Quiz in honor of Darwin's 200 anniversary, and why many Republicans would not take it

Great Debates
61

AFAIK, no particular intelligence is specified. I suppose the general implication would be to insert your own particular god or equivalent.

I’m not going to defend the merits of ID because, quite frankly, it directly contradicts some of my beliefs. However, I am saying that the OP is conflating ID with YEC, assuming that it necessitates the Christian God, and saying that it makes certain assertions that it does not (like that natural selection does not occur). So, while ID may or may not be BS, the “quiz” put forth by the OP doesn’t accomplish anything except to attack strawman arguments.

62

I’m not sure that’s true. YEC and ID are very different things, where YEC general says that the Judeo-Christian God created the Earth ~6k years ago in more or less the same form they are now with some changes affected by the fall, the flood, and natural selection. As I understand, YEC may say that dogs and wolves all have a common ancestor, but that they do not have a common ancestor with humans. ID tends to go along with natural selection and speciation but asserts that some things couldn’t have evolved naturally due to irreducible complexity and thus require an intelligence to have created them. ID makes no assertion about a relatively short age of the Earth and doesn’t generally have a problem with common ancestory like YEC does. That is, ID seems more to me like an attempt to rectify evolutionary theory and the implication of no higher power being necessary by allowing the higher power and having it be a, for lack of a better term, god of the gaps.

So, I would say ID is, at worst, an attempt to introduce religion into science but, more likely, just people trying to settle seemingly contradictory beliefs.

Fair enough, that was a mistatement on my part. I think what I meant to say was speciation not natural selection.

63

Cite?

Cite?

Cite?

64

Just adding one small comment to what you already said.

Sometimes a trait might show up that seems to have no real “benefit”. But, it also seems to not cause any “harm”. So, it doesn’t get selected for or against. It just “hangs around”.

65

/Devil’s advocate (and charging $580 an hour for it)

It was a design feature to provide some limits on the human population but intentionally designing in flaws.

Again, it’s a design feature to intentionally provide flaws in the human animal that would occasionally cause death and thus limit the population. Since humans were designed to be the top life form there needed to be checks designed into humans because…that’s what the original design parameters called for. Everything is requirements driven after all…

Because the parameters for squids and humans were different, and thus had they had different design requirements that had to be met.

Because of our lifestyles and the original design parameters for humans. Also, this gets back into the purpose and self limiting design flaws intentionally placed into humans and the initial requirements. Also, there may have been a few flaws in the RFP.

Specific breeds or sub-groups of humans had small differences in initial requirements. Also, there were subtle differences in manufacturing due to using slightly different standards. This kind of thing is inevitable, and at least in general human parts are compatible.

Design feature. The rather exotic appetites of some pregnant women were also a design feature, along with a compulsive need to boil water.

It provides a check on industrialized humans, and was part of the original concept. Yeah, it’s kind of gross, but the committee felt it was a necessary feature, considering how industrialized humans would come to dominate other humans and the rest of the world. You should have seen some of the OTHER proposals…!

Why shouldn’t it? Again, this was intentionally designed into the prototype and it was felt that there were good reasons for keeping it in the production models. Some of the sub-types or breeds (depending on which plant manufactured them) have some resistance to this, but we have taken care of that by intentionally adding in other flaws.

Because they are needed? Originally our design envisioned humans as living a considerably shorter period of time. Anything over the initial warranty is not covered in the design…so you just have to take your chances and slog through any developing problems. We are considering doing an update at some point, but are waiting to see if this longer lived trend continues or is just a fad.

We didn’t originally envision ‘anti-diarrheal medication’ in the prototype design, and so, like with the old age thingy, we didn’t bother taking it into account. Perhaps in a later update…

Explained already…combination of design feature and inconsistent manufacturing and slightly different standards for the various human breeds. Sue us.

Explained already…humans are living beyond initial design parameters. They SHOULD just be dieing off at 30 or 40 as we originally intended. Anything past that voids the warranty and is beyond the scope of the initial RFP.

We never liked Austin.

-XT

66

Granted, but it stands to reason that a lot of constraints engineers and humans otherwise have on their “designs” would not apply a being that is designing a universe. My point was that the car analogy was flawed.

So - a rational and logically better alternative to the way the body works is deemed unworkable because there must have been trade offs. We don’t know what the trade offs were, just that there must have been some, and they were impossible for the designer to overcome. Also, there are a lot, and complicated. So we can’t understand them, and certainly can’t explain them.

There’s no apparent evidence of “trade offs” unless you presuppose an intelligent designer, in which case the trade offs become necessary or your designer is an idiot.

67

The analogy is flawed in that case because you took it too far. The fact that an intelligent designer is necessarily less constrained than humans does not mean that they are not constraints. The car is a reasonable analogy because, in the case of a car that is powerful and fast or a car that is light and fuel efficient which one is “perfect” depends upon the criteria around which it is being designed.

I’m using a simpler example precisely because an intelligent designer, by virtue of the complexity of the universe and our inability to understand it, must be well beyond our intelligence, but it does not follow that an intelligent designer would still be without constraints and not limited by some factors outside of his control.

To return to the morning sickness example, let’s assume that food is the trigger. If that’s the case, one might ask why there’s no mechanism to remove potentially toxic substances, but what if there’s a constraint to minimize on systems that serve limited purpose. Why add a system to filter those toxic substances when an existing system, the one that absorbed them in the first place, can have a small modification to remove those toxic substances rather than potentially many new systems to make the experience less unpleasant. If limiting the number of systems involved is a heavier weighted requirement than pleasantness of the process, then vomitting is a superior solution.

Either way, this is still an aside because ID makes no assertion that humans are perfect designs as is.

Yes, it’s sort of circular logic, but that’s really beside the point because a lot of evolutionary logic works with similarly circular logic presupposing evolutionary principles. My point is the fact that you (general you) may think that something is poorly designed and not see a problem with a different solution doesn’t mean that your solution is actually better.

Let’s use an analogy, like the xkcd on long lights (xkcd: Long Light). We all sit at lights and wonder why they may be so long or so short or whatever, but we just plain don’t have the big perspective to know if a change that may be more favorable to us wouldn’t cause all kinds of problems elsewhere.

The thing is, none of this mental gymnastic accomplishes things. You think your alternative is superior, but chances are for virtually any case you can come up with, there’s probably set of design requirements or constraints that would make it inferior to the current design. I gave some examples already in my first response, and I’m sure we can come up with more. But the key is that perfection of design is entirely meaningless without the context of what the constraints around the problem and the criteria were for judging the potential solutions.

And, again, it’s still a moot point because ID doesn’t presuppose that humans are perfect simply that we have some features that couldn’t have arisen through evolutionary principles alone.

68

Did the designer design the constraints? If not, who did?

69

It’s logically possible that the “Intelligent Designer” might not be omniscient. The human body could have been designed by God’s retarded nephew, not the Big Guy himself.

70

Requirements, I would have to assume he did. Constraints, I suppose that depends on how truly fundamental some things are like the laws of physics, mathematical constants and such and whether or not the designer is omnipotent and can manipulate them at will, or if he is not truly omnipotent and has some limitations.

And if we ARE talking about things like fundamental constants and the laws of physics and them being muteable, I’m not sure we can even imagine a universe where pi is a substantially different value or some basic principles like conservation of energy work differently, so I can’t speak to any potential drawbacks or advantages to those situations.

71

What point are you trying to make? :dubious:

72

That if we had an Intelligent Designer, he/it/whatever couldn’t have been all that intelligent. Just look at all the design flaws.

73

I think ID is a load of horseshit, personally, but this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. It could be that there WAS an Intelligent Designer and we just don’t understand all of the requirements and constraints such a being (or beings) were working under. Nor might we know the exact mechanism such a being was laboring under to bring about it’s creation. Perhaps, for reasons mysterious and unknown, said being had to use evolution as the mechanism for design…and had to periodically hurl rocks or cosmic rays or large rain storms to wipe the slate clean with designs that just weren’t working out to specification.

Frankly, I think this is a silly debate. People who believe are going to, you know, believe…regardless of the facts. If one believes in God, and that God can do anything, then there will always be a way to work things around so that God was at the core of creation. We’ll probably never know exactly what the environment was before the beginning of the universe or the exact mechanism for the initial expansion. My own Occam’s Razor pretty much says ‘no God necessary’, but I’m a live and let live kind of guy…and this kind of ‘Gotcha!’ thread really doesn’t forward much of anything.

Still, I had a good time playing Devil’s Advocate™…

-XT

74

Clearly, someone hasn’t been reading any of the points I and a couple others have made. Do you have anything constructive to add to the discussion?

75

Yes, you’re saying that God is not omnipotent, as our defects demonstrate, and yet He’s still God.

You’re also saying that there must be reasons for all these apparent defects, reasons we are too defective to comprehend - and you also talk about circular reasoning.

Have you anything but handwaving and sermonizing to add to the discussion?

76

No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. First, I’ve specifically said multiple times that ID doesn’t not assert that the designer is God, any specific other god, or even a god at all. Thus, any assumptions of omnipotence are automatically NOT part of the base assumptions of ID.

Second, also as I stated multiple times, you are conflating design, which is generally a multiple objective optimization problem (and is demonstratably so in this case) with a single optimization problem. A single optimization problem will necessary have an optimal (or potentially multiple equally optimal) solution. A multiple optimization problem may, and often will, not quite meet a particular criterion as ideally as another solution, but the manner in which it means the total criteria maximizes the weight of the criteria. IOW, what you perceive as a “flaw” may be an acceptable trade-off to better fit a more valued criterion.

Third, you’re assuming that an intelligent design had human perfection as being both within his capability (which would imply omnipotence, which is not something ID assumes) and befitting his goal.

Fourth, even if we assume omnipotence and initial perfection in design, ID does not in anyway guarantee that the initial design is what we still see. ID has no problem with natural selection or speciation, so it’s entirely possible that the current design we see now is not indicative of the original design.

Hence, the existence of what you perceive as flaws, which may or may not be, could be easily explained by any of those criteria.

Again, I did not say that at all. In some of the cases there are some pretty obvious reasonable and alternate criteria would which make a proposed superior solution actually inferior to the existing one. What we don’t know are the criteria that were used for design.

Further, in other cases we may or may not be able to to determine a set of criteria which would make the current design superior, but the fact that we cannot determine them does not mean they do not exist. It is not reasonable to hold ID up to a standard that requires it to have all answers for every conceivable question when alternatives like evolution are not held up to the same standard.

Finally, and most importantly, ID does not imply perfection. The fact that there may be flaws does not contradict ID. ID is subject to sub-optimal solutions just like evolution is, the only difference is that ID proposes that apparently irreducibly complex structures may have been designed while evolution states that they don’t have an answer yet.

Again, you obviously haven’t read a single post I’ve written because I specifically said I am not a believer of ID, in fact it is in direct contradiction to my beliefs, and I haven’t been sermonizing or handwaving. The reason I posted in this thread and have been participating in this discussion is because there are people like the OP and you who are arguing strawmen, and it is a severe disservice to anyone involved in the discussion to throw out strawmen.

The problem with the OP is they are making the exact same assumptions about ID that you are because the EXACT SAME ANSWERS that works for evolution work for ID because both theories operate on speciation and natural selection, so it just makes the author of the quiz look ignorant, makes people who agree with him smug, and makes those who disagree with him irritated.

So, again, please go back and read the arguments that have been put forth instead of just coming in and spewing arguments that consistent entirely ad hominem and strawmen fallacies based entirely on points that have already been addressed.

77

Whose ID books are you reading? Of course the designer is God. No other designer is ever presumed.

Or is this going to be one of those things where people get to defend ID by saying that it just proves “a designer”, not God, and then gets to leap to the assumption the designer is God? (I believe that’s the standard approach, since Aquinas anyway.)

78

I’ve been playing devil’s advocate, so I apologize if I’m not, you know, up to snuff on all of the canned responses. Yes, strictly speaking, the presumed intelligent designer being the Judeo-Christian God is probably the case 99% of the time, but ID does not require that it be that God, any specific god, or even a god at all. As I said, the fundamental difference is that ID proposes that there are irreducibly complex structures that were designed by some higher intelligence, where evolution postulates that these structures have an as of yet unknown evolutionary process. The fact that the vast majority of ID proponents are religious and believe it is their god that was the intelligent designer does not in anyway way add or remove any credibility to the theory.

And, I’ll repeat again, I too think ID is a bogus theory, but attacking it because most of the proponents are Christians, or because of a conflation with YEC, or false assumptions about their assertions, proves nothing.

79

The analogy was flawed because it was a false analogy. There are fundamental differences between designing the entirety of the world/universe and designing a car within that world that make the comparison meaningless.

Why does the design seem imperfect? Because the designer was operating under certain constraints.
How do you know these constraints exist? Because the design appears imperfect.

Getting dizzy yet?

Pointing out flaws in someone else’s argument isn’t a reasonable defense of your own. If ID is a good theory, it should stand on its own merit. One thing it seems to imply is that the “designer” is an impotent nothing from nowhere with less power than the undersecretary of agriculture. Most people pushing ID claim God as the designer, which doesn’t seem to fit once you actually sit down and think about the implications of ID.

80

Well, next I suppose we can talk about the relative likelihood that you have some previously unknown relative in nigeria who had died and left you a million dollars. After all, if you ignore the motives of those who generally are proposing that theory, it also is possible, right?

As for ID, I’d say that the starkest disproof of it regarding humans is the incredible amount of time that has passed prior to now, and the comparatively short amount of time humans have been on the earth. Unless you think the universe only started 6000 years ago or something (:D), it is insane to think that a creator who created this petri-dish universe specifically to make human life would have taken this long to get around to actually doing so.