If God did design cars they would be a totally different design from ours. Perhaps He designed horses to function like a car? Since we can’t know the mind of God how are we supposed to decide exactly how He would design anything?
If God did design cars they would be a totally different design from ours.
I guess I should discuss what I see as the problem: If we reject Deism, then God is causally connected to every event that occurs in creation. That would seem to include our minds and thoughts and actions. So we think and design and create things, only because God is enabling our thinking, designing, and creating. An analogy might be our holding the hand of our child as she draws shapes with her crayon on the paper. She draws because we draw. So if we design cars, is it because God is “holding our hand,” so to speak, in a similar way?
Since we can’t know the mind of God how are we supposed to decide exactly how He would design anything?
Good question. This is one of the reasons ID does not insist that the designer is God. It says that there is reasonable evidence that somebody designed certains things in living organisms. It does not insist that God did it. However, we can make hypotheses about the designer. For example, if God designed the vertebrate eye, then it seems there should be a good explanation for the “backward” wiring of the retina. Backward Wiring of Eye Retina Confirmed as Optimal – CEH
Have you ever read Stephen Meyer’s “signature in the Cell”? He addresses the question you”re speaking of pretty focused in the discussion, as I recall.
He takes a look at the raw information content necessary in the first organisms’ database (in particular, in the first life).
The question he addresses there involves the sheer magnitude of very specific data that must be arranged in a particular order in order to get a functioning, reproducing system, and also examines competing hypotheses to weigh if any blind or mechanistic process could as adequately explain the design and specific information necessary to originate life.
It is somewhat analogous to how SETI could detect purposeful, intelligent design in radio waves (such as in Contact, hence why I mention it).
I read Signature when it first came out. I’m trying to remember if Meyer tried to argue that the designer had to be God.
He emphatically did not. And this because his examination asked only what is empirically detectable. Just like in SETI, we can examine radio signals and determine that there is intelligence rather than being the result of natural processes, but from the signals themselves, we could not make any supposition about the specific identity or qualities of the transmitters - only that they possessed some level of purposeful intelligence.
I think he has gone so far as to say that the intelligent design hypothesis is clearly consistent with Christian theism, But he did not and would not say that intelligent design in nature proves the Christian God.
As I have already said:
When you look at what the designer has accomplished the only options are God or aliens. If you want to say ID is only response for first life and then evolution took over from there that would make the aliens a little more likely.
I think he has gone so far as to say that the intelligent design hypothesis is clearly consistent with Christian theism, But he did not and would not say that intelligent design in nature proves the Christian God.
That’s kinda how I remember his book.
When you look at what the designer has accomplished the only options are God or aliens. If you want to say ID is only response for first life and then evolution took over from there that would make the aliens a little more likely.
Or angels, or demons, or time travellers. Or Plato’s Demiurge. Or we could say that there is some sort of teleological force inherent in nature that is either pushing toward or being pulled toward new designs.
Natural selection in other words.
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No. Natural selection merely selects whatever survives long enough to reproduce. It doesn’t produce new designs. This would need to be something else.
How do you know this? Other than that is just your belief.
Natural selection takes an existing design and makes a minor tweak. Each minor tweak improves upon the earlier design. Enough minor tweaks and you end up with something that doesn’t look the same any more.
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Natural selection isn’t what makes the tweak. It selects the tweak. Neo-Darwinism would say that random mutation makes the tweak. Assuming that Behe has made a reasonable case (and it appears to me that he has), then I think we should have a healthy dose of skepticism regarding neo-Darwinism.
That’s not relevant. Natural selection scrutinizes variation (the source is unimportant) and acts ratchet-like to move the selected things (whatever they are) closer to some local optimum (of function or whatever). This is clearly a directional process and can’t be distinguished, empirically, from a mindful design process. I think that was @Bill_II’s point, and it’s irrefutable.
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Natural selection acting upon random mutation is a blind process. It selects whatever will survive to reproduce. But it is not directed towards constructing new binding sites, let alone new multi-protein molecular machines. If there are enough trials, it will occasionally get lucky and create a new binding site. But in his latest book, Darwin Devolves, I think Behe argued persuasively that Darwinian evolution will more often work by breaking or damaging genes. That’s not a direction that is likely to produce the molecular machines used by living organisms.
The questi9on is not did God arrange for evolution to create fins out of paws. The question is “Did God create a way that mammals to transition from land to the ocean?” Clearly God did. God created the land and the oceans to form the ecology of the earth. God created mammals on the land and enables them to also hive in the oceans. It is that simple, but of course it is not simple enough to happen by accident.
If all it required genetically was the breaking or damaging of genes, then maybe it did happen “by accident,” by which I would mean natural selection acting upon random mutations.
Thanks for sharing his summary. This quote is particularly striking to me:
Design theories can allow conceptual space for gaps in the course of nature.
As a scientist, I don’t even quite know how to respond to that statement… In part I want to chalk it up to the types of statements that can appear when philosophers write about what scientists actually do and how we learn things about nature. In another sense, it characterizes a lot of Christian thinking about science in that unapologetically glorifies the god of the gaps. It basically says, ‘cdesign proponentists have a superior ability to understand the natural world because they consider the possibility that gaps are there due to the activity of the god of their choosing unlike those other scientists.’
I am thankful there are many Christian scientists who don’t ascribe to such nonsense that generally all tend to fall into the evolutionary creation tent interestingly enough.
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The least you could do is quote Ratzsch’s explanation of why he thinks that would be an advantage:
“Being open to design offers a further possible scientific benefit.36 Design theories can allow conceptual space for gaps in the course of nature. There may or may not actually be such gaps (that is an empirical question, and design as such cuts neither way here), but (paralleling an earlier point) if there are gaps, then any science which denies their existence will of necessity be either incomplete (offering no relevant explanation of some aspects of the phenome- non in question) or mistaken (offering a full, gapless explanation where a gap in fact does exist).”
I think it is understandable to have mistaken Del for a gap-loving design shill, but he’s not. I don’t believe in gods, and I think Del and others are wrong to claim that design requires a designer, but his essay still rings mostly true to me as a reasoned response to many of the more simplistic responses to design thought. Notice that he actually wrote about design, something almost completely absent from the blabbering of the ID movement today. He was my colleague for 10 years, and I learned a lot from him.
What do you think of his explanation of counterflow and how that can’t be used to detect design in nature? Personally, I like the all-too-brief treatment of cognitive resonance, and I think the Martian bulldozer is a perfect thought experiment to show that it is not necessary to know of, or even be able to guess at, the identity of a designer to recognize design. The only difference between Ratzsch and me at that point is that I follow Dennett in adding that the design that we can see need not come from an intelligence at all, because the ingredients in design (which we can summarize as “reasons” and are analogous to “function” or a weak sense of “purpose”) can be free-floating, discoverable by evolution.
I haven’t read it yet. Do you think he dealt persuasively with epistasis? How did he address or discuss new research into de novo gene birth? Did he choose some examples of positive selection, perhaps from examples of putative selective sweeps, and apply his reasoning to those? Does the book mention critiques by subject matter experts, or cite any communication from his attendance at conferences? I’m not sure when I’ll read the book (the reviews by knowledgeable scientists indicate that, like his previous work, it has almost no technical merit), so I’ll be curious to know your thoughts on these questions.