Re: [asa] evidence for design

Hi Don,

"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."

Not quite. I can see the chaos just as much as you and others do. I can see the world exactly as Richard Dawkins does and it does not cause me to recoil. But I am also able to see the growing shadows of design. I see both. I choose to explore these shadows because a) they fascinate me; b) they stimulate me; c) they lead me to think in completely novel ways; d) they are beginning to pay off; and e) I'm the type that enjoys the road least traveled. Not to mention that if it was the 1950s, I would probably agree the chaos crowded out design. But things have changed.

"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."

As it should be. If life was indeed designed, it is reasonable to assume the designer, whether ETI or God, was a far superior designer compared to us. Put simply, we would be in the position of trying to use our own primitive designs as a tool to detect/understand far superior designs.

"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."

Sure, because such a method is wasteful - when time, money, and supplies are limited, efficiency becomes important. But life, and evolution, is not limited like this. There was no deadline to evolve metazoan life (or even human life if one wants to speculate that far out) and thanks to the sun and the amazing carbon-based nanotech devices we call 'bacteria', energy and supplies are effectively unlimited.

"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."

How do you know this? Unless you can come up with a specific mechanism that can be compared to one form of carbon-based nanotechnology we call 'cyanobacteria,' I can't really take this statement seriously.

If you want to come up with a more efficient mechanism, consider what you are up against.

1. Cyanobacteria are incredibly efficient in the sense that they don't require constant intervention by the designer. On the contrary, the system is so robust and resilient that it has remained largely unchanged and successful for BILLIONS of years. If you are going to design a better means of pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, it would also have to match cyanobacteria in terms of robustness. After all, if your method failed at some point over a 2-3 billion history, the whole ecosystem would collapse in a geologic blink of the eye. And if it needed continual supervision and maintainance, it would look very efficient to me.

2. Cynaobacteria are also efficient in the sense that they solve two key problems at the same time. Not only do they pump O2 into the atmosphere, but the same process that does this (photosynthesis) is the key engine of the carbon cycle. Put simply, cyanobacteria ultimately provide us with two basic ingredients to life - AIR and FOOD. Will your oxygen-generating mechanism simultaneously create a steady stream of food?

3. Cyanobacteria could also fulfill another design objective - they became the chloroplasts which opened the door for the appearance of plants (more FOOD!). And with plants come trees and with trees come wood. With wood comes FIRE and SHELTER.

So what we have in cyanobacteria is a mind-boggling level of efficiency. The very same nano-scale process, that has not failed or required intervention after billions of years, is ultimately at the root of generating the essentials of human life - AIR, FOOD, SHELTER, and even FIRE. And you can fit this multifunctional process inside a device (called cyanobacteria) that is so small that one million of these things can fit into a single milliliter of water. Are you sure you have some more efficient mechanism that can generate these same multiple outputs and is immune from failure?

- Mike Gene

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Don Winterstein
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 11:45 AM
  Subject: Re: [asa] evidence for design

  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 21:04:30 2009