Hello everyone!

Apologists subcribe to Natural Theology. According to the latter, you can infer God's properties and attributes from the observation of Nature, just like the skill of a watch-maker is known through his creations.
So, let's tackle the argument from poor design( as a mere reductio ad absurdum of teleological arguments).

Of course, apologists answer that while you may judge a thing goodly designed from its ordered functionning, it's not reasonable to reach the conclusion of a flawed/clumsy design from apparent imperfections....
why? because in the last case, you don't know God's goal whereas in the former one, you may infer His goal from the good functionning of an object.

Apart from a strange impression of unfalsifiability, is their justification working?

termina wrote:Apart from a strange impression of unfalsifiability, is their justification working?

Not for me.

Yeah, it's a case of

"see how this is pretty? - that's design!"
"Well, what about this ugly thing?"
"Still design, but you can't know the mind of the Creator!"

It's tiresome. I'd be more than open to a robust design metric being offered because at least then we could test it rather than having the goalposts moved every response.

From Darwin's "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae." showing that such 'design' is terminally unnecessary in creating a functioning biosphere to the massive inefficiency of things like the recurrent laryngeal nerve, any and all design assertions are, by necessity, cherrypicking.

Further, if we aren't to know the mind of the creator, then whence comes the design assertion? An all powerful being would be able to make any design work; it would not need to conform to naturalistic forces at all.

The fact is that the best insight into this comes from evolutionary biology. To go back to that recurrent laryngeal nerve, Dawkins wrote in a chapter called 'Constraints on Perfection' in The Extended Phenotype:

The shortest distance from the brain to the larynx in a mammal, especially a giraffe, is emphatically not via the posterior side of the aorta, yet that is the route taken by the recurrent laryngeal. Presumably there was once a time in the remote ancestry of the mammals when the straight line from origin to end organ of the nerve did run posterior to the aorta. When, in due course, the neck began to lengthen, the nerve lengthened its detour posterior to the aorta, but the marginal cost of each step in the lengthening of the detour was not great. A major mutation might have re-routed the nerve completely, but only at the cost of a great upheaval in early embryonic processes. Perhaps a prophetic, God-like designer back in the Devonian could have forseen the giraffe and designed the original embryonic routing of the nerve differently, but natural selection has no foresight. As Sydney Bremer has remarked, natural selection could not be expected to have favoured some useless mutation in the Cambrian simply because 'it might come in handy in the Cretaceous'

A designer with limitless power certainly could and would be expected to have resolved this problem though, and one of the marks of the quality of a design is efficiency.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote:A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Presumably an omniscient and omnipotent creator should be expected to achieve perfect efficiency, and that would indeed be a hallmark of design were it found ubiquitously throughout the natural kingdom. Instead, what we see in the natural world is a making-do, an inability to override inherited structures and a consequent adaption of the materials to hand. We see that features have a cost; an increase in one area - a specialisation, comes at a reduction in efficiency in another area. Again, an all-powerful being that magically created these organisms in the first place would not be limited by this, he could simply make it so, and physics be damned.

It's just dishonesty on insane levels. Apologists can't have it both ways, yet they try to do it all the time. Stephen Law has been pressing WLC on his idea that God is "good", he sees a bit of confirmation bias/double standards in the logic: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2011/10/ ... nt-in.html

So, it appears Craig failed to explain why belief in his good god is significantly more reasonable than the absurd belief that there’s an evil god.

I think quite a lot of people actually grasped that point, and so have switched to “But what about a deist god, then”? Someone actually shouted that out during my closing statement.

Well, I went this debate with one aim – to undermine belief in one specific god: Craig’s.

The debate was “Does God exist?” And both Craig and myself understood “God” to be defined, in this context, as his all-powerful and good god.

The whole "design" assertion is based upon duplicitous apologetic baits and switches, as well as manifest ignorance of the actual science involved. Indeed, Paley's original watchmaker analogy was a failure from the beginning, not least because he used at least one of the baits and switches I've alluded to. I'll expand further for you.

"Magic man did it" isn't a parsimonious explanation because [1] it isn't an explanation, it's a blind assertion, and one that constitutes the elevation of ignorance to a metaphysic, and [2] anyone who thinks that introducing the sort of supernatural entity beloved of design assertionists is "parsimonious", really needs to look up what the word means. Especially when one factors into this, that a central assertion erected by IDists, is that complex entities purportedly cannot arise from simpler beginnings (despite the large body of scientific evidence refuting this assertion, but I'll leave that to one side for a moment). If that assertion, which constitutes a central part of IDist attacks upon evolution, bore any connection to reality, then that assertion would alone destroy any idea that IDist assertions about "design" are parsimonious by definition. Because, that assertion would require their "designer" to be the most stupendously complex entity in existence.

But of course, this isn't the only problem that IDists have with their assertions. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that IDists only have assertions on their side, assertions that enjoy precisely zero evidential support from the real world ("it looks designed to me, therefore it is" doesn't constitute evidential support in rigorous science), other problems arise with respect to those assertions.

First, we have the duplicitous bait and switch employed by IDists, whereby they point to instances of human activity, and use this as purported "evidence" to support their "design" assertion, despite the fact that human design is demonstrably and manifestly different from the magic "design" processes IDists assert were responsible for the biosphere and its contents. Human design involves trial and error, discarding the failures, and building upon the successes, and thus, is far closer to an evolutionary process than to the magic "design" process IDists erect as being responsible for the biosphere. The magic "design" process IDists (and creationists) assert took place, is one in which their pet magic entity purportedly assembled the contents of the biosphere, employing perfect foreknowledge of how the parts being thus assembled would integrate to form the resultant whole. Human design activity has never bore even a passing resemblance to this, and the idea that human design activity somehow provides evidence for magic "design" is therefore not only a canard, but a dishonest apologetic bait and switch.

If anyone doubts that human design activity is much more akin to an evolutionary process than a process involving perfect magic foreknowledge, just take a look at this video clip, featuring some of our early attempts to produce working aircraft:



Anyone who thinks that the above hotch-potch of trials, errors, comic failures, and the eventual emergence of a successful prototype flying machine, courtesy of learning from those failures, supports the notion of a magic "design" process involving no such errors at all, needs to learn what constitutes proper evidential support for a postulate. Indeed, if you trace the history of every human technology, you'll find the same process at work, namely:

[1] Try out an idea;

[2] If it fails, discard it;

[3] If it works, build upon it.

Which, is far more akin to an evolutionary process than the magic "design" process asserted to exist by supernaturalists. For comparison, here's how evolutionary processes work:

[1] Generate new variations;

[2] Discard the failures;

[3] Build upon the successes by letting them reproduce.

As a corollary of the fact that human design far more closely mirrors evolution than any magic "design" process involving purported "perfect" foreknowledge of the working of parts, both separately and when integrated, the use of human design to support supernatural magic "design" is a duplicitous apologetic bait and switch.

Oh, and the bait and switch fails even with respect to mature technologies, not only because those mature technologies are mature precisely because they have benefited from a long period of prior trial and error learning, but because even mature technologies have their moments of spectacular failure. For example, Boeing and Airbus Industries are able to produce sleek, sophisticated, efficient working airliners precisely because they are the beneficiaries of a century of past learning, and without that past century of learning, which included a good number of failures along the way, those two aircraft companies would not even exist today. However, despite the fact that they are supposedly exponents of a mature technology, they still have their moments of failure. A classic example being this one:



Now, this aircraft was being flown at a high angle of attack, in order to demonstrate that the on board flight computer installed in this aircraft was capable of keeping it airborne, even if the pilot entered extreme or dangerous parts of the flight envelope. Unfortunately, there were still some latent bugs in that flight computer, despite the flight computer, glass cockpit and fly by wire system having been subject to over a decade of development, by a team of around 100 flight engineers and computer programmers. Bugs which only appeared when the crew of Air France 296 decided to put the system to serious test. Thankfully for the rest of us, they found those bugs early in the history of the A320 series, and since that accident, which concentrated minds wonderfully, Airbus has delivered A320s that not only lack the fatal bugs seen coming to the fore in that video, but which are software upgradable, so that new developments aimed at adding additional robustness to the flight control systems can be extended to the entire operating fleet.

But the point remains, emphasised by the above, that if a mature technology can still produce failures of this sort, then the idea that human design supports magic "design" of the sort asserted to exist by IDists, is frankly laughable.

When Paley erected his fatuous "watchmaker" argument, he did so using a mature product of the relevant technology, ignoring the fact that it took humans something like 350 years of prior trial and error to devise that mature product, and that along the way, humans produced some dismal failures. Most of the time, we don't bother remembering the failures, because once we have successful results of our endeavours, we remember that those successful results worked, and devise ways of building upon that success, on the basis that doing so is usually more useful than dwelling endlessly upon the wreckage of the failures. I've already noted earlier, that using mature technologies to prop up the "magic design" assertion is dishonest, because it amounts to yet more cherry-picking of the data to force the required, pre-determined conclusion to emerge - in effect, the apologetic process taking place with respect to the "magic design" assertion, consists of a gigantic and wholly mendacious act of historiographical quote mining: look for something that can be pressed into service to fit the pre-determined conclusion, ignore everything that falsifies the conclusion, and pretend that said falsifying real world data doesn't exist. And if I have to resurrect that video clip of hilarious aircraft failures again in the future, in order to bludgeon home this point with a tactical nuclear weapon, this will only serve to demonstrate how impervious supernaturalists are, to anything that fails to conform to their beloved doctrines and wishful thinking.

As if that were not enough, the other problem that design assertionists face, is that given the vast scope of their assertions, any means of detecting "design" needs to be universally applicable. Which brings me to the simple fact that design assertionists possess no genuine method of detecting "design" at all, let alone a universally applicable one. Once again, "it looks designed to me, therefore is is", does not constitute a rigorous metric for detecting "design". To make matter even worse, any genuine metric that existed for this purpose, would constitute such a massive leap forward in our scientific understanding, that whoever erected that metric, and demonstrated that it actually worked, would be showered with scientific honours of Nobel Prize standard. The amount of hard work required to achieve this aim would be right up there with the Manhattan Project, or the race to put a man on the Moon, and the level of insight required to devise such a metric would be such that whoever succeeded would be regarded in the same light as Einstein. The peer reviewed journals of the planet would be falling over themselves to be the first to publish such work because of this, which deals neatly with another favourite IDist canard. But this is properly a topic for another post.

The fact that scientists have never alighted upon a reliable, repeatable, universally applicable means of detecting "design" (even by other humans, let alone invisible magic men), despite assiduous searches for such a means, tells us that this is a far from trivial problem. In those instances where scientists conclude that human activity was responsible for a given entity, this is because they have evidence for this. In some cases, evidence that only the wilfully duplicitous could ignore when erecting apologetic assertions about design. But that evidence tends to be of a relatively specific nature, and coupled to specific classes of entity of interest (e.g., palaeolithic stone tools). But, there does not yet exist a universal means of deducing that human design activity was responsible, applicable to all classes of human artefacts. At the moment, it's still very much a matter of case-by-case analysis, with no universal features readily observable across different classes of artefacts. For example, can anyone here tell what features a palaeolithic stone tool and an Apple iPad have in common, other than that humans were involved in the production thereof?

Consequently, any assertions that "design" is "obvious" are fatuous in the light of that simple fact. Another fact that worsens the situation for those erecting the "design" assertion, is that the means by which humans detect the activity of other humans engaging in "design" activities are different in different fields, because the entities being examined are subject to different physical processes. The idea that a simple metric can encompass all of these differences, barring some gigantic leap of genius that would make Einstein look like a primary school child, is a notion that belongs in the realms of fantasy.

And, of course, another bait and switch that applies to the "design" assertion erected by creationists and their ilk, is this - human design techniques involve harnessing natural processes. Whereas the magic "design" process asserted to apply to the biosphere by creationists and IDists, is precisely that - a magic process, one involving some fantastic conjuring tricks, and is a magic process precisely because creationists and IDists assert that natural processes are purportedly insufficient for the task (despite, once again, the large body of scientific evidence to the contrary).

Science is diverse and complicated because the real world is diverse and complicated, which is why scientists specialise from an early point in their careers - there is simply too much complexity and diversity for one human being to assimilate in sufficient depth to make advances in multiple fields. This of course omits consideration of the rare example of the genius polymath, but these are becoming fewer and fewer with the passage of time, because the body of knowledge required to be assimilated has grown enormously since the first days of the Enlightenment. Back in Newton's day, it was possible for a single human being to know all that there was to know about the world, and have that knowledge to hand in a personal library. Nowadays, the sum total of scientific knowledge is so vast that it would fill millions of DVDs with the text alone. The idea that any simple metric for detecting "design" can encompass all of the diverse phenomena that scientists have alighted upon, and rule out all testable natural processes regardless of the class of entity being considered, is frankly a non-starter.

This, of course, is a gigantic problem to be overcome simply with respect to the business of detecting "design" at the hands of humans - humans have pressed into service so many different physical phenomena over the past 300 years, that any universal metric intended to detect human design alone would be a baroque, rococo edifice whose bureaucratic complexity would be positively Byzantine. This is before we try applying any such metric to blind assertions about the purported handiwork of invisible magic men. Which itself is problematic precisely because, as I demonstrated above, the "design" assertion erected about supernatural magic entities and their purported handiwork is qualitatively different in a hugely substantive manner from the "design" processes that humans are known to bring to bear upon a problem. Precisely because there is such a vast difference between the two "design" processes, which are duplicitously conflated in a bait and switch operation by IDists as I expounded above, any metric that would detect "design" by humans or human-like entities operating entirely within the laws of physics, would almost certainly be useless for detecting purported "supernatural design". As a consequence of this, IDists are treading quicksand.

When IDists can come up with the goods in terms of real research, and demonstrate that they have put in the hard work necessary to convert their assertions into something resembling evidentially supported postulates, then we'll sit up and take notice. Until then, their pretence that apologetics is going to overturn rigorous empirical science is precisely that - a pretence.

I think one of the problems, at least for me, with the argument from "you can't know the mind of god" is that the people pushing these arguments usually use the argument first to support the existence of god, so they can then start telling you the mind of god.

Another problem here is the attributes these people give god. God is not some mere lump of thinking brainmatter, trying to tinker around and plan ahead. On the one hand these people wish to assert that god is the ultimate creator, perfect in every way. Unlimited power, creativity and intelligence. Look at the wonders of the universe they say, look at the perfect clock-like fashion in which every entity in nature works with every other, "never a miscommunication". God the mathematician, the artist, the engineer, the scientist, the poet and the lover... every imaginable desirable human attribute, to an infinite degree. Amazing complexity, unfathomable time and space... all of it incomprehensible, "beyond ordinary human understanding, lost somewhere between immensity and eternity". That's the god they're talking about. Those are the attributes they define it with. That's how they want us to imagine god, infinitely creative and artful, infinitely intelligent and loving.

And then that god, they say, that god runs the recurrent laryngeal nerve down into your chest first. That god made an appalingly mediocre spine. That god cares about how much foreskin you have, who you go to bed with, when, how and what kind of food you eat. A god who is unfathomable in every concievable way, yet with the most ridiculously provintial, silly, nervous and cowardly human fears, needs and desires.

No, I don't buy it. I can't make myself believe it. To quote Christopher Hitchens: "It can't be believed by a thinking person".

termina wrote:Hello everyone!

Apologists subcribe to Natural Theology. According to the latter, you can infer God's properties and attributes from the observation of Nature, just like the skill of a watch-maker is known through his creations.
So, let's tackle the argument from poor design( as a mere reductio ad absurdum of teleological arguments).

Of course, apologists answer that while you may judge a thing goodly designed from its ordered functionning, it's not reasonable to reach the conclusion of a flawed/clumsy design from apparent imperfections....
why? because in the last case, you don't know God's goal whereas in the former one, you may infer His goal from the good functionning of an object.

Apart from a strange impression of unfalsifiability, is their justification working?

Yes, it is intentionally slanted to be unfalsifiable.

Also, the God of which mythology? Can we also infer his mythical feats from the "Creation"?

Before we get around to inferring his attributes, can we infer his existence in a manner that allows for any possbility of falsifiability?

The Watchmaker analogy is flawed, of course. We know watchmakers exist. We know watches are designed. We need only judge between good and poor designs. When it comes to a "Creator", the difference between good and bad design may be the difference between designed and not designed at all. Since the real point of such arguments is to prove God's existence, saying that flaws in design are dismissed and do not count as counter-evidence invalidates the whole argument.

True we don't know God's goals. Maybe he felt all art should be flawed. But if we don't know his goals, then you can't make any positive assumptions about the universe we see. We can't prove that this is an intentional design.

That's the problem with theist thinking. Notice the flaw? Theists assume we can discern a good from a bad "design". Doesn't that presume we know what God's goal was? Theists presume they can declare this to be a good design and that any seeming flaws are really part of the intent. So they know what God's goals were. They could not otherwise draw any conclusions about it being a good design. But the moment anyone else points out that it may not be designed because it has flaws, theists assert we cannot know God's intent.

As usual, they want it both ways.

At any rate, a design with flaws would not be the creation of an infallible, omnipotent god.

I know that theists will then just assert the creation is flawed because Adam and Eve ate that fruit or whatever the story may be in the respective mythology. Cart <----> horse.

It also mentioned not just his goals but His goals. That seemingly small appelation to God speaks volumes. How do we know God is a he? Theists don't. They baselessly assume it because their mythology says so. The point is that, like all things about God including God's very existence, it is just baselessly assumed, evidence ignored and sifted selectively by the truckload to get it to come out with God's existing.

Some IDiots of course claim that design is obvious and can indeed be measured objectively. Dumski himself promotes his Complex Specified Information (CSI) as a metric which enables the detection and measurement of design in real objects, whereby anything which scores i CSI above a predetermined benchmark is intentionally designed. Many have asked, nay demanded, him to provide the mathematics through which such a measurement can be made and/or to provide a real world example showing the utility of CSI.

Unfortunately Dumski's blog, Uncommon Descent has technical problems whereby questioners and dissenters are inexplicably banned or moderated into oblivion. One poster though has managed not only to ask questions about SCI and to ask for the mathematics of the metric to be provided, but was given the opportunity to post as a guest author in order to do so. Much hand-waving and diversion ensued.

You can follow the adventures of Mathgrrl in the land of CSI simply by typing her name into Google, here's a link to get you started and give an overview by Mathgrrl himself herself. Suffice to say that no useable method of applying CSI or real world example of it's utility has yet been provided by any IDiot. Dumbski himself has been surprisingly silent throughout.


EDIT: forgot the link didn't I

termina wrote:Hello everyone!

Apologists subcribe to Natural Theology. According to the latter, you can infer God's properties and attributes from the observation of Nature, just like the skill of a watch-maker is known through his creations.
So, let's tackle the argument from poor design( as a mere reductio ad absurdum of teleological arguments).

Of course, apologists answer that while you may judge a thing goodly designed from its ordered functionning, it's not reasonable to reach the conclusion of a flawed/clumsy design from apparent imperfections....
why? because in the last case, you don't know God's goal whereas in the former one, you may infer His goal from the good functionning of an object.

Apart from a strange impression of unfalsifiability, is their justification working?

Also, assertions of designedness necessarily infer intent. For there to be design, there must be intent, and it is specifically the intent that is being asserted - you look at an object, how do you know it's designed? Because the object was created for a purpose, with a prior plan for the object to fulfill that purpose. As such, the design hypothesis hinges on intent, and therefore necessarily claims to know the mind of the creator to that degree. As a consequence of this, if you can forward an object that shows no purpose, then the design assertion is erroneous; a category mistake. As they assert that all life was designed, and there are things like whale pelvises and giraffe laryngeal nerves that show the opposite of purpose, the design assertion is debunked.