One additional observation… I think you are trying to utilize Occam’s razor in this argument, preferring the less complicated solution in preference to the simpler and more straightforward one. Firstly, it is important remember that this principle, while a useful tool in general, is hardly anything like a logical proof. in many cases, the more complex and convoluted explanation will ultimately be the correct explanation.
But more significantly, I fear you have unwittingly made the position you are arguing against appear more convoluted than it is by suggesting it would require all manner of additional questions. This is fallacious, and ultimately quite absurd. one could do that to make any argument or position regarding intelligent agency appear more complicated than it is…
For instance, one could take the basic structure of your argument and argue against God’s existence on similar grounds… “You Christians claim God became incarnate in the first century because God wanted to… which of course makes us ask why? or why stop there? why not become incarnate in every century since then? or why not before then? why not appear in my back yard the same way he did to Moses in the burning bush, or speak audibly from heaven more often? And of course we don’t have answers to any of those questions, And we don’t need answers to any of those questions on the atheist explanation. It is much simpler and straightforward.”
Making an opponent’s position appear more complicated than it is by suggesting it raises all manner of additional questions is fallacious, I’m afraid.
Good and insightful question… I iindeed don’t think one should utilize the, “well, why would the designer have done it this way”, or the “if I were God, i would have simply put a bird’s wing into a bat…” argument. I do think we would all do much better without such argumentation.
However, once that argument has been made by someone else, I feel at liberty to critique it from the inside, so to speak, based on the argument that they raised and utilizing the parameters and assumptions that they have made. A form of the, “OK, assuming what you claimed here, let’s assume it is true for the sake of the argument and see if it holds water” line of discussion.
And thus, granting my opponent’s claim for the sake of the argument that “Surely a designer would not have simply modified an existing mammalian limb if he wanted a mammal to fly… surely he would have wholesale imported a bird’s wing” argument…" Once that argument has been made, I feel at liberty to “critique it from the inside” so to speak… i feel at liberty to respond to that by pointing out all the reasons that, if we humans were the designer (which we’re not), it may well indeed still make sense to modify a mammalian limb into a wing rather than try to import a bird’s wing onto a mammal.
Thus I would be arguing on two lines simultaneously:
It is indeed problematic to critique ID or the like on the basis of “Well, why didn’t God just import a bird’s wing onto a mammal.”
Even granting that line of reasoning for the sake of the argument, the argument remains vacuous, considering that even a human designer would likely have had rather obvious reasons for not importing a bird’s wing onto a mammal.
Roger A. Sawtelle,
Please can you explain how God ‘guides evolution’ via natural selection while at the same time leaving natural selection inviolate of divine intervention?
I submit this is erroneous. If Moses was able to read the letters on the tablets of the law that God had carved, then the existence of design on those tablets was clear and obvious and was in fact demonstrated or proven to him in some very empirical fashion, no? The letters on those ten commandments would indeed have been “scientific proof” of the fact of purposeful and intentional design, and thus of a designer. And there are other similar examples I could give. But I don’t see this as being problematic as you seem to think it would be? I don’t see the Bible presents an imagine of a God who carefully ensures that there is absolutely zero scientifically-verifiable evidence of his deeds or design.
Similarly, for instance, King Belshazzar and his team seemed quite able to recognize very clear purpose and design behind the “mene mene tekel parsin” words that were written on the wall, and probably took it “proof” there was a designer behind these words being written on the plaster. God didn’t seem so concerned to ensure that there was aboslutely zero scientifically-verifiable evidence of his purpose and design in that event.
(all that I said above notwithstanding, I should clarify that in general I absolutely agree that God is not particularly interested in demonstrating his existence or nature to be in the category of scientific fact. Even in Scripture the times when he does something that is scientifically verifiable by our standards as proof of intelligent agency are few and far between. While I don’t see it as a hard and fast rule for the reasons I outlined just above, I do entirely agree that in general God isn’t interested in providing scientific or empiric evidence of who he is and what he does.
But that said, I would dispute with someone that took this general principle to mean that it is therefore impossible to detect, scientifically or empirically, God’s activity, purpose, or design from those cases where God has unquestionably caused unquestionably recognizable design into the natural order of things. Someone who recognized (empirically) purpose or design, and thus inferred a designing or purposeful intelligence, after reading the original ten commandments or the writing on the wall would not be doing something illegitimate. They would indeed be recognizing design, and thus inferring a designing or purposeful intelligence, from what they empirically saw or heard in this natural order.
But I find the idea absurd, that many here seem to want to defend, that God’s actions when he interacts with this material world cannot be simply recognized as the result of intelligent purposeful agency. Is there anyone, really, who would have looked at the original ten commandments, or the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, and really claimed that it was impossible to recognize direct intelligent agency as the cause of those written words?
Yes to Moses, who needed no proof, but no to everyone else. Inscriptions on rock can be manmade, I believe. And you cannot consider information ‘coded’ into DNA as comparable, because it is produced, and modified, naturally. Likewise with Belshazzar’s wall.
As a fellow [God-is-omnitemporal] Calvinist, of course we infer meaning in everything, as we should (and sometimes it is even explicit and articulate in his providences for his children). But that is not scientifically replicable, even though his M.O. is not difficult to recognize.
God unquestionably caused recognizable Hebrew letters and sentences to be carved into a rock, which any objective observer would unquestionably recognize as having been purposed and designed.
OK, but let’s be clear about what we are claiming, philosophically or epistemologically, and see if it really holds up. Let’s explore the actual reasoning, logic, and philosophy before we make claims about what can or cannot be projected onto science, no way, no how.
A hypothetical for the sake of the argument: In principle, if God wanted to, he could have encoded the entire ten commandments, word for word, in some kind of quasi-digital format along some section of non-coding DNA in every living creature. Now, granted of course, God did not do that. But hypothetically, if he had, what would that say about whether or not we could, in some scientific or empiric way, detect empirically or scientifically God’s handiwork?
If a scientist did decode the DNA and found an exact one-to-one correspondence in coding between a strand of DNA and the entire text, letter for letter, of the ten commandments in Exodus, then by any reasonable definition, said scientist would have recognized, in biology, obvious and clear objective and empiric evidence of intelligent design in that DNA, no?
So the real question is not whether God’s intelligent and purposeful agency can be detected in the realm of biology, it is more as to whether or not he did act in such a way as it could be detected, no? I think it clear-cut and beyond dispute that he could act in such a way, if he so chose. It is hypothetically possible for God to encode , that said intelligent agency could be detected by scientific or empiric methods. God’s handiwork, intelligent agency, or whatever you want to call it would be empirically detectable regardless if he “wrote” it by carving it into stone, or encoded it into DNA.
Ok fair enough the terminology I used is not perfectly accurate. Yes some non coding dna is fundamental to the functioning of the cell. I didn’t realise those where called non coding. and you cited in a later comment introns, their is also the telomers, the regulatory dna, repeated genes and pseudogene that contain dna with errors in it. actually represents most of our dna. Now on the last to that we have that could arguably be expected under common design but that we have the same pseudogenes and repeated gene than an other close species doesn’t make sense.
yes some of the non coding dna is vital to the cell but most isn’t and more importantly their would be no reason to copy it by design.
What you a raising here is not common design or evolution but the origine of life which is something we don’t understand yet. this is a fundamental mechanic to simply life.
If he had, we would have no way of detecting it, because we have not learned nor deduced how to decipher human language that might be embedded in DNA by God, nor do we have any reason to think that there is any such thing. It is nothing like the recognizable glyphs that neither we use nor that Moses used. It does not resemble any of our languages.
That is purely imaginary and has nothing to do with reality
Of course, but that is not the problem, merely a distraction from it.
Hi Eyeillustration
Welcome to the forum.
Looks like you are not the only one not understanding the process of evolution. It is actually anything but unguided and unpurposed as the selection by survival fitness is spot on with the divine command to love thy neighbour like thyselves. And if we do not obey that command humanity will be called to answer.
Oddly those species that fulfilled their purpose and that got extinct were not wasted on the system either as after all creation is meant to give its life for one another.
I think our intuition is correct that there is design in nature, God’s design, but it is not scientifically demonstrable. It is really a matter of faith. There is evidence that points to design (the evidence of beauty and beautifully ordered systems, among other things), but like God himself, science can prove neither his existence nor design’s.
Neither are the bits and bytes in a computer anything like the glyphs Moses used, but once they are deciphered or decoded and recognized as having encoded human language, we can recognize them as having originated there by purposeful intelligent agency.
And I’m afraid the idea of storing human language onto the medium of DNA is not quite so strange or far-fetched a concept as you seem to believe…
Hence the point and fact remains, whether or not you like it, that humans can and have encoded and stored books on DNAl not entirely unlike storing them on a computer hard drive
And thus, if the English text of a book was discovered by a scientist stored in some strand of DNA in this fashion, we would rightly and empirically conclude that there was some kind of intelligent agency that had so stored it… would you have any dispute with this observation at least?
That is not new news and I am familiar with it. But DNA’s ability to store information is not the question.
The question is, can we determine scientifically that a Designer put the information there (natural DNA ain’t English nor any other human language) or even that the information is designed.
(A cloud’s shadow contains information about the beauty of the cloud, but you will be hard-pressed to prove that the information is designed.)
With decades of experience in software system engineering, I have found that composition works much better than inheritance. As a systems engineer, then, if I were designing wings for a mammal, I would compose the flying mammal using wings that were already available–i.e., from birds.
How would you argue against that?
How can anyone–ID proponent or otherwise–claim to know the design an infinitely wise and powerful designer would prefer? Are you, I, or anyone else able to know a priori the design choices of a designer who is infinitely wiser and more powerful than ourselves?
This is not at all obvious to me, for the reasons I have stated.
And that leads to the problem I have raised: how can you or anyone else claim to know a priori, without post facto rationalization (“the designer wanted it the way we see it because…”), the mind of the infinitely wise and powerful designer with regard to flying mammal design?
The only reason I would ever give to know the mind of God is through divine self-revelation. It is very clear from Scripture that no human can claim to use reason to ascend to God’s lofty thoughts.
Yet you seem to think you know how God would create a flying mammal by reason alone. Sorry, I can’t go there with you, Daniel.
And if you would say you don’t really claim to know that, you’re just making an “even if” argument, then you and I are left with an obvious problem: We have no way of looking at a biological design and knowing a priori whether it reflects the mind of God. Thus the theory of ID would reduce to an act of faith that has nothing to do with science.
That would be fine with me, though. By faith I do believe in an infinitely wise and powerful God who has created all of life and the universe we collectively inhabit.
Best,
Chris
EDIT: God’s answer to Job in Job 38 is very much on point:
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:
“Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you, and you shall answer me.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?
“Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.
.
“Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
Tell me, if you know all this.
[…]
Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!
I do believe that we can parsimoniously infer natural history based on the scientific method and apprehension of law-like behaviors. Such parsimonious inference is far, far different from claiming to know God’s preferences a priori (i.e., “here’s what an infinitely wise and powerful designer would do…”)
well, i’m trying to take this discussion one small step at a time to ensure we aren’t talking past each other, and to be sure where the crux of any disagreement lies.
My main question, then, is: If a scientist discovered a stand of DNA in an organism that contained the entire text of Moby Dick, I propose that it is a perfectly reasonable and natural response to say that we could determine that this DNA was in fact designed, hence that some designer put the information there.
If a scientist saddled a pig and rode it over the Himalayas, I propose that it is a perfectly reasonable and natural response to say that pigs have wings.