Hi Don,
"Why should intervention by the designer be undesirable?"
Because the criticism of inefficiency is a 'bad design' argument and I am attempting to get folks to understand that determining whether or not design is good or bad will involve several parameters. If we were to extrapolate the trends in good human design - autonomy, robustness, miniaturization, and multifunctionality - they would converge on something like cyanobacteria.
"Among humans, if a designer has a goal, he usually wants to attain it expeditiously. If a bit of intervention would cut a few billion years off the elapsed time, why would that be so bad?"
But why would it be so good? You'd have to demonstrate the importance of a deadline for this argument to have any teeth.
"If you allow an all-powerful, all-knowing designer to intervene, there are a great many ways he could generate atmospheric oxygen--and food."
Then again, one might argue that an all-knowing designer would be able to design in ways that would not call for later interventions. Charles Babbage pointed this out:
"Many excellent and religious persons not deeply versed in what they mistakenly call "human knowledge" but which is in truth the interpretation of those laws that God himself has impressed on his creation, have endeavoured to discover proofs of design in a multitude of apparent adaptations of means to ends, and have represented the Deity as perpetually interfering, to alter for a time the laws he had previously ordained; thus by implication denying to him the possession of that foresight which is the highest attribute of omnipotence."
"I'm speaking in a framework where it is assumed that (1) God is all-powerful, (2) he knows everything, (3) he has a goal. The problem is, given these three--which most Christians accept, why didn't he make the world in just a few 24 h days say, 10 000 years ago, as Genesis 1 seems to say?"
Why didn't he make the world in just a few millseconds say, 1000 years ago?
I think it is a mistake to employ this framework to detect design. To detect design, we all rely on our subjective experience as human designers and our objective experience with other human designs. We do not have such experience with an all-powerful, all-knowing designer, thus we are on very shaky ground in relying on your framework.
"Instead, we see the biotic world coming into existence very slowly, haphazardly, inefficiently."
Slow is not a problem. Inefficiency is a matter of perspective. As for haphazard, the new science of evo-devo is making evolution look much less haphazard as it was once believed to be. I touch on this here:
http://designmatrix.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/evo-devo-fits-comfortably-with-front-loading/
"What you mean by evidence for design seems to be that the biotic world doesn't fail but continues plugging along. You can cite all kinds of details to highlight the wonders of its development and claim they show intelligent design, but in the end it is "designed" simply because it doesn't fail. If the development processes of the biotic world were designed, then we can say that the designer designed them in such a way that, by human standards, they don't apppear to have been designed at all."
No, I am not arguing that lack of failure is evidence of design. I am simply responding to the claim that inefficiency is evidence against design. Yes, inefficiency counts against design, but there are also other factors to weigh if we are to make a judgment of bad design. The inefficiency of using cyanobacteria as judged by the metric of time should be balanced with the efficiency of using cyanobacteria in that they a) accomplish multiple crucial objectives b) without the need for continual redesign by the designer.
"That is, humans expect a competent person to progress straightforwardly and efficiently towards his goal and not, for example, to go down multitudes of blind alleys that he should have been able to foresee."
But what are the blind alleys? Can we be sure they are really blind alleys? If one of those blind alleys was removed, can we be sure this would not have a serious consequential effect on the other alleys?
I think this gets to a larger misconception about design. We tend to think of distinct objects when thinking of design, like flagella or humans. But what if the design objective is larger - a biosphere? For example, humans could never exist on a sterile planet. Humans exist because they are deeply plugged in to the rest of the living world. To design humans, you'd have to make sure many other life forms were in place - life forms that led to humans and life forms that maintain the existence of humans.
"So your definition of design (as I understand it) is indeed unconventional by normal human standards."
Well, I am not claiming that humans designed the first life forms.
Mike Gene
"Cyanobacteria are incredibly efficient in the sense that they don't require constant intervention by the designer."
Why should intervention by the designer be undesirable? Among humans, if a designer has a goal, he usually wants to attain it expeditiously. If a bit of intervention would cut a few billion years off the elapsed time, why would that be so bad? If you allow an all-powerful, all-knowing designer to intervene, there are a great many ways he could generate atmospheric oxygen--and food.
I'm speaking in a framework where it is assumed that (1) God is all-powerful, (2) he knows everything, (3) he has a goal. The problem is, given these three--which most Christians accept, why didn't he make the world in just a few 24 h days say, 10 000 years ago, as Genesis 1 seems to say?
Instead, we see the biotic world coming into existence very slowly, haphazardly, inefficiently. To all appearances it's as if the world for unknown reasons happens to be suited for life at the start, but the biotic part of it develops on its own, without outside guidance.
What you mean by evidence for design seems to be that the biotic world doesn't fail but continues plugging along. You can cite all kinds of details to highlight the wonders of its development and claim they show intelligent design, but in the end it is "designed" simply because it doesn't fail. If the development processes of the biotic world were designed, then we can say that the designer designed them in such a way that, by human standards, they don't apppear to have been designed at all.
That is, humans expect a competent person to progress straightforwardly and efficiently towards his goal and not, for example, to go down multitudes of blind alleys that he should have been able to foresee.
So your definition of design (as I understand it) is indeed unconventional by normal human standards.
Actually, in the end I don't think we're very far apart, because I believe the outcome observable in our day proves the biotic world was designed. That means the development processes were also in some sense designed--although this design could have been supplemented multiple times along the way by divine intervention.
I believe God in some way gave life forms freedom to develop largely on their own. By "on their own" I mean in accord with laws built into matter itself. I see this freedom as essential to the kinds of creatures God ultimately desired, and we ourselves now possess this freedom.
Don
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
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sat Feb 14 11:45:16 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Feb 14 2009 - 11:45:16 EST