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

[Faizal_Ali]

@John_Harshman

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.

And then the method doesn’t work, because there is a theory that very nicely accounts for the complexity of Homo sapiens and which does not entail a designer at all.

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@Faizal_Ali

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.

Your argument right or wrong is interesting.

Evolution however does not provide this explanation with rigorous scientific standards. It cannot explain with a mathematical model the origin of the gene patterns in the Howe et al diagram. It also cannot explain the origin of large macro machines like the spliceosome.

If sometime in the future a mathematical model gets built using mechanisms such as gene duplication and genetic recombination then the design “can” gets kicked down the road to explaining the origin of those mechanisms.

[Joe_Felsenstein]

@Rumraket

And an omnipotent divine designer could of course just make special rules for every individual thing.

For some reason The Designer does not do this, so we don’t see physicists and chemists having to deal with Intelligent Design arguments that argue that there are exceptions to the Schrödinger Wave Equation.

[Tim]

@colewd

Evolution however does not provide this explanation with rigorous scientific standards. It cannot explain with a mathematical model the origin of the gene patterns in the Howe et al diagram. It also cannot explain the origin of large macro machines like the spliceosome.

Let me fix that for you:

ID however does not provide this explanation with anything even remotely resembling rigor or scientific standards. ID cannot explain at all, let alone with a mathematical model the origin of the gene patterns in the Howe et al diagram. ID also cannot explain the origin of large macro machines like the spliceosome.

ID is simply the bald, unsubstantiated and vacuous assertion that ‘a designer did it’.

Talk about “the pot calling the kettle black”.

[RonSewell (RonS)]

@Joe_Felsenstein

So the properties of water cannot be tinkered with by The Designer without screwing up the whole universe as a side effect.

Yes, but is that not the whole point of the FTA, that the whole thing works together under a set of rules by which self awareness emerges from particle soup?

In any event, the FTA is about sufficiency in nature and has its roots in the physics community, in contrast to ID, which is concerned with insufficiency and has its roots in theology.