Claudia

Eternity is boring. so God decided to look for distraction, and played with creating universe(s). But lifeless universe is boring, so He played with life, and for pure fun he changes things from time to time, add a catastroph, other times he let things go on by their own. He even played with intelligence and modified primates in a being able to modify its environment, to see wha it becomes.

Hey, this is not the Christian God!
No, it is not.

There is no proof/ indication of such a God!
No, except that so much people are unable to imagine that things could happen "by themselves".

Do you believe in such a God?
No, I see no reason to introduce this hypothesis in my model of the universe. But it is the only kind which could be at least marginally consistent with my model of the universe.

Starboy

Oolon,

Do you know if ID is restricted to life on Earth or is it supposed to be applied to the entire universe?

Isn’t the main difficulty with ID is that it is useless, if the designer isn’t telling anyone how he did it then what good is it. We still have to use good old-fashioned science to figure it out anyway. Until the designer forks over the plans ID is just an excuse to not do science. From what I read about ID scientists, that appears to be exactly what they are doing. Seems like just another front the Christians are using to gum up the works of science. Anyone who thinks that science and religion don’t conflict with one another is just an historical ignoramus. ID and creationism is just a rehash of the god’s favorite creature argument that has been going on ever since Copernicus. If the science of the last 200 years affirmed mankind as the center of the universe instead of showing what small potatoes we really are we would not be having this discussion! That one thing alone is probably the primary reason Christians have stepped up their activies. It is the sort of behaviour one would expect if you were caught in a truth trap.

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=57&t=000347" target="_blank">Truth Trap</a>

Starboy

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Starboy

Well said Stephen T-B! Another way to put it is that new science gets the Nobel Prize and new religion gets crucified.

Starboy

You know Grumpy, you may have something with that bacteria idea.

1. The universe is very big and old.

2. The universe is 99.99999999999…% hostile vacuum.

The bacteria has the following interesting characteristics:

1. It can go into spore form and last for 100 of millions of years.

2. In spore form it needs no food or water.

3. Bacteria are light creatures; it wouldn’t take much to accelerate them to close to light speed.

4. While space traveling spores would not need to bring along any food or water.

5. They could land someplace and just wait until they were knocked back into space or until the environment changed to suit them.


Hmmmmm, maybe the universe was designed for bacteria and they are god's favorite creature.

Starboy

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Who knows? Dawkins argues that if there is life anywhere else, it will have been formed by evolution (obviously, it being the only known natural mechanism for producing organised complexity). So I imagine that evolution-deniers of any stripe will similarly invoke 'design' for it.

Yup It's an rrefutable explain-all.

Oolon

Oolon Colluphid

That would be nice, if it were what they have done. But all it is is the equivalent of Dawkins’s concept of ‘designoid’ objects (in Climbing Mount Improbable). Things which are too improbable to have come about by chance, and which seem to have a function related to their structure (or vice versa).

Nobody denies that living things have the appearance of being designed; they are designoid. Everyone sees that they are things in need of explanation. A hollowed-out stone may act as a cup, but a thin-walled cup-stone with a handle and matching saucer is too well fitted to a particular function to come about by chance. Similarly, there and any number of carbon-spined molecules; only a very few can self-replicate.

IDiots are not compartmentalising, they are intrinsically bringing in “implications of the conclusion”. Everyone agrees that things appear designed. It is a banality. But they are specifically saying that the design is caused by intelligence.

Okay, that makes it worse for them. Let me rephrase:

P1: Living things appear designed.

C1: If things were designed by an intelligent agency, they should be very well designed; there should be no examples of poor design in nature: no obvious flaws that could be easily remedied by a change in the design (an intelligent agent should realise these and alter them appropriately).

P2: There are obvious examples of poor design in nature.

C2: Living things were not designed by an intelligent agent.

Sure, that’s what they claim to do. But everyone knows damn well what the implication of something not appearing designed, but actually being designed, is.

Sure. But they specifically take it that there is / are creator(s) involved. Their reason? Things look that way.

But since we have a naturalistic mechanism that can produce such things without ‘supernatural’ entities and mechanisms, their hypothesis contains ‘entities multiplied beyond necessity’. It is less parsimonious, and should be rejected. Analogy: a rock moves unseen off a clifftop and lands in a particular place straight below. Maybe angels carried it down; but unless these angels can be demonstrated, gravity should be taken as the cause. IDiots are bringing in angels where none are needed.

But saying that that’s just how the designer wanted it is both irrefutable, so not science, and stupid. A designer that could design the laryngeal nerve’s structure, but still looped it under the aorta, is one whose sanity we’d question if it were human. It’s like a painter of masterpieces who hangs them facing a wall.

So, what variety of ‘decay’ in a design leads to fake sex in parthengenic lizards, male parts on female flowers, the human birth canal passing through the pelvis, marsupial foetuses having to crawl through the mother’s fur to get to the pouch, the non-counterflow set-up of cephalopod gills, and the human coccyx? Decay of that variety sure looks a lot like evolution...

Nice try, but bollocks . Of course there are trade-offs between optima. This is why cheetahs cannot run at 250mph (which would ensure that far more hunts were successful). But we’re talking a different sort of sub-optimal: the sort that could be easily rectified, but has not been.

Simple replumbing -- there’s a designer starting from scratch, remember -- would make human and marsupial birth much safer: an abdominal opening straight to the pouch, or not through the inevitable narrowness of a biped’s pelvis, would do it. But that’s not how it is.

Cephalopod gills could be made more efficient simply by altering the direction of water flow through them. But it hasn’t been.

Using more materials than necesssary is poor design, yet the vast majority of DNA codes for nothing, and the recurrent laryngeal is far longer than it need be.

To repeat: it’s an odd sort of intelligence that can do the complex stuff, but that cocks up on the obvious.

Perhaps. But random mutation and non-random survival is a pretty simple algorithm. Not much intelligence required. Once you have replicators and a competition for resources (inevitable), it is unavoidable. The best replicators will automatically, inevitably leave most descendants, and the world will become filled by things that are good at replicating and living long enough to do so.

Anything else is teleological, and the fossil record is pretty good witness to the lack of an aim in evolution.

Meanwhile, where’s the evidence for the designer? It’s just rock-lowering angels again.

It’s an odd sort of optimality that is so hugely wasteful. Trial and error is what you do if you don’t really have a clue. Intelligence is what you use instead. And which was manifestly not involved in forming living things.

Define ‘know’

Cheers, Oolon

Principia

Oolon,

Thanks for the reply. Let me continue to play advocate here, just because I see a lot of hand-waving on this board about an issue that seems a whole lot more important than debunking YECs.

The question, of course, is when these apparent design flaws appeared. IDiots (can I say that here, ah... I'm home, again) choose, apparently, not to answer the question, and cry foul when it is pushed on them. See, what they really want to do is to stop at:

And then, given that conclusion, work from there the implications of the designer. So, I agree with you:

To be sure, there is no doubt that IDiots are fully aware of the such issues. But given the number of tries the fundies (and the fundies in ID) have taken to change science, they have learned to clam up on them.

I think therein lies the problem. IDiots take advantage that naturalistic explanations are in fact incomplete. And they want nothing more than to say that attempts at mechanistic explanations are futile. For instance:

Note the assumption that once we have replicators, then RMNS can proceed without intelligence. So, one favorite argument of IDiots is where did those replicators come from? Enter front-loaded evolution and inhering intelligence.

You should read the thrashing the IDiots give experiments supporting abiogenesis. Arguments range from inability to replicate prebiotic conditions to recitation of Dembski's favorite you-smuggled-information-there to accusing scientists of 'materialism' bias. But, there is no easy counter.

The reality is that IDists merely want to insert their [C]reator(s) somewhere, sometime, anyhow in the biological/cosmological timeline. They have no need to maintain that the [C]reator(s) continue to exert their almost divine influences. And it seems that they would like to take full advantage of our present ignorances to further their cause.

P2 [that there are obvious poor designs in nature] brings with it a bunch of metaphysical assumptions that IDiots would be first to say are unfair to load onto them. Counter-arguments usually come in the form of:

• who is to say that the value judgment you place on the optimality of certain designs is objective? In other words, how do you know for certain, say, that there are better ways of embryologically developing the vagus so that the recurrent laryngeal branch doesn't loop around the aorta?
• Why must the Designer be responsible for continuing maintainence of the designs? Why must a design that is given the ability to mutate and adapt remain 'optimal'?

To be sure, some IDiots coopt evolution whenever it suits them, but it seems to me that their game plan isn't to reject evolution as their Creationist brethren would... but, they would love nothing more to demote evolution to a mere 'tweaker' in the game of life.

And perhaps the [D]esigner had no clue, and realized it. There are actually plenty of examples of human design which uses stochastic methods (i.e. trial and error) to solve complex problems -- protein design via recombination comes to mind. Systematic designs in many situations may in fact be suboptimal compared to stochastic schemes. An IDiot would argue that it took an Intelligence to get the ball rolling and then to forsee RMNS as a means of maintaining and evolving life.

To know: not to be ignorant.
To be ignorant: to be an IDiot.

SC