If The Designer is a watchmaker, why doesn't He make watches?

Hi Rum
I could only speculate but here is a swag.

The Designer left us with basic technology with both matter and its most advanced form biology. Biology contains more complex molecules than inert matter and has a stronger design detection signal based on human design detection standards. As @pnelson parody indicated, leaving complex non biological designs was not a priority and left for humans. God designed the human designer for optimizing inert matters capability.

A possible reason for this is to allow us to become self sufficient by developing technology using His basic designs. What humans can do with matter is quite impressive so far and there is a long way to go. I agree with @Michael_Okoko that we are not beyond copying biology at this point with Crispr. We may use biology more in the future as a benchmark for human designs.

I’m dubious of Ewert’s algorithm, and neither the algorithm nor the data are adequately explained. It doesn’t seem to me that anyone reading Ewert’s paper would be able to reproduce his work.

That’s a naked assertion unrelated to anything that came before and unsupported by any argument. Again, you have no explanation for the pattern, while I do. Therefore my ideas are superior, as science judges such things.

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I agree as science supports methodological naturalism.

What the methods of science is doing in this case maybe forcing you into a potentially faulty model. IMO a model of multiple LCA’s in the case of vertebrates should be considered.

I am impressed you took the time to read the RTB book and critique it. I agree with several of your points especially about developing a more robust creation model. I hope this promotes some healthy dialog. I also appreciate @swamidass effort in supporting this type of dialog.

If biology is “its most advanced form”, that is only because this “designer” did not create anything more advanced outside of biology. There is no apparent reason why this designer, if it existed, did not or could not.

Of course, if this designer does not exist, then there is nothing to be explained.

You persist in making no sense. Abandoning methodological naturalism doesn’t save your hypothesis.

So you are suggesting that we abandon science.

But you have as much as agreed that we have to abandon science in order to consider it. There is no evidence favoring multiple, independently-created ancestors for vertebrates and all sorts of evidence against that notion: fossils, morphology, DNA and protein sequences, and numerous large mutations such as indels, rearrangements, new genes, gene losses, and so on. Yet you cling to your hypothesis which you have as much as admitted is based on your interpretation of Genesis.

I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to care about your agreement, given your past ability to agree only with anything you already believed.

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I think this maybe best understood as ultimately a theological question in the case the Designer is God.

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I am not sure this is true as we currently start with LUCA vs RNA world at the base of the tree. I don’t think science is forcing the starting point of the model.

The alternative hypothesis is based on the Howe Venn diagram. It happens to fit conceptually with Genesis.

Perhaps this is a different issue, but: why don’t we see any use of ID arguments in chemistry and physics, aside from chemicals known to be synthesized by chemists or objects known to be constructed by humans? I suspect that this is simply a restatement of the argument of this thread but it does let the inorganic chemists and physicists off the hook while biologists bear the main burden of coping with ID arguments.

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Yet when Behe or Axe use some scientific approach based on MN to try to assail evolution, you gladly embrace their findings without considering whether their conclusions are faulty. When science seems to support ID, its good. When it doesn’t, it and MN might as well go out the window. Hypocrites.

That model is wrong based on available evidence drawn from disparate sources like fossils and molecules. Multiple LCA’s fits the observed pattern for viral origins better, just not so for cellular life.

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None of that is relevant to vertebrates or to anything else we’ve been talking about. (And it’s way off topic for this thread too.) You continue to post incoherent objections. Exclusively.

No, it isn’t. You grossly misunderstand the data and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. Your hypothesis fits Genesis, but that’s no coincidence, as you have formed it for just that reason.

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Intelligence Design activists have based an entire movement and spent millions of dollars supporting the claim it is a scientific question. I’m glad you agree that they are wrong about this. Do you think they have engaged in this because they are mistaken, or because they are lying?

I don’t think that is quite the same question. The typical ID Creationist argument relies on the arrangement of molecules or larger physical objects that occurs at the levels above basic chemistry or physics.

Michael Denton has put out a book based on the properties of water. I have not read it, but unlike most ID arguments it is not based on insufficiency in nature but rather an expression of fine tuning.

What intelligent design guys do you think have asked the question that you did? You have made an interesting argument about the overall picture of the evidence but it is not an ID argument.

ID guys are not considering the motive of the Designer as you are. The motive of the designer is for theologians.

The ID argument is evidence - inference - design as the cause.

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The properties of water come from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. Those in turn come from solutions of the Schrödinger wave equation. So the properties of water cannot be tinkered with by The Designer without screwing up the whole universe as a side effect.

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He isn’t, and in fact no design argument can work without considering the motives of the designer, since the supposed designer can do anything at all and make it look like anything else, if he likes. There can be no well-formed hypothesis of an omnipotent being without constraining his motives in some way.

That was nothing at all like an argument.

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ID is a method for inferring design in nature.

The designer is a much more complicated discussion and separate from Behe’s argument.

ID is a ‘method’ for “inferring design in nature” in the exact same way that dowsing is a ‘method’ for inferring the presence of subterranean water sources.

Both ‘methods’ lack anything in the way of procedural rigor, and both are entirely lacking in scientific validity.

It is in fact more accurate to state that ID is the bald and unsubstantiated assertion that 



 certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. [DI]

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I am not thinking at all of “motive”. I am applying the methodology the ID guys claim is able to detect design, and finding that it in the natural world it only seems to apply to things that arose thru evolution. And since evolution provides an explanation for how things that meet the ID guys’ criteria for “design” can arise without having been designed by an intelligent being, it raises serious problems for the ID guys’ claim that there is a designer responsible for things in the natural world.

That method, such as it is, must assume that the designer has certain goals, e.g. biological complexity, and in particular Homo sapiens, but lacks other goals, e.g. complex inanimate designs.

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And an omnipotent divine designer could of course just make special rules for every individual thing. Give water a unique and special essence that can be manipulated and adjusted at a fundamental level by the designer without affecting anything else. Same with any other entity, no reason to bother with this strangely interconnected system of interactions among simpler and more basic constituents, resulting in strongly contingent and emergent behaviors.

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