I see what you mean. And yes I’d be interested in taking a look at that reasoning too.
Here is the gist of it:
If I ask you the purpose of a boats outboard motor what would you say?
Could you give us the gist of the gist?
You know the purpose because you know that somebody built it for that purpose. If you don’t have prior knowledge that it was made for a purpose you can’t do that. So you can’t say that a bacterial flagellum has a purpose, just a function. What you can’t do is say that because something has a function, it must therefore have a purpose and was therefore designed. No matter how many times your repeat it, that argument doesn’t work.
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I think the argument works fine because you can infer purpose from observation. If you were on Mars and saw what looked like a turbine in the back of a structure that looked like a vehicle you could infer the purpose of that turbine.
I can also infer purpose of the flagellum by watching bacteria moving through a liquid medium.
What is the basis for judging whether an argument works or not beyond the subjective judgement of people listening to it?
The two cases are different. If you see the turbine, you know from experience that people make vehicles and turbines; they certainly don’t evolve. Thus you infer (I suppose) Martians analogous to people.
Bacteria, however, are not manufactured; they reproduce and evolve. There are no people behind them. You can’t infer purpose or design based on function.
I suppose that’s how you work. Other people are capable of analyzing arguments to see if the conclusion follows from the premises and it the premises are true.
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That you’re not answering my question.
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I don’t see anywhere in that where someone reasons to the conclusion that life is the product of a transcendent mind. At all.
What we first get is a list of things James Tour thinks we lack an explanation for. What follows from that? Nothing. Then Stephen Meyer goes on to say that he can basically imagine life being designed. Sure, I can imagine that too. Does that constitute a valid argument to the effect that life is the product of a transcendent mind? Nope.
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Precisely. You base your inference on past knowledge.
The structure on Mars had an origin event in the same way that the flagellum did and “evolve” is not a precise or likely explanation for that event. We are back with the challenge of explaining a complex adaption.
A reasonable inference is that a mechanism responsible is at least as capable as a mind. Something that can understand the basic components (amino acids) and plan how those components assemble to produce mobility.
You can infer purpose from observing certain functions. Wheels rotating are a good example.
And you have no past knowledge of anyone making living organisms.
Since you’re making a probability argument, please show (how you determine) the probability that the flagellum was designed. After all, if you’re going to say you prefer A over B because A is more likely than B, you need to show how you arrive at the probabilities of both.
I continue to be astonished by your total lack of inhibitions against mindless declarations of this sort. Anyone can just sit here and declare one blind assertion on top of another. In a way you never really say anything new, except to find another novel way of re-stating what we all already know you believe. You believe the flagellum, and life was designed. Okay. We already know that. You believe it is reasonable to infer this. Great, we now know you believe this too.
How many different ways of stating that same thing can you come up with? What is always missing is a solid argument to that effect. Not just another list of unsubstantiated assertions you happen to privately believe. But a set of premises from which that conclusion either directly follows, or is at least strongly implied.
And here’s the big challenge: Try to avoid having one of your premises be the fact that we are currently ignorant about something. If one of the premises in whatever argument you can think of, is that we currently do not have an explanation for X(be that the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or whatever), then the argument fails outright. It’s dead in the water and you shouldn’t even bother stating it.
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This is not the argument as much as you want to it to be. We have a known mechanism that can understand and plan which we can point to in order to infer a cause. The origin of the flagellum is something that we can infer requires this capability.
The argument is solid such that the discussion becomes very repetitive when someone is determined to defeat it for ideological reasons. They make nit pic arguments and repeat them. The counter arguments also become repetitive. Behe explains this in his discussion with @swamidass. You keep repeating that It looks like a duck quacks like a duck but it’s really a dog because science is not intuitive.
In fact science is often intuitive its just not always intuitive. To show it is not intuitive you need to test your claim.
Can you list the 1 (or 2 or 3) criterion used for DETECTING design?
The criterion or criteria must not be TOO obvious, or we wouldn’t still be arguing about it.
I’m glad to hear that. But then where is it?
Then make that inference please. You’ve now declared you can infer this. Now do it, make the inference.
You haven’t made an argument yet. You’ve stated what you believe. You have not argued for why we should think it is true.
You understand the difference between merely stating a conclusion to a putative argument, and stating the actual argument, right?
An argument has premises, and then a conclusion that is supposed to follow from the premises.
Premise 1: If A, then B.
Premise 2: A.
Conclusion: Therefore B.
All you’ve done so far is it just state that B. That (apparently you are convinced) the flagellum requires a designer. You have not stated anything that entails, or indicates, that this is true. That is to say, you have not stated any premises that lead to the truth of that conclusion.
I watched the video. There are some details I disagree with Tour about, but his overall message seems right. We are a long way from figuring out how life originated.
But then, at least given my philosophical vantage, I can’t make much sense of Stephen Meyer at the end.
Would discovering a scientific explanation for life’s origin make me less confident that God created everything? Not at all. I think Jim Tour would agree (I even think he has said as much in the past).
So if finding an explanation doesn’t affect my confidence that God created everything, then lacking an explanation shouldn’t have any affect either*.
And then there’s Jacques Monod, a non-theist who believed that life is so unlikely and its origins a matter of pure and minuscule chance, and it is highly unlikely we will ever be able to reconstruct its origins (in an amazing book he wrote called “Chance and Necessity”, which anyone interested in origins should read). This belief seemed to have no affect on his beliefs about God.
So I just don’t understand what one has to do with the other.
*I know that the effect of evidence on confidence is not always symmetric, but in this case, it seems like it should go both ways or neither.
Monod J. 1970 Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. New York, NY: Knopf.
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I think we can sum it all up in Behe’s criteria. Functional information is also a purposeful arrangement of parts (nucleotides)
It’s very simple reasoning yet that does not make it false. It just makes people that don’t like the ideological implications make repetitive looks like a duck but it’s really a dog counter arguments.
This argument has been around for thousands of years and its popularity goes up and down. I think the evidence in the cell is bringing it back. I also think that science needs to consider it as part of the overall decision making on the go or no go of projects.
Methodological naturalism taken to the extreme can cause a lot of “dogs chasing their tails” by supporting iffy assumptions.
I will add one more thing. The video feels kind of creepy to me. The way it shows some pop sci about origins on TV and computer screens (spliced with someone in a distorted Guy Fawkes mask), and then switches over to Jim Tour. It gives me the impression that the creator of this YouTube video seems to be afraid that people will believe the overzealous media articles about origins science, and wishes that Jim could appear right after all these stories with a caustic disclaimer.
How do you infer purpose? Make the inference. Don’t state the conclusion(an inference is not merely when you declare something), make the argument.
Wheels rotate. Okay, and? The coffee in my cup is giving off heat to it’s surroundings. Is that it’s purpose?
The car that contains the observed wheels moves when a force is applied much easier than without wheels. I then infer the wheels purpose is to aid in the motion of the car.
Behe is a very smart guy and has been thinking about this for 25 years. The original inference in Darwin’s Black box has been refined but not changed.