I am intrigued by your recent essay in the Huffington Post titled "Are We Observing Extraterrestrial Intelligence Without Realizing It?" The questions you raise are fascinating, and the novel theory you present -- that certain binary star systems may be artifacts of intelligent agency rather than natural artifacts -- is worthy of serious scientific investigation.
On a related matter, on your blog this is what you have said about intelligent design theory:
"... the pseudoscientific concept of Intelligent Design... I instantly realized that Intelligent Design was a pseudoscientific attempt to legitimize creationism. But the point of this article is not to provide another redundant analysis of why Intelligent Design is pseudoscience..."
But in your essay you used William Dembski's explanatory filter. You concluded that physical law did not explain the energy flow in the binary stars, and chance doesn't either, so you inferred design.
Even more remarkable is that you endorse rarified design -- design inferred only by the fingerprints left by intelligent agency, without any knowledge of the putative designer.
You could write a chapter in Dembski's next book on the explanatory filter. If the dynamics of binary stars that are not adequately described by physical laws or chance justifiably raise the question of intelligent agency -- and they do -- why doesn't the dynamics of millions of information-rich sequences of base pairs of nucleotides in DNA raise the question of intelligent agency?
Why is the inference to rarified design in binary stars valid, but the inference to rarified design in the genetic code "pseudoscience?"
Are we observing intracellular intelligence without realizing it?
Sincerely,
Mike Egnor
theadvancedapes, hope you don't mind me posting this. I have made you an "editor" on the post if you'd like to change or modify anything. Did you respond to Mr. Egnor?