand, and manipulate. It does so by proposing that there are consistent relationships between objects and qualities. The scientific theory actually evolved from the common mental ability to notice patterns in observations and turn them into predictions. "Last few times Og eat berry from purple bush, Og get sick. If Og eat berry from purple bush, Og get sick again. Og no eat from purple bush no more." Not a scientific theory for sure, but the spirit is the same. Newtonian gravity proposed a precise relationship between mass, distance, and attraction. This law allowed us to compress the vast amount of data about star positions with a simple formula. Compressing information, without losing too much of it, is what theorizing it all about. Its what science itself is all about. "Magic theories" don't just compress information, they lose it. The entire process that goes into creating a watch, not to mention the processes that go into making it consistently increment a timer, are whisked away. This actually results in magic making things MORE complex, not less. If we believed the stars move by magic, we are still stuck with the fact that each moves differently. Therefore, it is not one theory explaining how all stars work, but a separate theory for each and every star. In other words, we're back exactly where we started: only knowing about the stars what we record. I will now explain WHY science follows the principle of parsimony. The fitness of a theory depends on how much information it loses when it compresses it (the less the better, obviously) and how much information is can compress (the more the better). If two theories are evenly matched in these two fields, the principle tells us we should pursue the theory with the fewest premises. The reason is that the simpler a theory is, the easier it is draw conclusions about the theory from experiments. The principle of parsimony is not a hard and fast rule, and it is now plain to see why. The topic of this discussion is whether the principle of parsimony favors Intelligent Design, presumably over the theory of evolution, unless there's some third theory anybody wants to profess. The principle includes the condition that "all other things be equal", which they are not by any stretch, but we'll just focus on simplicity for now. For every unique species of animal, ID postulates a unique creation event. By abstracting away all the details, the ID proponent can use the same language to say that God created fish or that God created birds. It is language, nothing else, that makes ID seem simple, but because ID does not compress information, it is actually much much MORE complicated than the theory of evolution by natural selection. I expect that you will have some confusion about what I've said, so I will use the last 2 rounds to clarify any last misunderstandings you have.