Re: [asa] evidence for design

Great point, Don. Efficiency is an important element of design for any
engineer. If you have great inefficiencies in a system but you are
claiming to detect design in it by analogy to engineered systems, then
you probably need another analogy.

On Feb 6, 2009, at 8:45 AM, Don Winterstein wrote:

> I think I understand what's going on here. Both you and Mike Gene
> see design where I and others see chaos. That's fine. As I've said
> many times, because of the outcome, I believe design is there even
> when I don't see it. It's just that your concept of design is very
> unconventional. For example, a human who intended to build a house
> would not spend years fiddling with the gravel that was to go into
> the concrete of the foundation. Anyone who did that would be
> regarded as peculiar at best, even if his house eventually turned
> out well.
>
> If God wanted to have oxygen in the atmosphere, he surely could have
> found a way to get it there more efficiently than by nurturing
> cyanobacteria for several billion years. And yes, conventional
> meanings of design do have a connection to efficiency. If someone
> were all-powerful and all-knowing and goal-oriented, conventional
> thinking would have him achieve his goal more rapidlly and
> efficiently. Otherwise, his degree of goal-orientation would be in
> question.
>
> You're too easy on God, altogether giving him a pass on speed and
> efficiency. For myself, I claim there are deeper reasons for all
> this.
>
> Don
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Schwarzwald
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 7:49 PM
> Subject: 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
> 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 Fri Feb 6 11:54:45 2009