Right – that’s what you say. Which is not an answer to the question. In the history of the world, ‘design’ has never been known to produce anything other than a design. Design does not produce physical objects. Ever. This is why your proposal of ‘design’ as the mechanism for the production of physical objects fails, which is the question you asked, and the question I answered. Clear now?
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There is no syllogism there, let alone a factual, sound, and valid one. The “human minds as a test” is not just limited, the argument is incoherent.
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The proposed mechanism is a mind. The test bed is a human. With all the respect that is due to you Steve I think you are simply trying to defeat the argument and not trying to explore its potential value. I am only proposing it as a alternative to test against vs all the papers that work from the starting point of assuming the truth of evolution or universal common descent.
If you can show a tested truth to a hypothesis then the argument is defeated as it was in physics with General Relativity.
No, it’s not. You need to DEMONSTRATE that it is a mind. And trying to do that by analogizing its supposed products (usually VERY poorly) to human designs is just a hideously poor analogy, nothing more.
I am sure you immediately realize how strange that is. You cannot detect “purposeful” arrangement of parts. That’s what you are claiming to try to do, but you can’t do it; you have no method which could possibly work. What you do is detect functional arrangements of things, declare them “purposeful,” and conclude that that establishes design. But smuggling design in through an unwarranted inference of “purpose” is just unsophisticated verbal trickery; it doesn’t work.
As for a watch following that description: yes, because we know the purpose of people who make watches. As for a living cell: no, we have no reason to believe there is purpose in the creation of a living cell. Purposefulness can be judged by identifying the designer and ascertaining its motives. But you want to claim it without identifying any designer at all, without establishing empirically that any such designer exists, and without knowing its motives. Indeed, when people inquire into the motives of the designer, you declare that this is off-limits: a clear “tell” that this is theology, whose object is inscrutable in principle, rather than science, where an object may be inscrutable in practice but not in principle.
But even if a mind were capable of having written the genomes of all living things – and, again, we know empirically of no possessor of such a mind – the fact that a mind COULD generate something is not evidence that a mind DID generate it. Such a notion, again, opens up the mere possibility that some credulous person may BELIEVE this to be so, but it does nothing at all to establish that it actually is so. You have no designer. You have no demonstrated intent, purpose, nothing. You have no mechanism. You have nothing on top of nothing.
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The mechanism “explanation”
it’s still worth considering how a mind might act in the world to cause change. The answer is we don’t know. I sit here typing. My mind, mediated by my brain, is putting words into a computer program (designed by other minds, by the way), using my fingers to type. But how does it happen, really? Where does the impulse to press one key instead of another come from? And how do these words, products of my mind, communicate to others through their computer screens?
We can’t really say how our own minds work to interact with the world, yet we know they do. It is our universal, repeated, personal experience that shows us that our consciousness interacts with our bodies to produce information, but exactly how it works is not known. So why should we expect to know how the agent(s) responsible for the design of life or the universe may have worked?
A few paragraphs before was this implication of a material cause following a mental design
We know that intelligent agents have the necessary design capabilities to envision and build a pyramid. No natural force does. These are inferences based on our present knowledge of cause and effect or “causes now in operation.”
Another gem
At the present, to actually see how the design was inserted into the natural world would require a time-machine. Perhaps future theories of design may be able to address this question better, but currently this is not a question intelligent design claims to address. Suffice to say, “the design occurred.”
I take it that the designer is finished his work and it’s no longer possible to observe implementation. So that leaves only material explanations for everything we observe from here on out. Perhaps the IDEA Center should rethink this.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1175/
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Would somebody like to – oh, heck, I don’t know what – actually offer evidence for design in living things actually occurring, instead of just trying to infer it in these various exceedingly weak ways? ID has had a surplus of arguments, and a severe shortage of evidence, for a long time, and nothing in current ID literature makes me think that’s about to change.
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OK. So how does one “test” it?
By selling books to rubes. Isn’t that how scientific progress works?
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In that case, you can toss out Behe from your list of helpful people on your side, since Behe agrees that universal common descent is supported by strong evidence and that evolution does actually happen.
But if you’d like to add Behe back in, there’s gonna be some explainin’ to do. Since Behe does accept universal common descent, the “information” y’all are usually demanding a supernatural source for has to come from somewhere, sometime. Behe does seem to claim that this is NOT a thing that simply happened in the dark long-ago past, but rather is a thing that regularly shapes evolution. Take, for example, his speculation that the ancestors of modern lemurs may have gotten a whole bunch of genomic info front-loaded for use in later diversification, presumably at some sort of lemur-rafting-going-away-party hosted by YHWH, ineffable stuffer-of-genomes. I hope there was cake.
And as Behe now notes, we know that if genomic info isn’t useful it really does tend to decay quickly. That eliminates his earlier speculation that maybe all of life was somehow cleverly front-loaded way, way, back a long time ago.
So you need a process that not only HAS operated in the real world, in a distant and unknowable past, but that DOES operate in the world. After all of these years of nattering the same bad philosophical arguments and getting zero traction with people who actually study biology, maybe you should go find that, and document it, rather than just using the same bad analogies that ID is famous for eternally repeating.
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I’m afraid it is a straw-man - the ID argument is slightly different in form:
- See that car over there? It’s red and has four seats.
- And this apple over here? It’s also red.
- Everything that is red and has four seats has seatbelts.
- Conclusion: This apple has seatbelts.
{complex:red, four a origin, seatbelts:a designer}
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This is a good question. We know at this point mind has some of the basic components to solve the problems we see when observing life.
- A mind can generate a functional sequence.
- A mind can arrange parts for a purpose as a watch has a purpose.
- A mind can plan.
- A mind has some basic knowledge of physics hand chemistry as it has the ability to learn
The issue is that our best minds understanding of biology is very limited. At what point will we be able to design something as complex as a bacteria de novo?
I think the hypothesis value is as an alternative hypothesis to evolution to allow evolution to continue to build models and have something more powerful than random (null) hypothesis to compare against.
This is familiar. Christian theology has for millennia affirmed
- God is omnipotent.
- God arranges to His purpose.
- God has a plan.
- God is omniscient.
First science is always tentative. In general relativity Einstein proposed that the properties of matter could explain gravity. He developed a model and others initially tested it using the sun as a test bed. This became the mechanism that explained how the universe worked as the mathematics could accurately predict the observed orbits of the planets where Newton’s equations could not.
Do we know that General Relativity works at all other locations in the universe? The answer is no but at this point it is a well accepted hypothesis.
The properties of matter alone have struggled as an explanation for life’s origins and its major transitions. Mind is a more powerful mechanism as it can get past the functional information and chicken and egg challenges we are observing.
Yes. At what point are you going to have tentative science? Will that take you another twenty years?
But as has been pointed out to you, there is no explanation for living things which actually involves mind being a mechanism at all. When you demonstrate that minds can make things, here and now, in real time in the real world, then you’ll have a mechanism.
Have they? I mean, if you want a fully-reductionist model that says that if physics works like so, then you’ll get flightless waterfowl, then yeah, that’s not happened and almost certainly will not.
But if what you want is observable biological mechanisms in the here and now which can account for major transitions, we have those. Are they complete? No, because the only “complete” explanation for anything is the completely reductionist one. But why would you want that? Surely nothing happened in the War of the Spanish Succession that was not purely the result of physics; even the thoughts that passed through the Duke of Marlborough’s heads appear, so far as anyone can tell, to be the products of physics. But a physically reductionist explanation of the War of the Spanish Succession would not make sense to us because it does not answer questions in the terms in which we’d like them answered. Why did the battle happen? What tactical errors led to all of those troops being crushed into the village at Blindheim? What were the political implications of the outcome? What were the military implications of the outcome?
In the same way, one cannot expect fully reductionist explanations of biological phenomena, but one doesn’t really want them. We are trying to answer questions like: “why was the body size of mammals constrained in the Cretaceous to nothing greater than fox-sized?” or “how do modifications to gene regulation alter phenotypes?” or “what did the creatures along the line of ancient synapsids leading to modern mammals look like?”
The processes by which biological evolution proceeds – undenied by the only biologist in ID with the slightest shred of credibility – involve things that actually happen and can be seen to happen. Show us “Mind” DOING something that can modify a lineage of biological organisms. Gravity exists. I can demonstrate it right now. ID by a mind not empirically known to exist, doing things nobody has ever seen it do, does not exist – or, at least, it is fair to say that there is no reason to suppose it does.
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God can get past the functional information and chicken and egg challenges.
That one can always substitute “God” for “mind” in ID arguments as to the role of mind in nature, serves to demonstrate that mind is, for all intents and purposes, identical with God.
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Indeed, and then there is this from Dembski, particularly apt since we are speaking with someone connected with Uncommon Descent:
“Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
I do find that while I can endure the accusations of having made a “straw man” argument, I think that when the accuser is basically the incarnate Logos of Worzel Gummidge, this carries reduced weight.
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but behe isnt creationist. he believe in ID with common descent as far as i aware. im talking about creation scientist. those believe that evolution is false. im pretty sure that they also think evolution isnt scientific.
you just mentioned one- the fact that no designer on earth can make a cat.
we can detect design in a car even if we never seen someone that made it. i never seen who designed my PC and i can still detect design when i see it.
i think that actually every one of them, sincne every one of them probably has a unique biological system that other dont have. so if you want to go from a fish to a panther you cant do that by small steps. as for the evidence for design: tell me first why you detect design in a PC and i will show you why it can apply to a living creature too.
On what standard are you basing this requirement?
A mind as you’ve described would render all life on earth except humans as mindless.