Re: [asa] evidence for design

Heya Don,

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Don Winterstein <dfwinterstein@msn.com>wrote:

> ...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.
>

Life is not a game, but nature is certainly and strongly comparable to a
program. I'm not suggesting that God is literally a programmer (though I do
think it's a thought-provoking way of looking at the question), but if we're
going to talk about what design looks like, it's worth pointing out that not
all design is akin to the end product of a sculptor.

I have a feeling some of these questions you asked were rhetorical, but I'm
going to do my best to give my own meager thoughts nevertheless.

> What motive would you ascribe to an intelligent designer who
> designed almost all of his organisms so that they go extinct?
>

I'm assuming that here you're asking why species go extinct. I can come up
with multiple reasonable motives for a designer to do such a thing, but in
particular - why should I conclude that the only destiny a designer could
have for any species is to thrive and persevere for all time? Maybe they
were meant to contribute towards shaping and preparing the environment as a
whole either through the temporary niche they occupied, HGT, or otherwise.
Maybe their purposes weren't just in their temporary life, but in the
discoveries and information they would provide when humans arrived on the
scene. Maybe all of the above, and these possibilities are far from a
complete list.

> And why would he generate many avenues of development that turn out to be
> dead ends?
>

My response here would be similar to the question above, since talk of dead
ends seems to matter most in the context of extinction.

> And if his objective is humanity, why would he be fiddling around for
> billions of years with lower organisms that never amount to anything?
>

Never amount to anything? At that point we may as well ask why, even in
Genesis, God bothered with making anything but humans. Aren't all those
things really a distraction when you get right down to it? If we're supposed
to be center stage, why do we have to share that stage with platypii?

Either way, my perspective is that 'fiddling around' does no justice to the
history of life on this planet. Those billions of years passed with
organisms spreading about the entire planet, developing niches, growing and
changing, converging on 'solutions', and - if we want to think most purely
in terms of 'humans as the end goal' - setting the stage for the arrival of
humanity. A species that, keep in mind, even now continues to learn about
their existence, their features, their habitats, their traits - sometimes
being inspired to pragmatic application of what we learn, other times
stimulating imagination, still other times just plain producing knowledge
for us.

I don't see the validity of arguing that the past should have been
different, especially if one accepts the present - because there's no way to
change one without the other. Even if one can imagine the past playing out
differently and the present being 'different, but similar to now', that's a
bridge too far.

> 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.
>

 And I'd disagree across the board here. Your view seems to be that if
humanity were the goal of a designer, we should expect.. I don't know, some
utterly rapt, strictly ascendant, shorter evolutionary history? Say, OoL ->
Humanity in a billion years tops, development without extinctions or dead
ends, every animal and plant species that currently exists going through a
comparatively short evolution before being locked into a 'final form'? If
so, again, I disagree for a number of reasons. Partly because 'efficiency'
is more a concern for limited creatures than omnipotent (or even 'very
powerful') designers, partly because it's a mistake to view the purpose of
species purely in terms of 'do they thrive for all time', and more.

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.
>

I only have access to the same evidence you do - what differs is our
perspective and understanding of that evidence. I look at the development
and history of nature from the perspective of an amateur programmer - so for
me, the very processes of evolution, mutation, etc seem designed, flowing
along according to the rules of a program. Maybe absolutely everything that
has transpired was directly intended, down to the smallest minutae. Maybe
only larger developments (convergences, splitting into the larger varieties
of plant / mammal / lizard, the introduction of humanity) were directly
intended, with smaller events only mattering insofar as enabling those
larger events. Again, I refer to procedural content generation in
programming - even in that case, where we know humans are limited, and where
we can reasonably suspect that some specific outcomes seen in the program
were not precisely foreseen by the programmer, saying 'Well, clearly none of
this was designed' is still a tremendous mistake. And it strikes me as a
similar mistake when it comes to looking at what was generated in our own
past.

And, I see Mike Gene has thrown in his input - at a glance, I'd agree with
what he's saying, though his views on this matter are far more developed
than my own.

>
> Don
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Schwarzwald <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 22:49:56 2009