Posted: Aug 18, 2017 1:41 am
Calilasseia wrote:
If you don't find the contents of several thousand peer reviewed scientific papers on the subject convincing, this speaks volumes about your prejudices, and nothing about the content of those papers.
Firstly, that's an argument from authority you are making. Secondly, there are indeed thousands of articles describing evidence for natural selection but there are none (for obvious reasons) showing how natural selection can produce design.
Even without my experience in software development, I can see that your view of human design activity is woefully simplistic, to the point of being misleading. Most software development I've encountered in my long association therewith, has been a sometimes labyrinthine mix of the two approaches, frequently out of necessity. Plus, modern software projects have a habit of running into what is termed "unexpected use cases", that render any vision of a top-down approach useful only for strategic guidance, with the understanding that specification assertions arising therefrom, may have to be thrown out of the window altogether if the development process demands it.
Well, both strategies are employed in human engineering. However, many bottom-up designs themselves are dependent upon top-down architectures.
In short, trial and error still looms large, even in so-called "mature" technologies, and even more so in infant ones. The latter being beautifully exemplified by this hilarious collection of film footage, documenting the early history of human attempts to build working aircraft:
I think you are confusing the failures experienced in prototyping, and the corrections made, with mindless trial and error.
Well that's going to kill any attempt to answer my question right from the start, if this assertion is true. Which I doubt strongly, not least because I'm aware of several attempts to provide such a definition. One typical example of the product of such attempts, being to define design as "the manipulation of entities to produce another entity in pursuit of a goal". Of course, whether such manipulation succeeds in producing a new entity, or whether that entity, if produced, successfully attains that goal, are themselves separate questions. I don't propose this as being the last word on the subject, because I'm aware that the taxonomic question is itself fairly involved, but also because I'm aware that the taxonomic problem is only a first step in a proper analysis.
You have to look at matters on a case by case basis and see what is the more plausible explanation.
Of course, if we take that example definition, the moment a goal is absent from the picture, then "design" fails to apply, as thus defined. Which becomes a serious, possibly even critical, problem for your apologetics. Not least because the entire teleological edifice you're trying to prop up is predicated upon a goal being present.
If living systems and molecular machines can be shown to be jury-rigged, opportunistically-contrived, shoddily-assembled and imperfect designs, then an argument can be made against purposeful and intelligent design.
How can something be "intuitively obvious" if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about or dealing with? Indeed, the very concept of 'intuition' implies a certain minimum knowledge base to draw upon, even if that knowledge was not acquired in a systematic manner. Because, without a certain minimum knowledge base to draw upon, any thoughts in the requisite realm reduce to mere fantasising.
Yes, and that is Paley's argument. We just know design when we see it, precisely because we are familiar with designed things.
Oh wait, didn't a large part of Dembski's output consist of the claim that he had found objective criteria upon which to determine "design"? The subsequent determination by properly trained mathematicians, that his claims were risibly hyperbolic, does not affect the existence of those claims, of course.
I don't know. Design detection is used in radio astronomy and palaeontology but there is no universal way of determining design.