If there was/is an intelligent designer he sucks at it.
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The validity of intelligent design
- Thread starter Nirvana
- Start date
If there was/is an intelligent designer he sucks at it.
After having been in these discussions I think you will need to define the term 'Intelligent Design'. There is a certain Christian group that has taken the term and has been involved in court cases, etc.
I think the term 'Intelligent Design' should include any conscious intent in the creation and development of lifeforms. I am a strong believer in this type of Intelligent Design.
HonestJoe
Well-Known Member
They claim to, the question is whether they’re really as distant from the idea as they claim (or maybe believe they are). I still think a solid hypothesis from first principles would need to be presented for there to be significance in the professional field.
I don’t want to put words in the mouth of someone I’d never heard of before but Michael Behe appears to be an example of this on first look, given his primary position seems to be against evolutionary theory but rather than just focus on properly presenting that, he seems to feel a need to come up with an entirely unsupported alternative (which only really shifts the fundamental questions back a species anyway). I can’t help wondering if the fact that sells more books is a driving force here (as it appears to be for a number of the unnecessary vocal supporters of evolutionary theory and the like).
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
Well, how else could you explain the color of your eyes? Because your parents carried different genes which combined in you according to some type of discernible, predictable pattern of gene expression, resulting in your DNA blueprint coded for the cells in your irises to grow blue cells instead of darker ones? What kind of nonsense would that be?
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Skwim
Veteran Member
If you're talking about the origin of life, Yup. As far as evolutionists are concerned it doesn't matter which was the source.
.
Unbeliever!
It is obvious that I have blue eyes because God wanted so. I cannot accept that eyes colors are the result of blind chance, no pun intended.
Like my higher risk of getting skin cancer when I go to Spain on vacation, on account of my pale complexion. Must be the product of design, what else?
Ciao
- viole
Jose Fly
Fisker of men
It has? Where?
Again, where?
It's dead......has been for a long time.
After a serious of federal court rulings banned the teaching of Biblical creationism in science classes, the creationists stripped their arguments and talking points of overt Biblical references and re-labeled it "intelligent design". Fortunately they did a really poor job of it (see: "cdesign proponentists"), which allowed a court and the scientific community to quickly expose the charade. The Dover trial killed ID creationism as a legal/political strategy, and it's never had any life as science.
It lives on in much the same way as young-earth creationism......something conservative religious groups believe in and advocate online, and nothing more.
Kilgore Trout
Misanthropic Humanist
God clearly doesn't want you to vacation at the beach. I expect you're more likely to get eaten by a shark, so he's keeping you safely away from them via risk of skin cancer. He works in mysterious and unnecessarily convoluted ways. Perhaps god need some practice constructing process flow diagrams and workflow management plans.
By the way, if the design theory is correct, there is a clear and present danger that it should be demoted to "stupid design".
Ciao
- viole
I don't think I've stated this recently here so...
ID is based on a fundamental logical flow - it's not science, it's theology. Underlying the theology is an assumption that the universe has ultimate meaning and is not random. As theology one believes or does not believe and that's that.
Science describes and predicts based on experiment and the derivation of formulae from the observations. It does not and cannot speak to ultimate meaning because that is not what science is about.
ID is based on a fundamental logical flow - it's not science, it's theology. Underlying the theology is an assumption that the universe has ultimate meaning and is not random. As theology one believes or does not believe and that's that.
Science describes and predicts based on experiment and the derivation of formulae from the observations. It does not and cannot speak to ultimate meaning because that is not what science is about.
The Kilted Heathen
Crow FreyjasmaðR
Why must some resort to ridiculous hyperbole towards something they don't bother to understand? And no, that wasn't you seriously asking how it happened, it was you making a mockery of Evolution because you think it's rubbish.
I'm sure you know that the complexity of cells is a problem for abiogenesis research, not evolution.
The argument from complexity is actually a more powerful one against gods existing than against naturalistic abiogenesis (or evolution).
What you are saying in essence is that a cell seems too complex to you to exist undesigned and uncreated, so to solve this dilemma, you propose the existence of the least likely thing one can imagine existing undesigned and uncreated.
The operative phrase being "as yet".
For most of human history people attributed much of what went on around them to some form of supernatural agent. We did this for hallucinations, storms, infections, earthquakes, you name it. We described demons and gods and wizards and angels etc.
But as our knowledge and reason grew, more and more things were understood for the naturalistic events that they are.
Our knowledge and reasoning is continuing to grow. I see no reason to doubt that these big questions will be answered as well. I'm not holding my breath, because I expect it to be a long time. But that's not the same as impossible by any means.
Tom
Among others, Tyson enumerated the following design flaws in humans (a more complete list in video below)
- Practically comatose for 1/3 of our lives.
- Can't detect things that kill us like magnetic fields, ionizing radiation fields, Radon, CO, CH4, C02 (the last three are gases that kill us without us even being able to smell them.
- Massive numbers of spontaneous abortions and birth defects.
- Bursting appendicies One hole for breathing, eating, drinking, and speaking - we can choke.
- playground is in the middle of [and beside] the sewer system
Skwim
Veteran Member
This is a perfect example of quote mining and plugging in an irrelevancy. First of all, under the guise of showing that evolutionists "recognize" certain problems with the Big Bang, Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research cites an old (1983) comment by Don N. Page of The Pennsylvania State University, Center for Theoretical Physics:
"There is no mechanism known as yet that would allow the Universe to begin in an arbitrary state and then evolve to its present highly ordered state."
"Creationists have stressed these problems, but now evolutionists themselves recognize them."
which is totally irrelevant to evolution. Second of all, Morris' article, whose topic is
"Evolutionists have frequently criticized creationism as unscientific because of its basic commitment to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo—that is, “creation out of nothing.”
Thirdly, stating that there is a problem concerning how
"the primeval explosion could be the cause of the complexity and organization of the vast cosmos, and another of which is to explain how a uniform explosion could generate a heterogeneous universe"
which "evolutionists themselves recognize" and is purportedly evidenced by Page's remark, part of a letter regarding the inability of inflation to explain time asymmetry,
"There is no mechanism known as yet that would allow the Universe to begin in an arbitrary state and then evolve to its present highly ordered state."
Evolutionists aren't the least concerned with such things, nor do they impact biological evolution in any manner. Morris is simply again going far afield to grab a piece of science's ignorance (science doesn't know everything) and trying to convince the reader it's somehow a concern to the evolutionary model. It is not. Believe me, evolutionists couldn't care less about the inability of inflation to explain time asymmetry, or any other cosmological issues.
But such strawmen are part and parcel of the creationist strategies. Unable to make a case for creationism they confront evolution with innuendo and phony issues. Nothing new, but it is disturbing when people fall for it.
.
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leibowde84
Veteran Member
Beyond the usual flawed "beauty, complexity, etc." argument, why do you believe it didn't "just happen"?
Well that's like trying to explain the universe by looking at one fine grain of sand. But most all creatures have eyes, most have vision that sort of suits their needs, just enough more or less Yet we could all do better with better vision, so if evolution is true , survival of the fittest etc why do only eagles have eagle eyes?
Some creatures had eyes, and now they still have, but do not work anymore, because they became useless. I wonder how you square this with divine providence. Stupid design, I guess. Eyes that do not work, useless.
But that does not answer my primary question.
Why do I have blue eyes? Black eyes seem to be quite effectively, too. My husband has black eyes and can see as well as I do. But he is Italian, and I am Swede.
So, is the mutation that caused eyes to get suddenly blue a wish of God, or was that only chance?
Ciao
- viole
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
both
the 'functionality' of a cell may be a better word, since 'complexity' can be more semantically confusing for many atheists
A random pile of bricks is more geometrically complex to describe than a brick wall, but chance is a less probable explanation for the 'simpler' but more functional wall
The cell Darwin saw was a blurry blob, back then we could still imagine it to be quite simple in it's function- hence simple explanations for it's arrival and simple mechanisms of reproduction. We know this is not the case today.