Fwd: Identity of the Designer: was:Re: [asa] Responding to Atheists, Agnostics & Apatheist

oops , meant to send this to the list and not just to Mike Gene.

Iain

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 6:12 PM
Subject: Re: Identity of the Designer: was:Re: [asa] Responding to
Atheists, Agnostics & Apatheist
To: Nucacids <nucacids@wowway.com>

On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 3:26 AM, Nucacids <nucacids@wowway.com> wrote:
> Hi Iain,
>
>
>
> You wrote, "Although I agree with you that it is intellectually honest not
> to
>
> plump for an identity of the Designer, nonetheless …"
>
>
>
> But I'd like to stop here for a moment, as this *was* my point. The same
> goes with David, who writes, "I have two problems with ID's inability to
> identify a particular designer. I firmly agree that ID-type evidence would
> not indicate a particular designer. However…"
>
>
>
> I'd be happy to take a shot at the nonethelesses and howevers in a bit, but
> I was merely objecting to the notion that IDers will not identify the
> designer because it's just a sneaky political tactic. That's a talking
> point. It may indeed be a political tactic for many in the ID movement, but
> it is also an intellectually honest and responsible thing to do. I'm glad
> we all seem to see this.
>
>

Yes, we're agreed on that point, Mike. But I have further problems,
which I tried to explore (without much success) in my postings to
Timaeus, concerning the UEM (Universal Explanatory Mechanism).

I maintain that a Designer (of sufficient intelligence, with
unspecified limits on that intelligence) is a universal explainer of
phenomena. The proposal of a Designer can "explain" just about
anything away. If the Designer is God, then He has infinite
intelligence and capability, by definition. If however, the proposed
designer is an ETI, then one still has not specified a limit on the
intelligence - the ETI is assumed to be sufficiently intelligent to
design us.

But I would suggest that evolution is also a Universal Explainer (if
the "explanation" is just given that "it evolved"). Dawkins et al
usually get round the improbability by invoking the massive timescales
involved - and here the analog of "sufficiently intelligent" would be
"sufficiently long" and it is assumed that the billions of years
timescale is sufficiently long. Of course there is much debate about
this, and whether irreducible complexity and so forth means the
billions of years are sufficiently long or not.

But there is a further Universal Explainer that could be appealed to -
science we haven't yet discovered. Maybe we shall uncover different
mechanisms of whereby evolution occurs that are more powerful than
straight random mutation (many of these are discussed in "Darwin in
the Genome" by Lynn Caporale).

There again, the multiverse has been invoked as a Universal Explainer
(Multiversal explainer?) - many universes in which our one, though
exceedingly unlikely, is one of the ones that got lucky.

And again, there is just plain old coincidence.

Now, here is the crux of my argument. As you say the identity of the
Designer should not be specified, as a matter of intellectual honesty.
 But should it not be the case that any other UEM likewise should not
be excluded either? How do you tell the difference, for example,
between a Multiverse and Design? In particular the Everettian
Many-Worlds multiverse explanation allows for ANYTHING to happen. Or
how do we know that one of the fascinating mechanisms discussed in
"Darwin and the genome - strategies for molecular evolution" is not
the true designer?

I would have said that if one is to be completely intellectually
honest then one has to include all of these different UEM's (
Designer, Coincidence, Multiverse, Evolution - with some new
mechanisms we haven't yet discovered) into the potential set of final
explanations. What do you think?

Iain

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