RE: [asa] evidence for design

This and a previous e-mail touch on an interesting point. Both at the
macroscopic level as you say, and also at the genetic level (pseudogenes,
replication errors, etc.), there is a good case to be made for lack of
design in the details of the process, even though the end result still fills
us with wonder and a sense that the outcome was intended. That is, it
perhaps appears undesigned *IF* design (via a supernatural Intelligent
Designer) is held to what we consider a reasonable standard of "good
design", which includes efficiency, elegance, and a clear direction of
"forward progress" in the development. Analogies are made with software
development at times, but in the "designed evolution" of software, each step
forward has a particular advancing or constantly improving purpose in mind.
Yes, human software does get convoluted with baggage code the cumbers down
the whole system, but one would hope that an Intelligent Designer would do
better than Microsoft.

The Intelligent Design movement seems to completely overlook the areas where
appearance of design is challenging, and instead focus on areas where there
is beauty, elegance, and a sense of awe at how such an entity could have
developed in the absence of design. This seems inconsistent at best.

I think this illustrates two problems with IDM. One, the assumption that
design must be what we limited humans consider to be "good design"; and two,
overlooking certain aspects of what appear to be "bad design"; which leads
to the unstated conclusion that some things must not have been designed
well. Thus the TE approach of giving God credit for providentially
directing the whole works instead of just some parts of it, seems to be a
more orthodox view than IDM, which seems to emphasize God's direction only
in some parts of it.

Nothing new here that hasn't already been said on this list, but I thought
it was interesting that both at the level of evolution of species and at the
genetic level, there is messiness that challenges the idea of an
interventionist design policy, and yet there is beauty and order in the
picture as a whole. In a similar comparison, nature seems to exhibit true
randomness both at the atomic level, the genetic level, and on large scales
(such as expressed in chaos theory). And yet, each of these systems, though
random in some details, exhibit a great propensity toward stability. Even
though each of these systems has their own laws and mechanisms which are
different from each other, it seems that these characteristics of
simultaneous randomness and stability are fundamental properties of the
"nature of nature" at many different levels.

It's also interesting that both the regularity and orderliness, and also the
opposing characteristic of randomness, have been used to rule out God.
Regularity seems to imply that nature could go on deterministically without
the need for God, and randomness seems to imply lack of purpose; at least
for those who don't wish to accept the implications of God's existence.
Obviously, theologies (or many of them) can deal with both of these in
different ways, without ruling out an active and purposeful God.

Jon Tandy

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Don Winterstein
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:16 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] evidence for design

...things which 'look haphazard' do not look undesigned to me, certainly in
the context of natural science. ... from an intellectual and philosophical
vantage point, life on earth looks shot through with design to me.

Life isn't a game. What motive would you ascribe to an intelligent designer
who designed almost all of his organisms so that they go extinct? And why
would he generate many avenues of development that turn out to be dead ends?
And if his objective is humanity, why would he be fiddling around for
billions of years with lower organisms that never amount to anything? The
individual organisms emerging can and do look designed, but the processes
that give rise to them don't. It's these processes that the designer
presumably is controlling. The evidence says either he doesn't know how to
control or he isn't able to. One would suppose an intelligent designer who
had the knowledge and power to control and who also had a well-defined
objective in mind would have generated life forms in a vastly more efficient
way.

Ultimately I'm arguing that, because the outcome is what it is, the whole
thing in some way was designed by an intelligent designer after all. But on
the basis of what I know about historical geology and paleontology, I claim
it is a humongous stretch to say there is evidence of intelligent design in
the way that organisms have emerged--until modern humanity. If you have
such evidence, please share.

Don

----- Original Message -----

From: Schwarzwald <mailto:schwarzwald@gmail.com>

To: asa@calvin.edu

Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 7:46 AM

Subject: Re: [asa] evidence for design

Heya Don,

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com>
wrote:

Even Dawkins will, if I recall right, admit to seeing 'illusions of design'
in nature.

More than that, many atheists and agnostics even have "religious
experiences." I recall reading such testimony years ago in the Skeptical
Inquirer: someone described such experience in detail and subsequently
dismissed the whole thing as illusion. Many atheists acknowledge that their
bodies and minds are primed to receive "spiritual illusions" along with
sensory illusions. They simply categorize such "illusions" as stemming from
human frailty and are careful to dismiss them. That's what I mean when I
say they suppress that side of themselves. They can't completely control
it, but if and when "illusions" come, they are careful to "recognize them
for what they are." In the end, they make their intellects dominate and see
only nature in nature.

Perhaps, and I'm sure there's something to be said for there being an
appropriate amount of skepticism even for christians. I'd put what they're
doing differently, I think - rationalizing, denying what's apparent and
often doing so without much thought or justification, or really giving
consideration to what's entailed by what they deny. But, again, it seems
like that's a point where we diverge.
 

 ...The universe, for whatever reason, just happens to spit out rational
minds and illusions of design left and right.

There's a difference between mere design and design that requires an
intelligent designer. Plant parts, animal parts and whole plants and
animals often display various symmetries. Think of many kinds of flowers.
And crystals are known for their symmetries. Such designs most of the time
(excepting crystals here) can be readily ascribed to evolutionary processes.
Microscopic things like bacterial flagella are admittedly much harder to
explain, if it's even possible. But as I pointed out before, on the largest
evolutionary scale, the emergence of the various organisms as seen in the
fossil record seems utterly haphazard in the sense of being unguided by any
force except nature. The observed sequences of organisms beg the question
of why an intelligent being who had any degree of control over what was
going on would choose to bring organisms into the world so haphazardly. If
at this largest scale, the scale that presumablly would be most important
for an intelligent designer, we see only apparent randomness, an implication
is that examples of order and design at lesser scales are only apparent and
do not witness to an intelligent designer. As Dawkins has pointed out,
evolution is what makes atheism respectable (or whatever it was he said
along those lines).

And this is where I would disagree strongly. The typical way I see this
explained is with snowflakes - 'every snowflake is unique, and they have
noticeable patterns - some of them very beautiful. But we know the various
natural processes involved in making each and every snowflake, so therefore
snowflakes aren't designed.' One problem I have with this comes from some
meager programming experience - procedural content generation being a
particularly good example. I can name probably a dozen or more (at the
least) games where content is generated on the fly. But it would be a
tremendous mistake to, say, play one of these games and go 'Well, this stuff
is generated according to these algorithms which the programmer has no
direct control over, therefore it was not designed.' Even in the case of the
programmer, what you're playing with is the result of a designed program -
the specific outcomes may be of surprise to a mere human programmer, but
quite a lot of the content and what you experience would be part of a plan.
That before realizing that some content can be 'guaranteed' to show up mixed
in with the rest of what's procedurally generated. Saying 'Well, a natural
(or evolutionary) process did this, therefore there is no design' strikes me
as equivalent to saying 'Well, a procedural content-generating algorithm did
this, therefore no programmer'.

So no, I disagree sharply with Dawkins on this point - and certainly with
the conclusion that nothing (or few things) in nature looks designed
'because natural processes (which themselves, in my view, positively reek of
design - before looking at the specific organisms and micro-organisms) can
explain what we see'. It's akin to explaining away programmers because,
really, computers alone can explain software. In my view - and admittedly,
it's probably too strong for some - evolution made atheism intellectually
respectable only by comparison with YEC (or outright denials of any
substantial evolution), and only with the assumption that if YEC is not true
that no God exists. There's a reason why atheists almost exclusively promote
atheism indirectly (by attacking/insisting on skepticism of claims of
religion(s)) rather than positively offering up atheistic explanations for
the universe. Not just because said offering is emotionally undesirable, but
because it would sound more ridiculous than the most ancient, myth-laden
religion.

But still, my main point here is that things which 'look haphazard' do not
look undesigned to me, certainly in the context of natural science. Again,
we may just end up disagreeing here, but from an intellectual and
philosophical vantage point, life on earth looks shot through with design to
me. I don't rule out a designer just because natural forces may have been in
use, anymore than I rule out toy designers just because every GI Joe I've
ever come across was assembled by an unthinking machine.
 

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Received on Thu Feb 5 18:52:22 2009