I, for one, welcome our future panda overlords.
You’ve reached the point where your hypothesis has gone beyond proof. If the evidence supports intelligent design, then it’s acceptable at face value. If the evidence doesn’t support intelligent design, you theorize that there may be more unknown evidence which changes the meaning of the known evidence in a way that supports intelligent design.
Wrong in more ways than one. Carbon dating is only effective to about 60,000 years back, not nearly long enough to provide evidence about evolution. The dating of other radioactive isotopes in rocks is used for that.
Besides the correct point that Darwin knew nothing of it (or genetics either) and still came up with evolution, the ordering of fossils in the rocks supports evolution, as well as our genes. The thing to remember about evolution is that every advance since Darwin supported it and strengthened it, far from weakening or falsifying it. That is why the theory part of evolution is so strong.
Posting without reading thread:
No, and I’d look funny at anyone who would. My acceptance of evolution is wholly independent of my disbelief in god(s), and anyone who thinks one must impact the other doesn’t understand evolution.
This seems to me an absurd question.
Will the OP answer the obvious counter-question:
Assuming evolution is proven to be a science, would you loose your belief in God.
Well, in fact we have some clues as to how doing the designing. We’ve “designed” creatures by selective breeding for millenias. Recently, we began to play with the genes (adding a gene so that an organism will produce something useful for us, for instance). We’ll probably be able to do better in the future. We might not be able to make watchs, but we’re already making clocks.
Which of course makes “magic” (and gods) an even less necessary explanation.
You know what, fair enough - I wasn’t thinking along these sorts of lines (I was thinking of** ‘supernatural’ **design).
I wonder, can we tell the difference between a ‘designed’ organism (the way you suggest) and one that is not? Maybe ‘out of place’ genes?
If we could get definitive objective tests for such things, that would be the test for intelligent design.
Gravity doesn’t explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. So it’s more of a suggestion until dark matter gets explained.
Again, you are both missing the point. The OP is claiming that the four philosophical arguments against the argument from design are invalid. Evolutionary theory is not the only argument against these arguments from design, and the other arguments against it are worth discussing.
For example, point 4 from the OP:
“Nature is actually designed quite poorly. If anything nature displays that whoever designed it was surely not too intelligent. Certainly, God didn’t create the universe.”
The OP is arguing that this is wrong. He or she has come back with support, as far as I can tell, but I can pretty much guarantee that if he or she does, we will be able to find flaw in it with out just saying “you are wrong because evolution is a proven fact.”
If it helps, imagine that it’s the time before Darwin, and all the evidence proving it hasn’t been discovered yet. The position of the OP can still be refuted.
Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species” was published in 1859. Radiocarbon dating was developed in 1949.
And of course, Darwin didn’t invent the idea of evolution, he proposed a mechanism for evolution. There had been lots of theories of how evolution worked before Darwin.
Geologists had worked out how the Earth’s strata had been laid down, and which strata were older than the others, long before we developed the techniques of using radioactive isotopes to put absolute dates on those strata. So even though we weren’t sure exactly how long ago the Permian Era or the Cretaceous Era or the Jurassic Era was, we knew that the Jurassic happened before the Cretaceous, and the Permian happened before the Jurassic. And we knew that the Earth had to be at least millions and millions of years old, even if we didn’t know that the Permian lasted from 299 million years ago to 251 million years ago. The relative chronology was painstakingly assembled by thousands of geologists working for more than 200 years before we were able to put absolute dates on the chronology through radiometric dating.
Assuming evolution is discovered to be junk science, would you believe in God?
It’s not either/or.
Well, we could declare that every effect has a cause. Except this would require an infinite regress. Or, there must be some uncaused first cause. And then we label this uncaused first cause “God” and shake hands with ourselves, close up shop early and go home.
But what exactly is this uncaused first cause? We can call it God but what does that even mean? And if we admit the logical possibility that there was one uncaused cause, why must there have been only one? Why not thousands or millions or trillions? Postulating even one uncaused cause is just another way of denying that every effect has a cause. And if we deny that every effect has a cause, then there’s no need to postulate a single uncaused first cause.
Well, if we discover that evolution can’t be true, what exactly does that mean? That all life on earth doesn’t have a common ancestor? That life arose elsewhere than on earth? That the earth isn’t millions of years old, as it seems? That there are some organisms or traits that are proven to be the result of intelligent design? Of course, proof that some traits or organisms were the result of design only means that something designed them, and that designer doesn’t have to be God–it could be aliens or small-g gods or a previously existing intelligent species on Earth, like civilized trilobites who created fish as an experiment.
The exact hypothetical that disproves some aspect of evolution doesn’t automatically disprove everything we know about biology and geology, it would just disprove what it disproves. So we’d have to get into specifics of the hypothetical before we can hypothesize scientific explanations for the hypothetical. Of course, we can imagine hypothetical findings that actually do support the scientific hypothesis that Yahweh created the Earth 6000 years ago and created a man out of dust and breathed into his nostrils to give him life, however that doesn’t seem very likely, given everything we know about geology and biology, and so there would have to be some careful explaining about why everything we know was wrong.
If we find a watch in the desert, one theory is that the watch assembled itself spontaneously. Except, we never observe watches assembling themselves out of raw ingredients, and so this theory seems pretty unlikely. And so if we find a living organism in the desert, the theory that the organism which is much more complex than a watch assembled itself spontaneously seems pretty unlikely.
Except, we have evidence that organisms can assemble themselves. A seed lands in the desert, it sprouts, it absorbs water and sunlight and carbon dioxide and grows into a plant, and the plant produces more seeds. A watch, complex as it is, does not have the capability of creating new watches out of air and water and sunlight, whereas plants do.
And so living organisms aren’t much like a watch dropped by Yahweh in the desert. Rather, Yahweh would have to drop a watchmaking factory. Or rather than a watchmaking factory, a factory-making factory.
Here we find a conflation of two ideas–that the universe was created by an intelligent designer, and that life on Earth was created by an intelligent designer. One, or both, or neither of those things could be true, and proving one thing true or untrue doesn’t prove the other true or untrue.
So if we find that certain aspects of the universe–the ratio between the circumference and radius of a circle, or speed of light in a vacuum, or various cosmological constants, turn out to have been the result of intelligent design of the universe, that doesn’t disprove the idea that life arose and evolved on Earth by naturalistic means. And finding out that some agency created and shaped life on Earth doesn’t mean that agency also created the Universe, we can imagine small-g gods like the gods of Greek Mythology who created and shaped mankind, but were not the creators of the universe.
If a future paleontologist discovered fossil cows and little yappy dogs, he’d strongly suspect they were designed (at least in the breeding sense) since there is no way they could survive on their own in the numbers discovered.
The argument from design for earth at least doesn’t fail because of philosophical issues, but because there is no evidence for it and plenty of evidence for the alternative.
Another point: Even if Darwinian evolution were, somehow, disproved, that still wouldn’t make it junk science. For comparison, Newton’s law of gravitation has been disproved, but it still was and is very good science. Darwinian evolution is a very reasonable and rational conclusion to draw from the observational evidence we have. Now, sometimes reasonable and rational conclusions are wrong, but still reasonable and rational.
Why would anyone care whether or not I believe in god? Do people ask you whether you believe in black holes or Neptune or blue whales?
Believing in god only matters if you’re talking about God, the guy who talked to Noah, and Moses and sent Jesus down to earth. Believing in god, an anonymous super powerful being who created the universe, is irrelevant. His existence doesn’t imply Heaven and Hell, or the Ten Commandments, or anything from Leviticus, it’s just another possible way the universe was created, a Big Bang with a consciousness.
If you’re asking me whether I’d believe in the God of Abraham. No. Why would I? Does proving evolution wrong somehow change the fact that there is no evidence of His personal existence?
How have I “observed” evolution when I caught a cold?
If I found out that the evidence for macroevolution was wrong, I would assume someone is screwing with us.
I’d use science to found out who or what.
Science wouldn’t find God.
Short answer, even as a theist myself, it’s not an either/or proposition. Moreso, I’m utterly baffled by the idea that so many seem to think that evolution and religion are at odds except by the most bizarrely dogmatic on either side.
I think this is a poor reason to disbelieve in God. Yes, in universe bound by cause/effect, as ours generally is, this leads to that sort of conclusion, but even some modern scientific theories have proposed the idea that our universe may have had a “first moment” and yet still been caused by higher dimensional branes or other such phenomenon. Without getting to in depth about why, I don’t think having a deity involved is that much different. I, and many other theists, will liken our views of God as almost identical, in him existing in something that we might perceive as a higher dimensionality, at which point our concepts of cause and effect are utterly meaningless.
Moreso, I don’t even view the purpose of God in the equation as an attempt to try to resolve that “Ultimate Big Bang” problem. In either case, we’re either left with infinite regression or simply something always existing. I, personally, don’t believe in God to satisfy this question, nor do I think believing in him nor disbelieving in him gives us any meaningful insight into the question.
- The argument from design is based on an analogy – a flawed analogy. We know that if we’d find a watch, we’d automatically assume that it was designed by an intelligent human. But that doesn’t mean that if we find a masterfully-designed cell, we should automatically assume that it was created by God, since we never saw God make anything; however, we have seen humans make watches. This was Hume’s response to the argument from design.
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These is a reasonable arguments. But all it really says is that there’s no reason to believe in a creator. But it also seems to assume that, if evolution isn’t true, that design must be. I don’t see why, if evolution is false, design is the only option. Moreso, I don’t see why if evolution is true, a creator can’t also be true. In short, I agree here, except that I think it brings the argument back to neutral, not in favor of there being no creator.
While I can agree that nature appears to be designed poorly, I don’t think it follows that it isn’t intelligently designed. My view is more along the lines of emergence and the idea that creation wasn’t something that was finished some time ago, but rather, it is an on going process. The end product isn’t humanity, but the whole of all creation from the beginning of time, to the end, and so to judge it in it’s current state would be judging only a small part of the whole.
As an analogy. Imagine flipping through the channels on your TV and coming to a movie that’s already started. If you watch a little bit of it, you can probably figure out something about the plot and how far in you are, but then judging the film based just on a couple scenes in the middle of it, and then complaining that there’s no exposition or climax or conclusion, that the characters are lacking depth and motivation, or that the plot is impossible to follow is assinine. Relative to the grand scheme of the universe, our brief moment of awareness to this point is miniscule, and infinitesimally small relative to how much longer we can imagine the universe will continue to exist. How can we possibly make any meaningful judgments in that context, when we have no idea where evolution will take us, or where what other wonders of the universe our scientific knowledge will unveil.
Now, of course, none of this proves that a creator exists, but I do feel that it is a reasonable counter-argument to the idea that the poor state of the current design necessarily means that creation is poorly designed.
[QUOTE=Galileo]
How have I “observed” evolution when I caught a cold?
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Well, leaving aside the first cold you caught (though even there evolution was at work…you just couldn’t observe it directly), the subsequent colds were all mutations, since having gotten over the first one your body had produced anti-bodies for it which were defeated in the next version. Which your body then produced anti-bodies for (meaning you wouldn’t get that one again), which were then defeated in the next version. And so on.
So…you observed evolution at work in the most direct way possible! Don’t you feel better now, knowing you are part of the grand scheme of things? 
-XT
You are using the word “observed” peculiarly.
I have not “observed” mutations or antibodies. I have learned about them and I accept their validity in providing the best explanation of a variety of biological phenomena.