So what? Your avoidance of my point all but screams that you are afraid to look at evidence.
“I have looked at papers” does not indicate that you looked at any evidence. Did you examine the evidence presented in those papers, or did you just look at the words?
But you relentlessly misrepresent it as post hoc evidence, not a unique prediction that has been tested literally hundreds of thousands of times.
And your agreement does not even suggest that you examined any evidence yourself.
Common descent is perfectly consistent with them, as losses and gains form nested hierarchies.
You’d see that right away if you had had the courage to examine ANY of the evidence for yourself. I hypothesize that you lack sufficient faith to dig in.
I’ve shown Bill a number of my papers, and he has indeed looked at them. But he has also shown that he didn’t understand anything about them. And you can easily find many instances here of Bill failing to understand many other papers on the subject. He has looked at some of the evidence; he just didn’t comprehend any of it.
Again, looking at a paper isn’t necessarily looking at the evidence presented in it. I haven’t seen a single case in which Bill has looked at any evidence whatsoever.
OK, so you’re not convinced by my example of the Stone Age man meeting an iPhone, nor by the SETI example. I think you’re wrong, but anyway. Here’s another example. Imagine that you are in charge of a 4-person space mission to Mars. The four of you set off to explore a little-known region of the planet and, in the middle of a crater, you come across a black monolith with precise geometric proportions (1:4:9 ratio) and a perfectly polished surface (think of the monolith in the film 2001 space odyssey). I imagine that at this point you’d challenge the validity of a design inference, wouldn’t you? But my story doesn’t end there. As you approach the monolith, you’ll notice that when you enter the imaginary circle 5 metres in diameter that surrounds it, its surface becomes coloured. After a while, you and your companions realise that the colour displayed invariably corresponds to the emotional state of the person entering the circle: blue if you’re scared, red if you’re angry, green if you feel joy, orange if you’re stressed, purple if you’re serene, etc. Faced with such an object, what conclusion would you draw about its origin? Wouldn’t you infer design even if you don’t know about the how?
Of course it’s designed. You’re telling me to imagine a science fiction object from a movie.
These hypothetical scenarios will never illustrate what you want them to because you are asking, “Imagine a designed object and tell me how you know it’s a designed object?”
I know it’s a designed object because that is what you want me to imagine. You’re front-loading your conclusion into the scenario’s premise.
The SETI example is actually a great example of how to try to detect intelligent non-human origins. The problem for ID is that SETI methodologies stand in contrast to how ID proponents think design is detected.
This is generally true of other instances of trying to detect things of artificial (human) origin ranging from paleolithic tools to genetically-modified organisms. I’ve looked into some of these areas and hypothesizing the method of origin plays a role in their detection.
I just don’t understand why ID proponents are so scared of asking “how”.
A more interesting question is whether the conclusion that you are blatantly leading us to is a rigorous one, or merely a jumped-to conclusion?
Human decision-making is full of short-cut heuristics that let us reach conclusions without much mental effort – but at the cost of our decisions being, not infrequently, wrong.
These sorts of rushes to judgement are exactly the sort of thing that the scientific method is meant to guard us against.
All these “imagine” this, “imagine” that, unrealistically-loaded hypotheticals demonstrate is that ID argumentation is nothing more than empty rhetoric.
Wrong. These hypothetical scenarios are nothing more than thought experiments. Aren’t you aware of the important role thought experiments had for scientific and philosophical advances?
Wrong. I am asking you to imagine an hypothetical object displaying some properties and then tell me if a design inference is warranted despite the absence of knowledge about how the object was made. It is truly amazing to see how far in denial critics of ID are willing to go in order to avoid conceding a single, straightforward point to ID proponents.
You should ask the question to Galileo, Einstein, Schrödinger and many other scientists whose thought experiments were undeniably instrumental in advancing their scientific views.
Thought experiments, like intuitions, may have a role in the speculative initial stages of scientific inquiry – but I would doubt if they play any role in the rigorous, fit-for-peer-review-and-publication, conclusions to that inquiry. The latter requires rigorous analysis of evidence – something that your “hypothetical scenarios” are entirely lacking in.
The paper does not support your claim. Duplication and divergence is inferred in this paper. You made the claim of being observed in a lab. There are many papers like this one that infers duplication and divergence. There are no papers that I am aware of that confirm duplication and divergence in the lab. The Behe 2004 paper presents a model of why this claim is problematic.
No. Everything you have said about the object has to do with what it looks like and behaves, and none of it indicates that it either could have been or was designed.
See, had you said that instead of being a solid colour, like many pure substances are, it had a copy of the Mona Lisa painted on it, then I would be inclined to think that someone who was at least familiar with the picture was attempting to accomplish something either by constructing that monolith or by placing it where it is. I would still question who would have replicated the famous painting on a slab of unknown material, what for, and how they would have shipped it all the way to Mars, but knowing that accurate copies of the Mona Lisa don’t occur naturally on just any rock I come across, while they are a very common occurrence on all manner of man-made objects, I’m inclined to suspect that someone rather deliberately produced this copy.
But this doesn’t work for you, because the whole point you are trying to advocate for is that it is reasonable to infer design everywhere, even in things that to stone age design experts do not seem designed at all, such as kangaroos and coconuts.
that some random alien race knew enough about human physiology and psychology to intentionally create such an effect; or
that it was just some random naturally-occurring “weird bollocks” (to quote the fictional DCI Seawoll)?
Neither scenario seems particularly likely. This is part of what makes this completely credibility-free BSparticularly annoying. This is NOT a “thought experiment” so much as a “lack-of-thought experiment” – just an unoriginal clone of William Paley’s tired, not-the-least-bit convincing, and not-even-itself-original ‘Watch on the Heath’ analogy.