Side Comments: Is there really information being conveyed within a cell?

An analogy is a different argument than the three step logic you guys are trying to base your objection on.

No, itā€™s your implicit auxiliary premise mentioned above:

How is it implicit?

Once again my prediction is borne out. Iā€™m done here.

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Your logic depends on designed vs not designed instead of a design inference. As the function gets more challenging the design inference gets stronger and the likely hood of the premise being true increases.

Most people can readily distinguish between natural and artificial. It is pretty much only ID advocates who find that confusing.

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Hi Ron
What is your comment on this video as evidence for design in nature?

No, I do not.

No, I would not.

Iā€™m happy to give you this for free, because it is utterly meaningless. What is actually true is not a democracy. Whether something is, as a matter of fact, designed or not, in no way whatsoever depends on how few or how many peopleā€™s guts tell them it must be.

Good for you. I do not see any such thing. The idea of an ā€œunbiased human intuitionā€ is completely alien to me. I do not know of how to even begin conceiving of such a thing, let alone of it coming up with things.

No clue. For one, in the slide rule example you were talking about the strength of a design inference, not of a design detection. Are they the same thing? I donā€™t know. You didnā€™t say. You said nothing about what these things even are, which brings me to the second reason I say I have no clue here: I am completely unfamiliar with either term. I would not claim that a slide rule has the same strength of a design inference as an electronic calculator, because I do not know what a strength of a design inference is, or how to compare two of them enough to be able to say they are the same. Likewise, I cannot say which has the stronger design detection between a log floating on the water or a bird flying out of the nest to fetch food for its chicks, because I do not know what a design detection is or how to measure its strength in order to compare the two.

Of things that are designed we know that they are usually because the process by which people make them is at least partly known to not be a process that we can expect to occur without human intervention. Things we intuit to be designed beyond that distinguish themselves from things we have no such feelings about precisely when we have no familiarity with things quite like it coming about without human intervention. Needless to say, we err all the time intuiting such things, because there is no limit to the complexity a natural process can have, and merely our subjective ignorance of one or more of them of course does not entail that intelligent intervention must have been at play for any instance of a thing we wouldnā€™t know how to explain without appealing to any.

With that in mind, a phrase like ā€œdesign in natureā€ sounds like an outright oxymoron. Designed things are artificial things. The one thing by which we tell them from non-designed ones is that they do not occur naturally.

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Your point remain unclear. Are you claiming that, between the electronic pocket calculator and the slide rule, the ā€œdesign inferenceā€ is stronger for one of the two compared to the other?

Before you answer that, however, I would prefer you answer my earlier question:

I always find it baffling that ID proponents never seem to know how humans recognize things. In all my years of discussing and debating ID, I canā€™t recall if Iā€™ve ever met an ID proponent who could describe how humans recognize and distinguish artificial and natural objects.

I also believe that when ID proponents claim to be recognizing design in living things (such as Billā€™s example re: birds and flight), itā€™s just a case of apophenia. Especially when resorting to emotive language when describing what they are recognizing (again, Bill describing flight as ā€œremarkableā€).

That goes back to Paley. He did not realize that the very fact that he could distinguish the watch from the heath that surrounded it refuted his argument before he even started making it.

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Why are you beating a dead horse?

Because the dead horse refuses to stop posting?

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The horse is the logic chain that I admitted is wrong. The argument is based on design being a black and white argument ie designed or not designed. It is not and that is why you are struggling to do anything but make ā€œdesign argument is badā€ assertions.

And the dead horse not only keeps posting, he keeps posting word salad.

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I didnā€™t realize you had admitted it was wrong. In all honesty, I donā€™t think that is my fault, since you continue to use the same ā€œlogicā€ in making your case.

Hi Faizal

The logic changes when you do not make the design argument black and white. Ron pointed out the problem by showing an exception. The design argument is not black and white. Inferring design is less difficult depending on the function. In the case Ron made, a floating object is harder to infer design than a bird that demonstrates purposeful flight.

Letā€™s take your example.

If item number 4 was most flying animal are birds and your conclusion is ducks are most likely birds this would be a reasonable inference.

I would guess that flying insects far outnumber birds.

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The ID argument seems to me to be this:

  • Item X is far more complex than anything we have seen designed or know how to design.
  • Therefore item X must be designed.

To me this makes no sense at all.

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To be clear, are you telling us youā€™d have a harder time recognizing, say, a motor boat or a canoe as a designed object, versus something like an airplane or a helicopter?