You are lucky (or you have a really good diet). My gall bladder also went critical a few months ago (it also nearly killed me…so design!) and I haven’t recovered yet. I certainly can’t eat all the stuff I could before (fried chicken WAS one of my favorite foods…can’t eat it now without a quick run to the bathroom).
From an evolutionary perspective these things make sense…from a ‘God who can pull fish out of his rump and create the known universe’ it makes no sense at all…
-XT
Remind me not to eat at God’s house on Fridays.
Gee, nobody has brought them up in this thread - until you, of course. I was just noting that if you want to produce unfalsifiable hypotheses, you can get more personal than a deistic god without violating any known facts. As for what happened “before” the BB, I’ve never read any suggestions not carefully labeled as pure speculation. If only religious texts were so labeled.
Speaking to this “b_wad” character in this thread is worthless. People like him/her, who have never read a scientific book in their life and come to argue a point they literally know nothing about and start a pointless debate to which anyone with half-a-brain already knows the facts about is so utterly pointless. Like clockwork, they post a few more messages and are never heard of again once their arguments are crushed into oblivion. Repeat ad nauseam.
Yaaaaawn. What’s on TV?
Any activity that is entertaining is not worthless, even if it is not challenging.
Okay I’ll accept that… Even though threads like this often result in my slapping my head in disbelief and yelling at the computer monitor. 
You guys just need to learn to slide right on by when you see posts like that. Just add b_wad to the list. When I see names like lekatt and kanicbird I just ignore them. I can’t even be entertained by them anymore, it’s just too sad. I’m hoping that if people just ignore posters like this, it won’t happen anymore.
Me, of course? Yeah, that makes sense. Given all the threads I’ve been in with you about similar topics and all the times I brought them up. Why it must have been, let’s see…Yep, ZERO times, give or take ZERO. Yeah, a lot of sense. :rolleyes:
I simply pointed to where the conversation was headed, your “fairy tales” and whatnot. And chose to gracefully bow out of the discussion before the usual nonsense pops up. And wold you like to claim that you have never brought them up? I don’t think so. Maybe you should tag-team with Der Trihs and explain to all those who hold religious belief why their so stupid. And you have been in enough of these threads with me to know full well that my argument HAS NOTHIING TO DO WITH A CHRISTIAN GOD, or any other particular flavor of God for that matter, so why you would bring up “Since we were supposedly created in his image” is a complete fucking mystery. Oh wait, maybe it’s not a fuckiing mystery. Maybe there’s a reason you’d try to associate my argument with something that you know I don’t hold to—especially after I just made the exact fucking point in the very post you felt you needed to respond to. Gee, I wonder what that reason could be? So I leave you to your unerring knowledge of all things knowable and unknowable. You’re a fucking god.
My original objection was that Cervaise is arguing against ID by trivializing biology (the human body is so simple an undergrad could figure it out). Arguments like this are not only wrong (if biology is so easy, what are we paying all the biology professors for? The doctors? Why do we find the Honda Asimo so impressive if it was so easy to design? And why has the project been underway for two decades?), they are (or can be) interpreted as trivializing the ID proponent and everything they care about. Some of the major proponents of evolution (people like Dawkins and Dennett) comment on the grand and majestic properties of nature, on the amazing design found within, and thus on the power of evolutionary design. My point is that we need to show how evolutionary design processes can overcome the challenges of design, not misrepresent these obsticles as child’s play.
My second (and less important) point is that the mere existence of design flaws–even major ones–does not suffice to reasonably disprove the ID hypotheses. The method of the design and the nature of the mistakes made will tend to be different in evolutionary and intelligent design. To show the truth of evolution we must show that the history of biological design follows a pattern that we would expect from evolution, and not a path we would expect from some intelligence.
Mmmmm… God’s ass-fish.
Fact is, the IPU rarely gets brought up on ID or creationist threads. In most of these, it is anyone who understands fuck-all about science vs. those who don’t. It is not a religion vs no religion debate.
The IPU has a very specific mission - to try to get theists to understand why “God” doesn’t merit special pleading. That’s an argument that has nothing to do with evolution or creationism.
My point, which clearly escaped you, was that the same logic you used in postulating a deistic god could be used to defend theistic evolution. I believe the Catholic position is that God intervened to make humans appear, using evolution in an invisible way. This has the advantage that the study of evolution just teaches us how god did it. There is obviously no way of proving things one way or another. It makes it easier for religious scientists to compartmentalize science and faith, since nothing they discover will ever disprove this hypothesis. The evolution part is science, the theistic part isn’t. And yes I called it a fairy tale. Boo-hoo.
Equating me with DerTrihs clearly shows you’ve either never read nor don’t understand my posts.
I wonder if calling an atheist a god is an insult. After all, I do exist.
My interpretation is not that the design of the body is so trivial that an undergrad could do it, but that an undergrad with the tools to design a body wouldn’t make the boneheaded mistakes God supposedly made. Don’t knock progress. When I was an undergrad Cambridge was having a big debate about whether to allow work on DNA in the city limits. My daughter sequenced DNA in a freshman bio lab.
I’m familiar with the results of programs done using both algorithmic and heuristic techniques to solve certain problems. Biology looks like it was done with a heuristic technique. They take longer, have lots of dead ends, and do local optimization. You’re right, algorithmic methods aren’t perfect, but they’re wrong in a very different way.
You are honestly the first person I’ve come across to suggest that the intelligent designer is not God. The suboptimal design argument works well when considering an omniscient and omnipotent god. The point is not that biology is so simple we should have a full grasp of it, but that one would expect an all-knowing creator to have it down cold.
I’m not sure I see, however, a response to my point here. If there was a limited, imperfect designer, it is still clear that he or she or it developed better technologies in nature around us. So they could have given humans (and all creatures, really) some much better ways of doing many things, but they still stuck us with the suboptimal design.
I’m not following. You seem to posit a “design” to present challenges. Do you mean a purposeful intelligent design, or are you using the term design to mean “the way that we are”?
Finally, how does the suboptimal design argument misrepresent anything as child’s play?
Would you say that this can be adequately addressed by finding two extant examples of solutions to the same problem - one that is more efficient or less poorly-designed than the other?
I think it can, but whenever I’ve tried this on IDists, they end up weaselling to the extent that their argument turns into (essentially) “It’s possible for me to identify design in nature and speculate about the purpose of the designer, but it’s impossible for you to employ the same methodologies in order to criticise”
It appears to me that the design flaws are of a nature that natural, evolutionary systems exhibit. That is, they do not interfere sufficiently with reproduction to be an obstacle to the process.
They do not appear to be the type of flaws that an itelligence who loves the products of intelligence and is merciful would allow to exist.
Please don’t mischaracterize my argument. I was not at all suggesting what you say I was, though I can see that a casual glance at my post might produce such an interpretation.
My point is rather closer what Voyager and others have said: the more we learn about the wonderful complexities (not trivial simplicity) of biology, physiology, etc., the more we scratch our heads to see how and why things are put together the way they are. The gall bladder has been mentioned; the fragility of the spine is another; the design of the eye, with the optic nerve attaching through the retina to its front surface and thus creating a blind spot, is yet another. These are the kinds of things I had in mind that should be considered “design flaws” if one were entertaining the concept of guided intelligent design, and that cut the legs out from under the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient designer.
These “flaws” make sense only when you look at the grand scope of evolution, and recognize that, for example, the spine is a typical mammalian model that has been ratcheted somewhat awkwardly into an upright position, and that serves its purpose well enough but not ideally — exactly as we would expect if existing material were adapted over time, and exactly as we would not expect if an intelligent designer had conceptualized us on some sort of metaphorical drawing board.
This does no disservice at all to the disciplines you mention, but instead, to me at least, produces the opposite: a feeling approaching awe that over many thousands and millions of years natural selection would be capable of taking all these bits of raw material and shoving them around to meet various requirements, and what’s more a sense of pride that we should be able to figure out as much of it as we have.
Clearer?
I liked your description from the first page:
“…humans are largely slapped together from barely-adapted parts of the critters that preceded us.”
Design is not the same as construction.
I can definitely point out the dumbness of the very inconvenient location the starter in my car is placed, and think it would work better in a more accessible spot (as it is in other cars), but there is no way in hell I’d be able to actually BUILD a car myself.
Right. And Dr. Love’s original objection was about construction:
I took that to mean “constructing” in a theoretical/hypothetical sense. The same way that people say “That was a lame film…I could make a better movie than that!”
In a literal sense, they probably couldn’t (actually writing, producing, directing, and/or filming a movie is not easy in the least). But what they mean is they can concieve of a better way to do it than the example they just saw.