Evidence against Design?

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rossum said:
The question of design does not arise unless there is a designer.

The presence of a designer cannot be assumed at the outset if one is open-minded.
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Neither the absence of Design or a Designer can be assumed at the outset if one is open-minded! The default position is agnosticism.
 
rossum said:
However, the absence of evidence is not evidence of presence either. Nobody asserts that there can be design without a designer. In the absence of any evidence for a designer then the assertion that a designer exists can at best be highly provisional.

rossum
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The designer could design in a way that keep his identity hidden. We do not have to know the designer at all.
 
rossum said:
However, the absence of evidence is not evidence of presence either. Nobody asserts that there can be design without a designer. In the absence of any evidence for a designer then the assertion that a designer exists can at best be highly provisional.
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All interpretations of reality are highly provisional at the outset!
 
tonyrey said:
Neither the absence of Design or a Designer can be assumed at the outset if one is open-minded! The default position is agnosticism.
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Yes. So if the designer lives outside our frame of reference and designs inside this frame we may not recognize specific designs ( a rock could be part of his design) and not be able to distinguish design at all. We then become totally dependent on whether or not the designer communicates Himself.

In other words, man will never have enough information by himself. The best we can do is study and calculate the odds that something has a greater possibility of being designed than not.
 
tonyrey said:
A good point - which weakens the evidence against Design to some extent.
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Yes, and that would be rossum’s position. However, a designer is under no obligation to share. Perhaps His designs are so complicated that limited humans do not have the capacity to discover them.
 
buffalo said:
Yes. So if the designer lives outside our frame of reference and designs inside this frame we may not recognize specific designs ( a rock could be part of his design) and not be able to distinguish design at all. We then become totally dependent on whether or not the designer communicates Himself.

In other words, man will never have enough information by himself. The best we can do is study and calculate the odds that something has a greater possibility of being designed than not.
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It could be argued that no information at all about the source of Design weakens the case for Design - unless there is a good reason for the total absence of information. To a certain extent the two issues have to be considered hand in hand.

I think we have enough information to reach some conclusions about the source of Design - but that takes us away from the topic.
 
Now I’m curious. What evidence is there against design? And I do mean evidence, not theory.
 
TheDoors said:
Now I’m curious. What evidence is there against design? And I do mean evidence, not theory.
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The usual argument is that the negative outweigh the positive aspects of existence so that there is excessive failure and frustration.
 
None… It is really funny because instead of atheists pondering if their is a God, and that he is infinite, they speculate that their is no God, and that he is limited. This is their downfall, their achilles heel, because without a creator their is no design, because creation is a fruit of the creator.
 
tonyrey said:
The usual argument is that the negative outweigh the positive aspects of existence so that there is excessive failure and frustration.
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What a very, very limited view point. What if they simply aren’t seeing the desired outcome that the device was designed for? What if existance is here to come up with
“What is six times seven?”
 
buffalo said:
The designer could design in a way that keep his identity hidden. We do not have to know the designer at all.
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Then, depending on how good the designer is at hiding his/her work we would be justified in rejecting design. A perfect murder is one where the investigator says, “natural causes” or “accidental death”.

Yes, a designer can be deliberately deceptive. Who designed all those $5 Rolexes I keep getting offered in me e-mail?

rossum
 
TheDoors said:
Now I’m curious. What evidence is there against design? And I do mean evidence, not theory.
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Primarily Occam’s razor. If natural processes are sufficient, then there is no need to complicate things with a superfluous entity. The rotation of the Earth adequately explains why the Sun moves across the sky each day. There is no need to posit Apollo in his chariot doing the moving.

Design can be evidenced when a natural explanation is insufficient. The victim did not stick the knife into his own back. Someone else must have done it.

rossum
 
I’ve always found curious the idea the existence of evil in the world disallows God’s presence. Evil, death, disease, war and poverty only intruded God’s perfect creation of the Garden of Eden after Man’s fall consonant with the terrible gift of free will. Enforced loving and obeying God would mean nothing without the corollary ability to follow Satan and NOT love and obey God. All the bad things in the world are the fault of Satan and a compliant mankind and not that of God. God, to whom time means nothing, will set matters right on judgement day.

Apropos to this question of “grand design” is the Creation on the Web" website’s" critique of Stephen Hawking"s book “The Grand Design”.The specious nature of this attack on intelligent design of the universe in favor of the “big bang” is shown in many aspects. How could anything create itself before it exists? Gravity is the force of attraction arising between objects by virtue of their masses. Before any matter existed no gravity existed.How then could it have operated before it existed? Had any law of physics caused the universe to create itself then the law must have existed before the universe began. That is to say before time began. Therefore the the law must be outside of time. How could that be? Scientific laws do not create anything but only describe things that already exist or processes that are observable and repeatable. They cannot cause anything any more than the outline of a map causes the shape of the coastline it describes.
 
Most of the “Intelligent Design” arguments are very opposed to “the Designer” being all knowing. E.g. Formation of a cell needs God’s intervention to form. While Catholic Tradition holds that God made the world whole from the beginning without need for periodic intervention, because he’s just that perfect a “Designer”. Too many of the “Intelligent Design” arguments are based on how we would think we would have to build the world piece by piece.
 
rossum said:
Then, depending on how good the designer is at hiding his/her work we would be justified in rejecting design. A perfect murder is one where the investigator says, “natural causes” or “accidental death”.

Yes, a designer can be deliberately deceptive. Who designed all those $5 Rolexes I keep getting offered in me e-mail?

rossum
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You cannot reject it because you cannot see it. Humans are limited to 5 senses, 3 dimensions and time.

Again, Revelation tells us important things.
 
buffalo said:
Revelation tells us important things.
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So why don’t you follow what the Buddha has revealed? 😃

There are many different revelations, and even more different interpretations of those revelations. How are we to pick which revelation to follow? Even Harold Camping claimed that he was right, up until it was obvious he wasn’t.

rossum
 
rossum said:
So why don’t you follow what the Buddha has revealed? 😃

There are many different revelations, and even more different interpretations of those revelations. How are we to pick which revelation to follow? Even Harold Camping claimed that he was right, up until it was obvious he wasn’t.

rossum
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Let us go through them and see which one’s make sense.
 
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