Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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Do we have to know what the purpose is for a 20 ft, perfectly rectangular plane of 1? thick glass with uniform, beveled edges in order to discern that it is best explained by design? Must we know how it was made, or where it was found and in what environmental conditions?
Or, hey, what about large square columns? Surely the objects pictured below must have been designed:
The fact is that design must have evidence of rationality--or at least some sort of mark of intelligence--behind it, but even that has to be demonstrated, not merely assumed. That's why Dembski's "test" for design is circular, since after redefining the rationality of most simple human objects, and the apparent rationality of crystals, as "complex" in order to conflate life and design, he has to leave out crystals because they have "CSI," because they're known not to be designed.
Life, of course, simply is lacking in any sort of evident rationality behind its "design" (at least when studied, rather than stupidly assumed), which is what really is a great marker of design, yet which isn't sufficient to alone determine design. The spiel now is that there's all of this "information technology" in life, as if that's the clincher, but surely there would simply be no life without information systems at least nearly as complex as exist in life. More importantly, gee, just how much more evolvable are the information elements in life (genes, most notably) than in a designed system? Uh, hugely, sufficiently (at least insofar as we can judge), while there's no realistic chance at all that human-made information systems will start to evolve organically (mimicking evolution in silico does work, but merely reinforces the fact that life's information systems were analogized sufficiently in order to do so). It's just a great coincidence, or for microevolution--just mindless excuses ad nauseam.
Forethought is the one aspect of design that, if it were demonstrated, should actually indicate design. Apparent rationality is a good marker, but fails alone, mainly because natural processes can produce what rationality would in some cases. Neither, however, is demonstrable in life.
That's why Stephen Meyer tries to pull a fast one, by claiming that processes observed today must produce the results that we see. Clearly it's an intellectually dishonest endeavor (would any intellectually honest person draw upon Lyell's uniformitarianism today?), which also must ignore the vast differences between information systems in life--the evolvable ones--and those designed by us without copying natural evolution. You simply rule out the evolution of information systems because we didn't observe their evolution (and who cares that we evolved our information-manipulating abilities? Not IDiots, anyway), and default to design because we've designed information systems--and if you ignore all of the differences, notably evolvability, what's left are the similarities.
So, you can just observe an object and see that it's designed, unless, that is, it's a crystal or some such thing that wasn't designed and we know that because of all of the contextual information. Even if that fails us, well, information "technology" surely indicates design, because that simply redefines what makes life able to succeed at all as design, so if you can just fake that well enough, you've won by defining the terms.
The evolvability of life's information can be conveniently ignored, just as all of the evidence that life lacks the requisite forethought and rational shortcuts that would (at least one or the other) be necessary to legitimately infer design can be ignored.
Glen Davidson
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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