I’m waiting for version 10000 to come out – it’s supposed to be able to drone the litany as a (repeating) Gregorian Chant. 
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If I make the statement that there is no purpose for DNA the statement becomes nonsense. If I make a statement that there is no purpose for atoms again the statement makes no sense.
For even propaganda to have any weight among independently minded people it must at least make sense.
They are not nonsensical, no, they’re just sort of trivial. Of course a thing by itself has no purpose. Purpose is something an agent has for a thing, not something a thing has all by itself.
Purposes are relative and subjective, and without any subjects to have them, there wouldn’t be any. This is even true with raw materials agents use to make things out of: Just because a bird makes a nest out of twigs doesn’t mean twigs are base material for nests without any birds to use them thus. It’s true for tools, too: Just because one can use a rock to crack a nut doesn’t mean that rocks of that shape and size are all “supposed to be” nut crackers. And the clue is right in there in that expression: Someone needs to suppose them to be so. Nothing can be supposed to be anything all by itself, without anyone to do the supposing. How is this even a point of contention here?
With atoms and DNA it’s even worse, because unlike twigs and rocks, there are no agents we know of that actually make intentional use of them at all, and yet here you are, comfortably asserting that their purposefulness is so great as to transcend the need for intentionality altogether? Who died and made you king of making a lick of sense?
Would you say that the reason rocks accelerate when falling to the ground is because of how excited they are to reunite with their brethren down there, too? Does a train locomotive work by having a horse hidden inside after all? Grow up…
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I am amazed by how many people seem unable to grasp so elementary a concept. Purpose is an idea in our heads. Even for designed objects. We can have an idea about things, and multiple people can have conflicting ideas about the purpose of the same thing, and the same thing can be used very well for either, proving it is not intrinsic to the thing but simply a subjective notion to each person.
A screwdriver can be thought of by one person to be for screwing, and by another for stabbing, and for another as a bottle opener, and so on and so forth. And it’s good for all of them. Tools, weapons, food, construction materials, sex toys and on an don. Anything and everything can be intended by someone for X, and by another for Y. The intention is in their minds and nowhere else.
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By themselves they have no purpose is true. But as components of larger systems their purpose is significant. One, atoms, is the basic component of everything purposeful in the universe the other is a key component that is the basic information storage unit of life.
Richard Dawkins said that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.” he goes on to claim that inference is really the action of mutation and natural selection.
Now many people including evolutionary biologists question the power of mutation and natural selection to be the real agent.
You can assert that people that make the inference to an intelligent agent is wrong but it is a stretch to say it is not a reasonable inference based on the functional complexity of living organisms.
Nonsensical, not significant. Again, things do not have purposes. Agents have purposes for things.
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So if we infer something has a purpose by seeing it has a useful function a logical conclusion is there is an intelligent agent behind it.
Ok but we do not have direct evidence of the agent becomes the objection. Science does not operate under this restriction as it infers from the evidence.
It turns out ironically in this case that we do have other evidence of the agent.
I do not understand how one can infer literally meaningless gibberish like this. Things do not have purpose. That’s a definitional matter, not an empirical one. No amount of evidence can warrant an inference to the contrary. Recognizing a function and deeming it useful does not suddenly undo all the philosophical principles describing purposes and purposefulness.
Ex falso quod libet. If we re-define the language of purposes in such a way as to allow things to have any, we can conclude all manner of things. If two and two is seven, everything follows.
Not mine, no. My objection is not that you need an agent before you can say that a thing has a purpose. My objection is that you cannot say that a thing has a purpose, fullstop. An agent may have a purpose for a thing, and that’s a statement about the agent, not about the thing. And, indeed, if you have no evidence even for the existence of the agent, ascribing intentions to them is premature to put it mildly. Even if we had established the agent’s existence we’d still have most of our homework ahead of us proving what intentions they have for anything. But one thing at a time. It is this why I said that you were putting the cart and horse up backwards, but rather the cart miles ahead of the horse that shall pull it.
“Other” than none at all? That’d be new.
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Remember, folks. Bill just doesn’t get these things called “words”.
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This is an interesting comment and you maybe right that philosophy assigns purpose to agents only. Does this authority make this point beyond logical challenge in your mind?
I can infer purposeful design behind the bacterial flagellum. This is a falsifiable claim because if you show it evolving in a lab you have falsified my claim.
Methodological naturalism does not logically rule out the supernatural in this case as it is a falsifiable claim. Your point if true says philosophy and definition rule out claiming purpose for objects only agents does not appear to be consistent with science.
“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
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That’s false. If bacterial flagella are shown evolving in a lab, that’s not proof that no design was involved in their development either in that lab, or out in nature.
This is something I know you are sealioning about, because yours truly has most personally explained to you how it’s not enough to say you’d accept a falsification by some arbitrary criterion you made up. We would not trust fellow scientists, people whose entire livelihood are on stake often even over honest mistakes, let alone deliberate data manipulation, and we are certainly no more inclined to trust someone as dishonest as you to just keep your word like this.
No, in order for something to be an actual prediction, something one can actually hinge the veracity of a hypothesis on, it needs to logically follow from the hypothesis. Nothing about “purposeful design”[1] entails in any way whatsoever that bacterial flagella cannot evolve in a lab. So you just promising that you would consider “purposeful design” a falsified “inference”[2] if only some arbitrary challenge with no logical connection to said “inference” were met, would be untrustworthy even if it came from someone with a track-record of any integrity at all.
Or in any other case. Methodological naturalism is not a commitment to rule out any specific claims. It is a recognition that things that have no obligation to be even a little bit consistent some of the time, or abide by basic logical principles, are intellectually inaccessible.
No, it is not. For one, “the supernatural” is not a claim. “Purposeful design” is not a claim either. Something cannot be a falsifiable claim without being a claim first. Secondly, falsifiability is not about you pinky-promising that you’ll retract something if someone meets some arbitrary challenge. It is about whether it is conceivable that a logically necessary consequence of the claim should turn out to be false.
You know that this is what it means – at least the way most of us scientists use that terminology most of the time – because you were explained this multiple times, including by yours truly, and in this very thread at that. So your pinky-promise means all the less, because you make it in the middle of a grossly sealioning display of blatant dishonesty.
I much prefer asking what you mean by things when what you say doesn’t make sense. This, however, I am struggling to even parse on a linguistic level. Are you sure this is even an actual English sentence?
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Yet this is how scientists have been trying to falsify Behe’s claim. This has the same earmarks of your use of a definition of purpose to make your argument. People use the word purpose to signify a useful function all the time. This is how Mike Behe uses the word.
Defining words for the intent of ideological persuasion is a form of indoctrination. The word homology in biology is an example.
In biology, homology refers to the similarity in characteristics or features between different organisms that is due to their shared ancestry.
This conflation of purpose and function is pretty common in ID Creationist circles. Michael Behe’s always making this ridiculous jump, insisting that the hallmark of design is the purposeful arrangement of parts.
And that’s actually true, or mostly true, at least, if one literally means “purposeful.” Because the only way to show that an arrangement of parts is “purposeful” is to find an agent that arranged them and that had a purpose in doing so. As @Gisteron notes, the purpose does not belong to the things, or even to the arrangement, but to the one who does the arranging. So if we show that an intelligent agent arranged parts for a purpose, then yes, we’ve shown design, or something like it.
But Behe ignores the distinction between purpose and function. In practice what he means is that any functional arrangement of parts demonstrates design. But the only reason that a “purposeful” arrangement demonstrates design is that in order to conclude it was purposeful, we had to identify its designer and assembler. If we mean “functional” when we say “purposeful,” then our conclusion that something is “purposeful” no longer literally means it has a purpose, but only that it is functional, and obviously there is no design inference flowing therefrom.
But this has been explained again, and again, and again, not only to Bill but to loads of others. They seem to believe that “purpose” is something which can be intuitively judged purely on the basis of function, without any related knowledge that confirms that the object was purposefully designed.
I wish that I could say that this kind of asinine word-shuffling was uncommon; it’s not, especially within ID Creationism.
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Hi Puck
I agree you have good understanding here with a slight correction. When Behe talks about purpose he does not mean just function but function with a defined usefulness. He uses the word purpose in this case. In the case of the flagellum the usefulness or purpose is mobility.
Purpose is admittedly a loaded word with multiple definitions.
I would expect most scientists who study microbial motility have not the slightest idea of who Professor Behe is. Outside of ID, he is inconsequential. Few currently doing relevant lab work give a damn about falsifying his claims
Yes, but it is ID advocates who then shift that meaning to include agency. Pick a lane.
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Can you show a clear example where this is done by intent.
There are several papers trying to show evolutionary paths to the flagellum.
It is the core of your entire argument in this thread, which is that God is the agent for anything in nature that does something.
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I am not shifting the meaning to include agency. I am inferring agency from the observation.
So the “usefulness or purpose” is the same as the function? That’s cool, I can work with that.
That’s not been my experience with that word. Usually when people speak of purposes, they mean by it something an agent intends for a thing, not an inherent property of the thing itself. We can consult the dictionary about this, too, if you like, but I’d find that rather boring. If you want to say that by purposefulness you just mean functionality, that’s fine.
Much like I think things do not have purposes, but people have purposes for things, so I too believe that words do not mean things, but that people mean things by words. I am perfectly comfortable with agreeing with you on a custom, proprietary definition of purpose for the sake of this discussion.
Now, since atoms do not do arbitrary magical things willy-nilly, and since DNA does not do arbitrary magical things willy-nilly, we may say each of them function in some specific ways, they affect things in their environment in specific ways.
You call this purpose, but all you mean is function. Very well. So what about the fact that atoms and DNA abide by the laws of physics – and, by extension, chemistry – indicates to you that such a state of affairs used to not be the case at some point, or that an intelligence was involved in changing things from the ways they were before to the ways we know them now?
Yes, but your inference boils down to “Thing exists, therefore agency”, or “Thing behaves in some way but not in another, therefore agency”. Non sequitur does not even begin to express how vacuous this “argument” is. It is an “inference” only insofar as there is an implied “therefore” in there somewhere. As far as the actual substance of your case goes, you might as well be saying “Agency because I said so”, with no actual inference anywhere in sight.
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