any designer is possible. even a monkey might be able to make gears (by taming).
correct. so when we see gears the best explanation we can think about is design. just like any other complex designed objects we know about (airplanes, space shuttles, personal computers etc).
i never said “never”. i im just saying that so far its the best explanation.
I could make a similar argument to what SCD has attempted here:
All hitherto analyzed biological objects are the products of evolution, these gears are biological objects, thus biological evolution is the best explanation.
I happen to think this is a terrible argument, but it has exact same form as the one SCD made. Whatever problem you can think of for this evolution argument, SCD’s will suffer from too.
When you make an inference to the best explanation (which isn’t what SCD attempted, he attempted an inductive generalization which violates the principle of total evidence) you are supposed to contrast multiple explanations and show how one explanation is either more pasimonious than another, and/or also explains all the relevant data better.
So far, neither Giltil or scd have even attempted an inference to the best explanation.
It is also possible that nobody designed it.
Mere possibility is irrelevant. Possibility does nothing to show us what happened. It is possible it was designed? Yes. It is also possible it wasn’t designed. It is also possible it evolved instead.
Why? You are not explaining why. You are just SAYING it is, you are not EXPLAINING why it is.
Do you understand the difference between a CLAIM and a JUSTIFICATION for the claim?
I agree that’s what you’re doing. You’re just saying design is the best explanation. That’s all you’re doing.
The reason you give does not entail that conclusion however, so we are still left wondering why it is the best explanation. Why?
It’s the same old “this LOOKS designed to ME so it must BE designed!!”
Wash, rinse, repeat.
But is it an explanation—or just an assumption on your part? How does one use the scientific method to determine whether or not it is intelligently designed? If your explanation is a scientific explanation, it should be testable.
Your explanation sounds like a personal philosophical inclination on your part, not science.
you can say the same about a space shuttle. i dont see any real difference unless you can show me one.
true. but who has the burdon of proof in that case?
i said that its because all gears we know about are the product of design. thus when we see gears we must conclude design. unless we know about a natural process that can produce gears.
let me also quote prof dawkins: “Each one of us is a machine, like an airliner only much more complicated.” and: “I said that I could not imagine being an atheist at anytime before 1859, when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published”
and: “one thing I shall not do is belittle the wonder of the living ‘watches’ that so inspired Paley. On the contrary, I shall try to illustrate my feeling that here Paley could have gone even further”
dawkins understand very well why the burdon of proof is on the design side. and he has a good reason for this.
if we dont have a proven natural process that can produce gears then it is an explanation rather than assumption.
No. We know who designed the space shuttle and countless people observed that design process.
its also true for (artificial) genomes. so i dont think that we can conclude design base on that. it must be something else that make us to conclude design when we see a space shuttle.
Yes they are like gear tooth parts. They have what looks like gear teeth. The do not have what looks like gears.
Astronomers don’t have a “proven natural process” that can produce the Red Rectangle Nebula. Therefore, my explanation (not an assumption) is that it was built by cosmic elves.
See the problem?
Neither your assumption nor mine is testable under scientific methodologies.
We do have a proven natural process that we now know can produce biological features which function as gears. It’s called evolution.
Just because no one stumbled upon this example before now doesn’t make the insect legs be “designed”.
I think it is testable. Is the mechanism (mind) offered capable of creating the structure observed?
Whether or not something is capable doesn’t mean that it is causal… No one argues that an intelligence could design gears. The issue is whether or not one can show that a mind did and a natural process did not.
Okay.
According to Dembski, you know that an object is designed if it is 1) contingent; 2) complex (or improbable) and 3) specified.
The planthopper gears are both contingent and specified. But is it complex (improbable)? I would argue positively, but given that we don’t know enough about the inner workings (the molecular details) of the system, it is impossible to compute its improbability rigorously.
The bottom line here is that we probably don’t know enough about the system to draw a rigorous design inference. But what we can say I think in that case is that the evidence for design is highly suggestive, especially when considering that 1) the bug gears displays another hallmark of design, ie., the purposeful arrangement of parts (Behe) and 2) as far as I can tell, purely blind/unguided processes such as RV+NS are unable to offer a credible explanation.
So given the above, I would say that design is the best explanation for the planthopper gears.
Perfect! You have a theory now! Go prove it!!
No, they are not specified. You already admitted the insect “gears” existed long before humans designed gears. That means the human designed gears cannot be a before-the-fact specification.
You keep making the same mistake over and over. Measuring an existing object and claiming after the fact your measurement is somehow a “specification”.
Wonderful example of question begging !
No, because we know that the space shuttle was designed, and when, and by whom, and how.
We don’t know that these gears were designed, that’s what you are trying to argue that they were. If we already know they were in the same way we do for the space shuttle, you wouldn’t have to make an inductive argument to that effect.
i dont see any real difference unless you can show me one.
Between an object we know was designed, and one we don’t know was designed? Then you are trying not to see it and there’s nothing that can be done for you.
The person who claims to know which of these possibilities are actually the case has the burden of demonstrating the truth of the claim. So when you claim to know that it was designed(not just that it is POSSIBLE it was designed, but that it WAS designed), you have the burden of proof to show that.
Why? The conclusion doesn’t follow. It does not follow that because all gears we know of are the product of design, then gears we don’t know of MUST be the product of design too.
It simply doesn’t follow.
unless we know about a natural process that can produce gears.
No, we don’t have to already know of such a process (we might in fact know of such a process, maybe evolution is such a process?).
Detecting gears which we don’t know the origin of might be one of the ways that we come to discover that there are other processes besides design that can produce gears. That means we can’t just assume that because some gears(the ones we happen to have made) were designed, that therefore ALL gears were designed. It doesn’t follow.
Now as stated, evolution might be one such process that could produce gears. Have you evaluated that possibility? No, you haven’t.
Except there are 160+ years of positive evidence from dozens of scientific disciplines establishing evolution as true. You gave a wonderful example of reality denial!