Intelligent Design

Great Debates
81

[QUOTE=Cervaise]
Anybody who actually believes in intelligent design hasn’t done the rudimentary investigation into how a human being is actually put together and therefore doesn’t realize that our bodies are pretty far from intelligently designed. An engineering undergrad could do a better job of constructing a biped than the so-called intelligent designer ostensibly did. Even a cursory familiarity with biology and zoology is sufficient to demonstrate that humans are largely slapped together from barely-adapted parts of the critters that preceded us.
[/QUOTE]

Except for Jessica Alba’s body. I mean… come on. Surely that alone proves God.

82

Random leaves and other instances of haphazard order?

Did an artist actually createthese arrangements? Or did he merely photograph the natural workings of nature?

83

[QUOTE=magellan01]
How about if he has no beard? No form? That he is just pure energy, will and intention? That brings us down to one, right?

What if he willed the unverse into existence and what he created was the big bang? And then he never intervened? The we’d have a world that operates just as science predicts, with the exception of the cause that caused the prime mover. Theists (sans any religion) believe that this extra-natural “thing” to be God, i.e., something able to operate outside the laws of the universe. That is an explanation. One based on logic. That doesn’t make it necessarily correct, simply a reasonable explanation.

What is the non-theistic theory of how our universe came into being? I’m talking pre-Big Bang, as the BB seeks to explain only what transpired after the event began.
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The old “Uncaused first cause” meme. Well, fine. There was an uncaused first cause. The Big Bang happened, and unless the Big Bang was uncaused, then it had a cause.

Except it seems to me that labeling the uncaused first cause “God” slips all sorts of unwarranted assumptions and emotions into the discussion. It sneakily equates that uncaused first cause with the idea of a guy with a beard who lives in the clouds and makes the thunder and gets angry if you don’t worship him properly, but who can be appeased by the smell of burning meat wafting into the sky. At the very least is supposes that the uncaused first cause was some sort of conscious entity.

The other trouble with the idea of the uncaused first cause is that we can’t really say anything about it. If cause and effect operated before the Big Bang such that the Big Bang had a cause, what can we say about those causes and effects? Nothing, really. So what exactly is the difference between an entity that we know nothing about, and CAN know nothing about, not even by the effects of the things it caused…and an entity that doesn’t exist?

And

84

[QUOTE=b_wad]
Ok I dont know the exact number of genetic strands which need to be place in the correct order for life..but lets put it in the millions.

remember..they have to be in the correct order..one out of order would be deemed fatal.

[/QUOTE]

And if every human being was born perfect and healthy, you might have a minimal shred of an argument. But genetic strands are quite often not perfectly aligned. Children are born with fatal birth defects every day. People live with congenital disorders such as Down’s syndrome, muscular dystrophy and the like. I ask you, where is the “intelligence” of your “designer”?

There’s a passage in Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (page 268) in which he quotes Epicurus regarding the existence of a “creator”. Substitute “birth defects” or “congenital anomalies” for the word “evil” and I believe it makes for a cogent argument against ID:

[QUOTE=Epicurus]
Is he willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?
[/QUOTE]

85

[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I asked this question on another board, but I’ll ask it again here:

What is ID? - What methodologies does it propose? How does it work and why?

I can tell you what I learned in my first few science classes - it included the scientific method, empiricism, documenting experiments. What would I learn in my first few ID classes?

I ask, because in all of my discussions with supporters of ID, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a straight, definitive answer on what ID actually is, what it does, how it works, and how we’d know if it works - all that ever seems to happen is that someone asks a question like “isn’t it just like a God-of-the-gaps argument?”, or “doesn’t it require us to assume the existence of unnecessary entities?”, and the answer comes back “Oh no, ID isn’t like that/doesn’t do that/doesn’t state that/doesn’t work like that”.

OK, so I know lots about what it isn’t. But what IS it?
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That appears to be a decent question. Allow me to have a go at answering.

First here’s what we know:

  1. God exists.
  2. He created the World 6000 years ago.
  3. He is a Protestant (none of this Catholic or Judaism stuff applies).
  4. He supports America (and American troops).
  5. The 10 commandments are all you need to know in order to behave correctly.
  6. Soon He will come and take His faithful supporters away. The rest of you can go to Hell.
  7. Evolution is an invention of the Devil to confuse people how the World began.
  8. God laughs at the scientific method, because He didn’t invent it. So it must be flawed.

From this it follows logically that the World was Designed by an Intelligence. Therefore Intelligent Design is true.
Any Catholic Jewish Atheist Communists who say otherwise are in league with the Devil.

86

I’m not sure I understand Dr. Love’s problems with the suboptimal design argument.

Okay, I follow that the Doctor is not asserting an omnipotent, omniscient intelligent designer. Fine. Novel, and a bit off the typical track of the ID game, but interesting.

However, we have plenty of examples of things that do exist that, I don’t know about you, but I’d like to have.

For instance, this echolocation thing would be pretty helpful. Certainly better than banging my shin off the blanket chest or pissing on the closed toilet seat in the dark. Why didn’t I get that?

During the day, I can only see within a portion of the spectrum. That kind of sucks.

Sometimes I’m hungry and tired, but I’m pretty far from the snack bar. Why can’t I just convert sunlight into food for myself? That was pretty short sighted to only give that cool option package to plants.

Oh, and flying. Flying would be a good thing to have. Why not? Of course the physics would be difficult to work out while keeping some of the cool lifting heavy objects stuff, and the running stuff, but why not take the time? Was the Intelligent Designer working under some kind of time crunch? From whom?

Finally, horses. Why do they only get to be hung like horses?

I don’t think the semi-intelligent designer argument really holds up all that well.

87

[QUOTE=magellan01]
Did an artist actually createthese arrangements? Or did he merely photograph the natural workings of nature?
[/QUOTE]
Yes.

Mr. Goldsworthy is a natural working of nature. Okay, okay. I know what you meant. I just get annoyed when humans are set apart from nature. It leads to wacky ideas such as souls, deities, and the meaning of life.

88

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
I’m not sure I understand Dr. Love’s problems with the suboptimal design argument.
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I don’t get it at all. Is a god supposedly capable of creating the universe AND all life within (think about the conceptualization that would be needed to create the universe AND life from nothing…let alone I presume all the physical and interconnected laws that have to be in place to make it all work) it supposed to be both a genius AND a moron? I mean…‘suboptimal’ is a bit of an understatement when you consider some of the laughable, um, design flaws (if that were the case) in our own bodies. Yeah, ‘god’ can create whole star systems, he can conceive of life from nothing…but just couldn’t figure out how to keep us from choking to death because he put our air pipe and food pipe together? The powerful god of creation couldn’t figure out that it was a bad idea to put the sewer next to the play ground??

I mean…come on people.

-XT

89

[QUOTE=magellan01]
How about if he has no beard? No form? That he is just pure energy, will and intention? That brings us down to one, right?

What if he willed the unverse into existence and what he created was the big bang? And then he never intervened? The we’d have a world that operates just as science predicts, with the exception of the cause that caused the prime mover. Theists (sans any religion) believe that this extra-natural “thing” to be God, i.e., something able to operate outside the laws of the universe. That is an explanation. One based on logic. That doesn’t make it necessarily correct, simply a reasonable explanation.

[/quote]

I’ll do you one better. Since we were supposedly created in his image, maybe he intervened quietly, to make sure that apes became intelligent, not rodents. He could have caused a mutation that might have happened by chance, or tripped a predator at the appropriate time. There is no reason to believe this, but this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. A nice fairy tale, but not science.

The laws of nature, as far as we can tell, don’t allow there to be nothing. If these apply before the universe is something we’re probably never going to find out. If they do, a 0 energy bubble of space-time is perfectly plausible.

90

[QUOTE=glee]

Any Catholic Jewish Atheist Communists who say otherwise are in league with the Devil.
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And that Behe is Catholic demonstrates how desperate they are.

99% of the time,it is the religious origin hypothesis with “Creationism” scratched out and “Intelligent Design” written in its place. Unluckily for them, the courts seem to be smarter than the IDers give them credit for.

Behe had a bad hypothesis, but if the majority of IDers took over, he’d be burned at the stake as a heretic. He, as far as I can tell, acknowledges speciation.

91

[QUOTE=Voyager]
I’ll do you one better. Since we were supposedly created in his image, maybe he intervened quietly, to make sure that apes became intelligent, not rodents. He could have caused a mutation that might have happened by chance, or tripped a predator at the appropriate time. There is no reason to believe this, but this hypothesis is unfalsifiable. A nice fairy tale, but not science.
[/QUOTE]

Never said it was, so I’m not sure why you took the trouble to say it’s not. Other than the usual kneejerk hostility to anything hinting at the existence of a higher power. Still, you have no knowledge about what did or did not cause the big bang. That’s “knowledge”, as in things that you “know”.

[QUOTE=Voyager]
The laws of nature, as far as we can tell, don’t allow there to be nothing. If these apply before the universe is something we’re probably never going to find out. If they do, a 0 energy bubble of space-time is perfectly plausible.
[/QUOTE]

(bolding mine) You might want to keep qualifications like what I bolded in mind.

On that note, I’ll leave you to your usual discussion of IPUs and FSMs. Enjoy.

92

[QUOTE=xtisme]
Yeah, ‘god’ can create whole star systems, he can conceive of life from nothing…but just couldn’t figure out how to keep us from choking to death because he put our air pipe and food pipe together?
[/QUOTE]
Forget all that trivial stuff - what about baldness?

I’m tooling along, appropriately haired, for 37 years, and now all of a sudden my hair wants to make a stampeding run from my scalp down my back? Who fucked that shit up? Where’s the quality control?

93

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
Forget all that trivial stuff - what about baldness?
[/QUOTE]

lol…exactly. I’m quite a bit older than you are…and probably have proportionally less hair as well. Sure, god can manage to get the freezing of water right, and how hydrogen works…but he couldn’t figure out how to keep hair on our heads for the duration?? Talk about design flaws…

-XT

94

[QUOTE=Q.E.D.]
Well, no. I’m talking about the whole here, not the constituent genes. What I mean to say is that no matter how much shuffling of the genes is done, at the end you still have exactly the same number of them, if there are no mutations. The result can only code for a human; this is never going to change

I can’t see how. There’s still going to be the same number of chromosomes and all the cellular machinery is going to remain the same. What mechanism do you propose which would cause reproductive incompatibility?
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It seems to me that speciation without mutation is at least mathematically possible, though I wouldn’t know how to work out the odds.

I imagine a scenario like this: A population contains some gene X and some other genes Y[sub]1[/sub], Y[sub]2[/sub], . . ., Y[sub]n[/sub], but it is extremely unlikely for any single individual to possess all the genes in {Y[sub]1[/sub], Y[sub]2[/sub], . . ., Y[sub]n[/sub]}. Indeed, it is so unlikely that it has never happened. However, if such an individual arose, it would have dramatically improved reproductive fitness. In addition, it would not be able to reproduce with individuals carrying X.

Now suppose that the population is divided into two separated populations P[sub]1[/sub] and P[sub]2[/sub]. In P[sub]1[/sub], through a variety of historical accidents, gene X spreads until all members carry it. In P[sub]2[/sub], by chance, an individual with all the genes in {Y[sub]1[/sub], Y[sub]2[/sub], . . ., Y[sub]n[/sub]} is born. Because this gene combination is so advantageous, the entire population eventually consists of this individual’s offspring, who also have all these genes.

Given these assumptions, you would now have two populations that could no longer interbreed, so speciation would have occurred.

On preview, I see that Blake gave a more biologically informed account of how speciation could occur without mutation. But as far as I can tell, the scenario I described is another way it could happen.

95

This is all so esoteric. I feel kind of bad going back to:

just to say that this is exactly how the sand filters for water treatment plants work.

It’s kind of unfortunate that gravity and water flow sort the grains so that the finest is on the top, grading to coarsest on the bottom (for millions of grains of sand per filter - that’s a lot of random order there), because the fine grains become clogged faster than the coarser ones would, if they were on the top. To get around this natural sorting, coarser garnet sand is added. The garnet sand is lighter than the regular sand and so it sorts to the top and can pre-filter the coarser impurities.

By natural forces, you get the garnet sand, sorted from finest to coarsest, on top of the regular sand, also sorted from finest to coarsest. And since there are fewer fines in the garnet sand, the filter doesn’t have to be backflushed as often. Some filters have a third layer, but I can’t remember what the third sand is or if it’s layer is on the top or the bottom.

96

[QUOTE=xtisme]
I don’t get it at all. Is a god supposedly capable of creating the universe AND all life within (think about the conceptualization that would be needed to create the universe AND life from nothing…let alone I presume all the physical and interconnected laws that have to be in place to make it all work) it supposed to be both a genius AND a moron? I mean…‘suboptimal’ is a bit of an understatement when you consider some of the laughable, um, design flaws (if that were the case) in our own bodies. Yeah, ‘god’ can create whole star systems, he can conceive of life from nothing…but just couldn’t figure out how to keep us from choking to death because he put our air pipe and food pipe together? The powerful god of creation couldn’t figure out that it was a bad idea to put the sewer next to the play ground??

I mean…come on people.

-XT
[/QUOTE]
You, sir, are bordering on a god who handles the big picture and lets the details work themselves out. Deism is just around the corner.

97

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
I’m tooling along, appropriately haired, for 37 years,
[/QUOTE]

Damn hippie punk. “Ooh, feel sorry for me, I’m 37 and have all my hair!” :mad:

What about the intelligent design in that we crave the foods that make us obese and cause heart disease? Why couldn’t we be designed to live healthily on Doritos and Twinkies?

God is cruel, I tells ya.

98

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Except for Jessica Alba’s body. I mean… come on. Surely that alone proves God.
[/QUOTE]

Ah, but once again we’re back to evolution. A million years of guys reproducing with women we wished looked like Jessica Alba, and eventually you’ll get someone who looks fantasic in those genes.

99

[QUOTE=b_wad]
This is not a religious debate.
try this..take nothing and make something !! cant do it !!
[/QUOTE]

Which is the primary reason I do not buy any ‘first cause’ arguments for the existence of god.

I’m curious, if you believe the above, then why do you think God could do it?

100

I want someone to explain the intelligence behind the design of the gall bladder. I had to have surgery last month to have mine removed, after it tried to kill me. Post surgery, my life is entirely unchanged. I eat the same food, do the same activities, feel just like I did when I still had a gall bladder. Me with a gall bladder is exactly the same as me without a gall bladder. Much like the appendix, it exists solely to get infected and make you die. If that was supposed to be in there by design, it’s the equivalent of buying a Chrysler that has a hand grenade attached to the engine. What the hell is intelligent about that?