The Extra Face in Mount Rushmore

Yet ID advocates (not necessarily you Dr.) seem to have no interest in investigating the how it was made aspect of their claimed designed life. Strange.

Yep.

That’s why the subjective “this looks designed to me” doesn’t work.

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I think this is because they already know this isn’t possible. That the intelligence is immaterial and it’s methods are outside the reach of the science we can do here on earth. Same reason they aren’t going on archaeological expeditions in the Cambrian. Because surely a being capable of creating all those phyla would leave some of his/her materials behind. But they already know the answer beforehand and know that that would be a waste of time and money.

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One of my favorites is a portrait of Lenin that appeared on a shower curtain:

image

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Ha! Never seen that one before

Is that Marilyn Monroe?

Rumor is it’s supposed to be the Virgin Mary. On a grilled cheese sandwich. A casino in Vegas actually paid $28K for it (!) and has it on display.

Maybe I’m not in the right line of work. :frowning_face:

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Maybe, it’s because Eastern Orthodox iconography portrays Mary differently than Roman Catholic church but I don’t see it.

And, yeah, definitely.

Perhaps, but I am not so sure…

@Agauger, this seems like a valid complaint. It seems that we could only determine if the face was designed if it showed tell tale artifacts of human design. Without seeing these tell tale signs, a human could have still done it (perhaps by choosing the right mountain and placing the other heads just so), but we would never know from evidence (unless of course we found diary that told us so).

Here is the problem though. There are no tell tale artifacts of human design in biological systems. So how do we determine if it designed? Honestly, the complexity we see in biology looks far more like Everest or Rushmore’s Fifth Face, than the presidential busts.

Finally, it does seems we have to know something about how design happens in order to detect it. Failing some model of design, we can’t really tell.

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Perhaps, but that isn’t what it shows me. Why not summarize the main argument?

@Patrick
Just to be clear, this particular artifact is disputed. And I wasn’t talking about faces. And I didn’t say it would always be decisive one way or another. You just go and look.

@T.j_Runyon
Thanks for your good sense. I suspect @Timothy also knows there is no way his “project” would work. The designer, as you point out , is unlikely to have manufactured new phyla in a factory and then left it on the bottom of the sea floor for us to find. @Timothy just likes to poke us.

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I know. That’s why I chose it. I wanted to hear what you thought about. It looks like a rock to me.

@swamidass
I think we are finally in a position to begin to answer some of these questions. We are accumulating enough depth of genomic and phylogenetic data to begin to get a read on the diversity and relatedness that is out there. Rather than look at individual molecules or pathways we need to look at the patterns.

Out of nowhere the mind comes forth.
—the Diamond Sutra

You determined that is unlikely exactly…how? You seem quite fond of telling us what the Designer would and wouldn’t do yet you can’t say from where you get this “insider” confidential information. BTW isn’t your sea floor scenario above exactly what Stephen Meyer has been pitching the last few years with the “designed” Cambrian fauna?

Not poking, just asking critical questions to test your ID position. The same sort of questions you’d get if you submitted your claims for publication in a peer-reviewed science journal. So far the inability for ID to answer is rather telling.

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Okay; I’ll bite into your analogy.

Analogously, mind you --don’t we have just such a “diary entry” in Genesis 1, and another reference to the same in John, chapter one? : )

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@Timothy there are ways of asking questions that don’t involve pokes. Study T aquaticus for examples. How do I know the designer didn’t use factories on the seafloor? Because factories don’t work very well with molecules. And everything we see around us is made of molecules. The kind of factory I had in mind was working with metal and wire and plastic and other formed objects like that. Now if you come at me and say that chemical engineers use factories to manufacture molecules I will respond by saying they don’t make the kinds of molecules that are necessary to make cells. Not in the kinds of quantities and complexities that are required. Then if you say the intelligent designer could of course do that. I will say oh. Show me.

Then why should we believe in intelligent design? I mean our best minds can’t do these things. So why should this intelligence be able to? If this leads to positing a super intelligence, then why couldn’t he/she/it use a factory like a chemical engineer to manufacture the necessary molecules?

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Well, then wouldn’t you have to show the intelligence you are positing can create and design objects out of thin air without prexisting materials?

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How do you know what sort of factories or production machinery the Designed used? Or what their capabilities are? Once again you are telling us what the Designer could and could not do based on your own intuition. That’s what I keep pointing out to you. You are building your Designer case on a foundation of unsupported assertions.

Sorry, you have it backwards. You’re the one claiming the Designer manufactured life, the onus is on you to show us how.

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