[quote=“Puck_Mendelssohn, post:10, topic:13715, full:true”]
Scd’s argument is Paley’s argument. Are you willing to say Paley is wretched?
Your definition is ad hoc and doesn’t fit with reality. Humans, who are conscious designers, guide a lot of processes but these processes and their end results are still natural. Aren’t cars, boats, and planes natural, even though they are man-made?
I also suspect you keep mentioning the Big Bang, but are unaware of its tenets. According to the Big Bang model, the universe used to be extremely hot and dense and that it is currently expanding. Kindly explain what’s not natural about hotness, density and expansion even if all these events were guided by God?
Honestly this is dense gibberish. Please express your point more clearly.
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I know next to nothing at all about Paley, so I can’t say. But to call his infamous watchmaker argument “wretched” would be an understatement. He argues that a watch lying in the heath is easily determined to be “designed” because it is so different from the heath that surrounds it.
Problem is he’s trying to argue that the heath itself was designed. Oops.
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The wretchedness of ignorance must be judged in relation to the time and cultural setting of the person in whom it’s to be judged. Seeing as one practically has to be a Paley-ontologist to understand the comparatively primitive scientific understanding of Paley, it would probably be harsh to judge him by modern standards. If he lived today and still held those views, yes; he would be a wretched example of gross ignorance.
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We are in agreement here.
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I guess our modern Paley (Behe) fits the bill.
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say that the PC fan is an internal system such as the olfactory system. now, suppose that we need to show how such a fan can be made by small steps (and thus the olfactory system supposedly could have evolved by small steps). so do you think that the PC fan can be made by small steps while every step can be functional with respect to the PC?
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By that same “reasoning”: If a PC fan is made out of plastic and bears the label “Made in China”, then the olfactory system is also made out of plastic and bears the label “Made in China.”
In all seriousness, it’s easy to make fun of the silly attempts at reasoning made by the creationists here and elsewhere who lack any formal training in relevant sciences. But the fact is these are essentially the same arguments made by the supposedly better educated “scientists” in the ID movement. They just gussy it up better with sciencey sounding language.
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An olfactory system is an inappropriate analogy to a PC fan. Do you even know what the olfactory system is?
You are still saying nonsense. If a human designer wanted to incorporate a fan into a PC, he would first assemble the fan (if he did not buy it assembled already) components to get the fan in successive small steps. Afterwards, he will incorporate the finished fan into the PC at a particular step.
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@scd probably thinks it would be significant if the fan performed no useful function until it was fully assembled. Who knows why he would think that? It’s almost as if he thinks evolutionists believe PC fans evolved and weren’t designed.
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And that if we agree to that, then somehow the flagella or any other biological system deemed to be IC could not have evolved through small, functional steps as if man-made machine are entirely like biological proteins. Why he thinks that way baffles me. Its like saying because the primary sequence of an enzyme is like a string of beads, and since strings don’t fold into conformations that allow them to catalyze chemical reactions, therefore enzymes cannot catalyze chemical reactions which is clearly absurd: he takes his faulty analogies too far.
The beautiful thing though, is that evolution can proceed through small steps whether those steps have selective benefits or not.
If this is so, its a strawman he can’t seem to let go of.
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The opposite is obviously true. Given what science has discovered about the molecular foundation of life since Paley times, especially the fact that, as Bruce Albert noted, « the entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contrains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines », it is clear that If Paley would live today, he would be more confident than ever about the strength of his argument.
It is never clear or obvious what some-one long-dead would have thought had they had a very different upbringing, environment and education. It is especially unclear and unobvious when you’re making claims about the views of some-one who was much more intelligent than you are.
Nor is there any way to check or confirm what such a reborn, reincarnated or resurrected person would have thought. Of all the arguments used by creationists, this has the least weight because it is literally pure opinion.
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You ignore the fact that the theory of evolution did not exist in his time. If he continued to make the same argument today, now that this theory has been shown to be true, it would only mean he was just another creationist dunce, not that his argument was any good. If had to bet, though, I would expect him to be a theistic evolutionist today.
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no its not. in order for the analogy to be correct, we need to compare two traits that are common to both. these two traits in that case, is the fact that by removing some parts out of the flagellum or the fan, they will become non-functional. this is true for both of them and thus they are both IC systems by definition.
see above. both systems are IC by definition and thus we can compare between the two.
when every step of the fan can be functional in that PC? how exactly?
Yes.
And therefore, by your reasoning, if one IC system is made of plastic and bears a label “Made in China”, then the other must as well.
What am I missing?
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While it’s quite useless to speculate, it’s clear that I have a higher opinion of Paley than you do. I think it’s not very nice to slander a dead man by suggesting he would be a science denialist if he were alive today.
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no. you are comparing again two different traits: the material the object is made of and the IC of that object. this is the problem.
Which is exactly the error you are making. And this is not just your error. You are illustrating a more general error made by ID’ists as a whole, which why I am risking belaboring the point.
You are quite right on one thing. If something is IC and also made of plastic, it does not follow that anything that is IC is necessarily made of plastic.
However it is also true, and for the same reasons, that if something is IC and could not have evolved in a series of functional steps it is not the case that anything that is IC could not have evolved in a series of functional steps.
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This is sort of the big point thought, right? You are saying you can spot design in big-scale things that we know are man-made, but when I ask you to spot design at the molecular level (the level more similar to the flagella and ATPas motors) you can’t see it. By every objective measure I know of (size, function, etc.) the motor I asked you to pick you is orders of magnitude more similar to the flagella than the CPU fan. At the very least I think my “test” shows that design is very subjective and can sometimes be easy to just observe (the CPU fan or Paley’s watch) and sometimes can be impossible unless you know the answer ahead of time. The question is, which of those two scenarios is more similar to inferring design in complex biochemical systems. From my experience (PhD work was related to artificial molecular motor design) I think it easily falls into the “we really don’t know”. Could God or an omnipotent Intelligent Designer have tinkered with things? I guess so, but I don’t see any way of proving that from just observing that data we have. On the other hand, we do have are systems that can take the laws of physics and chemistry and create pretty complicated things on their own (self-assembly, genetic recombination and enormous amounts of non-protein-encoding DNA, etc.).
A CPU fan? Sure, I have no problem saying that’s obviously human-made just by looking at it. Unfortunately, that is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. That you can’t spot a real molecular motor in a “line up” seems more relevant. Even then though, whether you or I can “conclude design” is not the question. The question is is it design. We humans have demonstrated quite readily that concluding something doesn’t make it true.
I know a number of smart people have tried to demonstrate Intelligent Design via scientific/mathematical arguments but frankly it just always seems to fall flat to me. As a Christian I’m certainly willing to say that the entire universe was designed and created by an intelligent being, I just don’t think that is remotely a scientific conclusion. I would considered it something like a “revealed observation” or a “theological-grounded observation” if I were pressed to label it. I just don’t understand why the ID crowd are so bent on finding scientific legitimacy. Science is great at what it does, but why would we conclude that it’s the only game in town? To me, the ID movement sounds as if it assumes that materialism and empiricism already won. That just seems like bad philosophy and impoverished theology to me.
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