For the sake of this argument we will assume Intelligent Design is a fact. So, who or what did the designing? God? Gods? Aliens? Where does the evidence we have so far lead us?
Space aliens, hoping to guide Earthly evolution to the point where we can make and deliver the part they need to repair their spaceship, currently parked in the G-ring of Saturn.
I’m not sure that God or Gods would be on the explanation table. For one thing, it certainly looks like many ‘designs’ are tried out and fail. For another thing, how exactly would God ‘insert’ a design?
God assigned it to lesser gods, who in turn subcontracted it out to space aliens, going with the lowest bidder.
Explains a lot.
It obviously had to be a trans-dimensional being that could manipulate our 4-D time/space continuum in a manner that is completely untraceable. No evidence could be left behind except, of course, the change in the genome of a particular species. And all other species as well.
Otherwise, we would have seen its handiwork in our genetic analysis.
In other words, positing those kind of changes leads us to something quite literally beyond our ability to understand. Changes that are deliberately created to appear to be based upon natural forces are by definition impossible to detect.
Well, if you believe Kelvin, Crick, and a few others, it was aliens that did it.
Or, a future society of time-travelling intelligent cats are manipulating our genomes to create a perfect slave race, concerned only with feeding, housing, and posting pictures of cats on the global communication net.
(Oh wait…)
It depends what you mean was intelligently designed. For instance, dogs have been bred for centuries deliberately to be better suited for specific jobs or roles. So without a doubt, humans intelligently designed dogs.
If you mean to apply that bullshit theory to life in general then the whole point of the theory is to confuse people into thinking we can’t know the answer.
Assuming that we reject the “it didn’t happen” answer, then the next best choice would be aliens. Aliens violate no physical laws, and could have visited Earth a million or a billion years ago and left no evidence behind that would survive. There’s no evidence *for *their being alien interference in Earth’s evolutionary history either of course; but at least there’s no evidence against it either and that puts it above the alternatives.
A big boy did it then ran away.
Surely this topic has been done to death on this forum?
A bit tangential, but something like this issue leads to epic (and often mean-spirited) debates between theists of various stripes. Those at least in the Thomist tradition arguing that whatever design arguments get you, they don’t get you god. So take heart; this discussion isn’t lost on all religious believers.
Oddly: I recently found that one of my undergraduate philosophy professors, Brad Monton, wrote a book entitled Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. I find this fact at the very least terribly confusing, frankly, but there you go. It might be a relevant resource for a discussion such as this one.
If it happened that way? Yes.
Assuming for the sake of argument it happened, and asking who and how? Not so much, I think.
I didn’t, I, I didn’t do it, I, I, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t do it, I,
I, I didn’t, I, I didn’t do it, I, I didn’t, I didn’t, I, I didn’t do it,
I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it.
Not aliens, but Atlanteans. A sentient race which designed us to be free of the embarrassing problems they had no choice but to put up with, such as short-sightedness, inability to sit for long periods without suffering back pain, and flatulence. After drawing a few lines in the Nazca desert, carving some giant stone heads and terrifying the shit out their progeny with tales of catastrophic floods, they buggered off to live in a cave in Nepal, subsisting off eyeless insects.
Of course, they were a product of evolution.
I’m not sure who the creator was but I’m pretty sure that when he/she/it was creating, a bunch of other creators stood around and watched.
And one of them helpfully pointed out that the creator missed a spot.
God = 7_4!
Genuine question, though: since we’re assuming as a given for this discussion that ID is fact, is any of that “evidence against” valid?
It depends a lot on when the intelligent design was done. If every species got tweaked it would be some god-like object, since aliens would get bored. If it happened once every 100 million years or so, it would be aliens making regular service calls and doing PM. Or it could be R. Daneel with a time machine exercising the -1 law. Or it could be those creepy things living in the hollow earth.
You need to give us more information about the intelligent design before it is possible to give a reasonable answer - even to this unreasonable question.
The trouble is that you can’t just say “it was intelligent design” and step away. WHAT was intelligently designed? The Universe, with the laws of physics intelligently tuned to create a universe hospitable to life? Or is it that the Earth was put in exactly the right distance from the Sun with the exact right Moon and the exact right amount of water, and life arose naturally from there? Or are we saying that the very first microsopic living things on Earth were intelligently designed from scratch and all subsequent life evolved naturally from there? Or are we saying that major categories of organisms were designed? Or are we saying that each and every new species that arises on Earth is intelligently designed? Or are we saying that human beings aren’t like other animals, but are uniquely intelligently designed? Or maybe that life usually evolves, but every now and then a designer steps in and makes some changes at one or more critical points?
Or some mixture of all or any of the above? Maybe the designer did several of the above actions but not all, or maybe there were different designers for some actions. Like, an entity that might as well be called God designed the universe, and created lesser beings who might as well be called gods, who created starfish aliens, who started life on earth from scratch, and then some completely different aliens found some intelligent monkeys and genetically engineered them to be slaves, but we escaped and ate them all 50,000 years.
An Uncaused First Cause isn’t the same as some alien genetic slaverunners.