There is a law of conservation of information

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 Fallacies contained in this claim 5 External Links 6 Related claims 7 Acknowledgments

Claim

Complex specified information (CSI) cannot be created by either natural law or chance, so there is a law of conservation of information which says that only intelligent action can make it increase.

The reason for this is that

• law cannot generate information, to say nothing of complex specified information,
• pure chance, entirely unsupplemented and left to its own devices, is incapable of generating CSI,
• so it seems intuitively obvious that no chance-law combination is going to generate information either. This intuition is right because
  • any chance-law combination can be split into a process involving chance and a following process involving law,
  • none of those processes can make CSI,
  • therefore the combination can't do it either.

Source

• Dembski, William, 1999. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, p. 170.

Responses

1. Dembski uses unconventional definitions; he defines "complex" as "pretty improbable". So, "complex information" means "more than 500 bits of information". By that definition, any (real) random number is infinitely complex since it has infinitely many decimal places.
2. But even using his definitions the argument does not hold water. Dembski's first two reasons are OK, as far as it goes. Strangely he does not mention what law and chance can do, and it turns out that those omissions are the crucial weak points in his reasoning.
   • Law without chance cannot generate information, as another, really existing "law of conservation of information" by Peter Medawar says.
     • But law can turn complex information into CSI.
   • Chance cannot generate CSI (or rather, it's very improbable).
     • But chance can make complex information (see the first response above).
   • So, chance-law combinations can first generate complex information (by chance), the turn it into CSI (by law).

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Exclusion (omitting possibilities)

External Links

• Stenger, Victor J., 2000 (Dec.). The Emperor's New Designer Clothes. Skeptical Briefs, [1]

Related claims

• Intelligent design theory is scientific
• Intelligent design has explanatory power
• Evidence for design disproves evolutionary mechanisms

Acknowledgments