Been here, refuted once, will do so again.
How we came into being bares no relation to how we are treated once we are made. Designs do not necessarily include specs for specific behaviour, only the abilities necessary to decide for ourselves. Once the designed creation is done we are left to our own devices and can take notice of our creator if we want to, or not if we don’t.
That is why the watchmaker analogy fails.
Richard
I VERY much disagree. Ends are NOT independent of the means. Quite the contrary they are one and the same. How something came into being is the essence of what it is. No you cannot use evil to accomplish good. Neither can you accomplish love by power and control. Design is the essence of the machine. Growth, learning, and evolution is the essence of living organisms. How they came into being is what they are. That is the difference between dream and reality. In dreams there is no logical consistency and there is no coherent connection between what you do and the results. Thus the notion of omnipotence which claims you can accomplish whatever you want by whatever means you care to dictate is the omnipotence of a dreamer, which any child can do. Real omnipotence is quite different than this, with a logical coherence between the means and the result.
That is your right, but it does not make you right.
We could, and have been designed with freedom in mind. Freedom means not under anyone’s control or power.
I follow God because I choose to, not because of some innate preprogramming. If that were so we would all be Christians. You cannot force someone to love you… It would be a hollow victory… That applies as much to God as it does to anyone else. (See Bruce Almighty, Star Trek et al.)
Richard
It is what is rational and reasonable. It is a Christianity worth believing in and not some gold mine in a swamp scam. Those who seek to buy their way into heaven by trading away all rational integrity are dealing not with God but a devil.
I do not believe in a dreamy magical world where freedom is just an ingredient in a divine magical spell. I believe in rational universe and free will as a product of divine design. Yes that is a divine design which I believe in – and I think it is the reason for why God made the universe this way. Nothing whimsical about it. It was all necessary. The answer to the problem of evil is that we don’t live in a dream world – so God cannot do what He wants by any means He prefers. To accomplish what He want requires doing things in the way required to accomplish it.
Again I ask that you show just how these students were seeking any kind of control or power.
Belief in God does not come from God? That would be a surprise to the Apostles and to Jesus Himself!
Please show how those students were “dealing . . . with . . . a devil”.
By your own arguments this means you are seeking power – after all, you claim that a belief in design is something held in order to gain power over others.
Again, please show how those formerly atheist and agnostic students who concluded there must be a Designer and thus became Deist (only a couple) or theist (large majority) and mostly eventually Christians were trying to achieve power over others.
This argument for a designer seems to work in the opposite direction than it does in the ID movement. The ID argument generally results in a god-of-the-gaps argument where God/the Designer seems less and less necessary the more science fills in the gaps in our knowledge. On the other hand, if we see evidence of a designer in the underlying order and beauty that we see in the universe, the case for a designer becomes stronger the more we learn about the universe and discover its underlying order and interconnectedness. Instead of God seeming less and less necessary because we are using him as just another hypothesis to explain how the universe works, he becomes more necessary as we see him as the source of beauty and order and the reason that it should exist in the universe in the first place.
I was tempted to say there were times past when the world would not have seem so beautiful to us. The world of the dinosaurs would have looked to most like one full of terrible monsters. But… there are those who would see a great deal of beauty in that world of the dinosaurs. So I tried to think of a world more terrible… how about the surface of Venus? Pretty hellish… right? Sigh… the human capacity to see beauty in things is nearly unlimited and the truth is that we can even see beauty in things like that. So I realized the basic problem is that the perception of beauty and truth can be rather subjective. And not everyone sees a necessity for a god to explain beauty in the world… since it is likely the explanation is inside us.
But… I do believe in God and I do think God is looking for things in His creation: those who can respond to Him and appreciate what He can give… children… And maybe as I have often thought He sees goodness and beauty in the success of cooperation in the world. Totally subjective, of course. But that is an unavoidable part of life… to decide what we like and embrace it.
Exactly – that’s why I point out that this informal club used the term “intelligent design” before the young-Earth faction hijacked and politicized it.
We loved to sit and listen as students from one discipline sat and discussed how elegant the science they were studying was, not that we could always understand it (the cell biologists tended to leave me in the proverbial dust, and the fourth-year and grad level physics students often lost me by the third statement) but that we could see how they were excited about learning more in their fields because it just pointed them more towards God.
And when YECism started to become somewhat prominent on campus and some wanted to join the club, we patiently pointed out that they were starting from the assumption that there was a God Who was Creator and Designer and then searching for things to support that while we had started from science and concluded that there was a Designer and Creator, so we looked honestly at all the new science we learned while they tried to “correct” it to fit their a priori position – and thus we had absolutely nothing in common as far as intelligent design went.
This is a difficult sentence - an uncontrolled system rarely develops (unless you can provide an example). A system normally is designed to meet a particular need, and design is an appropriate term for this.
A design that includes autonomy and self-determination is rare - strictly speaking it would be advanced robotics and falls short of how I understand human personhood.
I am not ‘knit-picking’, but instead trying to point out that your remarks would limit the attributes of a Creator that is God the Father who creates by His Word and sustains by His Holy Spirit.
I have used AI to obtain a response to ‘what is design and its relevance to biology’? The response may agree with some of your remarks.
Design is the process of creating something that serves a specific purpose or function. It can involve aesthetics, functionality, usability, sustainability, and other aspects. Design is relevant to biology because living organisms are also the result of a natural design process that involves evolution, adaptation, and selection. Biologists can learn from the design principles of nature and apply them to human-made products or systems. This is called Biodesign or biomimicry
Nor is that. Nature has no design principles – it’s all trial and error. Scientists can only copy or adapt what works in nature, hence ‘biomimicry’.
This is cool, but nature had this purpose “in mind”?
I can believe it was God-directed1 with cosmic rays (or some other undetectable means), à la @St.Roymond’s remarks:
1 And in fact I do believe – delightedly – that it was God-directed and no accident, something fun for us to discover and marvel at.
Beside the fact evolution is not “uncontrolled”.
= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =
Species survival might count as a purpose, so natural selection would then be “designing” for survival of the next generation.
Kinda flimsy, though.
Next up: ball bearings. 
The control is reactive not proactive. IOW there is no goal or purpose/
A design has a purpose. But that does not mean it controls the end result. The machine for choosing lottery balls was desgined and built. Does that make the lottery fixed? (@mitchellmckain )
When I call evolution uncontrolled I mean that the initial change is random. The control is not in which change comes when, it is in whether the change is useful or not. IOW you are changing the meaninng of “control” to suit your understanding therefore it is not controlled in the manner I claim.
(forgive the use of bold. Writing does not always show emphasis)
Richard
Calling trial and error ‘design’ – kinda flimsy? Yep.
But your alternative of complete control is not real.(God controlling every single change) God would not need millions of years. He could do that in six days.
Richard
Perhaps. What He could have done, and what He did do, could be different. But back to what I read as Stephen Meyer’s point about ID, he points to the unlikely circumstance of regulatory sequences of DNA. He pointed to the current understanding of what was formerly termed “junk” DNA regulating the product(s) of a protein-synthesizing gene. He calls these “regulatory genes”. Neo Darwinism demands random and frequent mutations that are subsequently chosen either by survival or reproduction advantages. But we now know (he says) that any change in the sequence (mutation) of a regulatory gene renders it incompetent to regulate. But a protein-synthesizing gene can mutate and still work, even though perhaps less well. So Meyer is suggesting that ID created this circumstance such that evolution could occur without further intervention. So isn’t he suggesting that ID fixed certain sequences of DNA and not others? I’m asking for clarification.
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