Evidence for Design?

[Al_Moritz]

A metaphysical design?

Are you using the word “metaphysical” to mean that human nature is essentially designed as an unique unification of *both *the spiritual and material worlds?

You can see it that way, yes.

Metaphysics of things relates to their being, their intrinsic nature, and the intrinsic nature of humans entails such a unification of *both *the spiritual and material worlds.

No ‘biological design’, in terms of direct sculpting of biological structures, required for that. And biological ID simply does not address that essence of human nature. In other words, biological ID barks up the wrong tree.

 

[inocente]

Yes, it is so funny that biological ID people react to the term “natural causes” as if they were the Great Enemy, instead of them being created by God and singing His glory. With that they play directly into the hands of atheists.

And then you get such absurd notions like ‘laws of nature’ on one hand and ‘randomness’ on the other. As if randomness were not part of the laws of nature. But I guess Brownian motion of particles in fluids is allowed, while random mutations are not

So particles in fluids are ‘purposeless’ because they follow random Brownian motion? Nice try. Typical confusion of metaphysics with science, when ‘random’ becomes ‘purposeless’. With that ID people play directly into the hands of atheists as well.

In fact, the more I think about it the more ID creationists have in common with atheists – and vice versa

Excellent points although atheists probably know what Brownian motion is, while ID fans think it’s a young girl scout running down a hill (or for the less sophisticated, a chocolate fudge cake sliding down a hill) .

 

[buffalo]

The traditional design argument speaks of the perfect purpose of creation as evidence of a perfect Creator, while ID in its childishness can only speak of the imperfect purposes of created organisms, leaving 99.9999999% of creation with no purpose other than to supply raw materials for ID’s red-neck drive-thru consumer “philosophy”.

Thanks for this hilarious thread, I’ve almost wet myself several times at the preposterous divide between ID and civilization. Seriously though, ID is the tool of the Great Deceiver. Right from the start it denies that all creation sings to God, it cannot even speak the word God without burning its lips, and has to substitute “agent” instead. But it won’t kill the Church, which was Satan’s intent, because it is far too funny to stand a snowball’s chance in hell.

ID is part of God’s creation. It exists and we all know it exists. We can and should study design for it is part of creation. It is ridiculous to ignore it. The scientists working in the emerging field of biomimicry are not.

 

[buffalo]

Yes, it is so funny that biological ID people react to the term “natural causes” as if they were the Great Enemy, instead of them being created by God and singing His glory. With that they play directly into the hands of atheists.

And then you get such absurd notions like ‘laws of nature’ on one hand and ‘randomness’ on the other. As if randomness were not part of the laws of nature. But I guess Brownian motion of particles in fluids is allowed, while random mutations are not

So particles in fluids are ‘purposeless’ because they follow random Brownian motion? Nice try. Typical confusion of metaphysics with science, when ‘random’ becomes ‘purposeless’. With that ID people play directly into the hands of atheists as well.

In fact, the more I think about it the more ID creationists have in common with atheists – and vice versa

It comes down to blind unguided processes as being a good explanation. It is not.

 

[grannymh]

On the contrary, it is the only natural solution that makes sense. If God gave a soul to two persons, would you not think that their offspring would naturally, by continued biological attraction, mate with the humanoids around them? (And yes, Adam and Eve might well have mated just with each other, while their offspring did not.)

The only alternative is that God miraculously removed them from their humanoid brethren after ensoulment, and miraculously had the descendents overcome the natural inclination against inbreeding and incest, and miraculously prevented the spread of genetic defects from inbreeding.

Now that sounds unnatural and ad hoc to me.

I would like to answer this from the position of Catholic teaching which is designed
to bring all created people into a harmonious relationship with our Creator.

Adam had a specifically designed purpose as the first human. Somehow, we get so caught up in our own little worlds, that we forget that Adam’s future descendents–that is the whole human race which was to follow from his loins-- was destined to live in eternal love with our Creator.

The glitch was that Adam was not equal to God.

The first moment of Adam’s existence, at the dawn of human history, was in perfect friendship with God. This did not include bestiality by mating with non-human beings. Eve was created in the same nature as Adam and thus only she was a suitable partner.

The Garden of Eden is seen as the location where Adam and Eve lived in friendship with God. Whether it was allegorical or whether it had a zip code is not the point. The point is that this was the time Adam had to freely make a choice to live as a spiritual creature in free submission to his Creator or to leave and go out on his own as another god. The rest is history.

Because future humans would be implicated in their founder’s reward for obedience, they became implicated in Adam’s original sin. The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man.” (St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo 4, 1.) Either way, God had blessed Adam and Eve saying “Be fertile and multiply…” (Genesis 1:28) Adam called his wife Eve because she became the mother of all the living. (Genesis 3: 20)

The key question is – When did mating between siblings become wrong?

Starting with God’s blessing which would be in effect no matter if Adam remained in God’s friendship or not, the Catholic teaching is that Adam had received original holiness and justice (harmony of human nature) not for himself alone, but for all human nature. (CCC 404 -406) When death entered the human world, human nature was no longer in genetic harmony.

Shifting to basic science regarding genetics and heredity, there is the simple principle that genes can be dominant or recessive. There is also the simple observable principle that over time genes did change as sickness and death entered the world. For example, genes directing the immune system can grow stronger in some instances and weaker in other situations. After original sin, transmission of genes through propagation was not in harmony. Changes in the chemical base pairs (mutations) would occur as each new generation succeeded the previous generation.

By understanding genetics, one can come to the conclusion that the ill effects of mating with relatives would eventually come into being. This could be expressed by the degree of relationship. Thus the question of “incest” between siblings remains as a question of timing.

Ah, one says. Adam’s great-grandchildren did not know anything about genetics. True. But they did have eyes and could see what was happening. And they were rational beings so that they could put two and two together.

What the knowledge of genetics tells us, is that the children of Adam could mate with their siblings without much trouble. Given the length of female fertility, there would be overlapping generations which would enlarge the “degree” of relationship. In practical terms, the need for siblings to mate with each other would be very short, shorter than the time for genes to cause hereditary diseases.

 

[inocente]

ID is part of God’s creation. It exists and we all know it exists. We can and should study design for it is part of creation. It is ridiculous to ignore it. The scientists working in the emerging field of biomimicry are not.

I’ve done some - written software which learns, inspired by evolution, neural networks inspired by the brain, fractals and so on.

So ID is now trying to take ownership of Leonardo da Vinci, who studied birds in an attempt to invent a flying machine? ID has never produced even one thing remotely of any use to humankind, although I fully expect the Discovery Institute will shortly claim that it is the guiding light behind the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the UDHR, and the Barbie doll. The Church and the rest of us can pack our bags, safe in the knowledge that ID will save us all.

Then there’s the real world.

 

[buffalo]

I’ve done some - written software which learns, inspired by evolution, neural networks inspired by the brain, fractals and so on.

So ID is now trying to take ownership of Leonardo da Vinci, who studied birds in an attempt to invent a flying machine? ID has never produced even one thing remotely of any use to humankind, although I fully expect the Discovery Institute will shortly claim that it is the guiding light behind the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the UDHR, and the Barbie doll. The Church and the rest of us can pack our bags, safe in the knowledge that ID will save us all.

Then there’s the real world.

Written software inspired by **********? Wouldn’t this be a designed program that adds data to make decisions and fine tune them through feedback loops? Does this software have a target? What specific feature of ********* is it based on? Call me curious.

Use Biomimicry to Make Better Products (and Companies)

…Here’s one quick example that I use in my talks: the Speedo swimsuit that Michael Phelps and other Olympians won medals with in Beijing is called the “shark suit,” and for good reason. It was designed to mimic the way sharks move through the water. At the panel, Benyus mentioned that Airbus planes also mimic sharkskin to cut through the air more efficiently. She has many more examples of products we use in our lives every day that are borrowed from the 3.8 billion-year-old laboratory of nature.
**
I believe that biomimicry is one of a small handful of very important ideas that will change the way business is done.** And it seems to be catching on. Benyus pointed out that any investment in this kind of research was mainly from the military or aerospace sectors until recent years. But, she said, in one study of worldwide patent databases, between 1985 and 2005, inventions inspired by “biomimetics” increased by a factor of 93.
So how do companies apply this thinking? Since Ray Anderson was on the panel, and talked about his big biomimicry success story (which I’ve told before in Green to Gold), let’s start there. Interface sent designers out to the woods to study nature and get inspired. They realized that no two things were alike — chaos at the small level, but also a pleasant orderliness in total. So they developed a product line of carpet tiles where no two are the same and can be placed on the floor in any orientation (greatly reducing installation time and expense). The new product, Entropy, was the fastest-selling in the company’s history. Now, Anderson says, the company looks to nature for ideas about every design decision or challenge.
The key is to get a biological perspective into the company. Interface trains its people on biological principles and even sends some back to school to get a degree. Benyus has a consulting practice, the Biomimicry Guild, which brings biologists into large companies such as Boeing, General Mills, and Nike. She tells clients to mimic nature in three broad areas: form (products), process (green chemistry), and at the eco-system level (putting companies in food webs and industrial ecologies). The larger, company-wide perspective is where the real bang for the buck is. Benyus commented, “We often go in to design a green product and end up designing a green company.”

 

[inocente]

I would like to answer this from the position of Catholic teaching which is designed
to bring all created people into a harmonious relationship with our Creator.

…]

What the knowledge of genetics tells us, is that the children of Adam could mate with their siblings without much trouble. Given the length of female fertility, there would be overlapping generations which would enlarge the “degree” of relationship. In practical terms, the need for siblings to mate with each other would be very short, shorter than the time for genes to cause hereditary diseases.

Steering well clear of banned topics, I think you are wrong about the genetics but would need confirmation from someone who has formal training in genetics, which I and most folk don’t have.

However I will say that ethically you can’t make both those statements, you have to give up on one of them. For any normal person incest is highly icky, as it is also highly icky in any species where inbreeding creates unviable offspring. There is a reason for morality.

So, either the siblings would have to be forced to mate, much against their will, or if they didn’t find it icky then God’s moral law changed radically at a later date.

Imho you either to think again or have to argue for relativism.

 

[tonyrey]

It comes down to blind unguided processes as being a good explanation. It is not.

Especially when they are considered to have been **designed **to be unguided!

Or perhaps they are thought to exist without any purpose at all…

Convolutions of the mind that regard the convolutions of the brain ultimately purposeless!

 

[tonyrey]

The traditional design argument speaks of the perfect purpose of creation as evidence of a perfect Creator, while ID in its childishness can only speak of the imperfect purposes of created organisms, leaving 99.9999999% of creation with no purpose other than to supply raw materials for ID’s red-neck drive-thru consumer “philosophy”…

So you do deny that living organisms are entities which have their own purposes and the physical universe isa necessary basis for living organisms?

 

[inocente]

Written software inspired by **********? Wouldn’t this be a designed program that adds data to make decisions and fine tune them through feedback loops? Does this software have a target? What specific feature of ********* is it based on? Call me curious.

No. There are many approaches. If interested, I think the best place to start would be Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton which has been around for donkey’s years, where order and complexity emerges from a the simplest of “physical law”, with no goals, no targets, no fine tuning. I think this gives a fascinating insight into how the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. It’s best to find a book rather than just the short articles on the web. Also I think Conway was a (vocal?) atheist.

 

[inocente]

So you do deny that living organisms are entities which have their own purposes and the physical universe isa necessary basis for living organisms?

Living organisms are part and parcel of the physical universe, to me it’s incoherent to talk as if they could have a separate existence.

 

[grannymh]

You can see it that way, yes.

Metaphysics of things relates to their being, their intrinsic nature, and the intrinsic nature of humans entails such a unification of *both *the spiritual and material worlds.

No ‘biological design’, in terms of direct sculpting of biological structures, required for that. And biological ID simply does not address that essence of human nature. In other words, biological ID barks up the wrong tree.

It was the word metaphysics which threw me.

I remember skipping out of my metaphysics course because now the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist made sense. Obviously, I don’t remember the other stuff.

 

[grannymh]

Steering well clear of banned topics, I think you are wrong about the genetics but would need confirmation from someone who has formal training in genetics, which I and most folk don’t have.

However I will say that ethically you can’t make both those statements, you have to give up on one of them. For any normal person incest is highly icky, as it is also highly icky in any species where inbreeding creates unviable offspring. There is a reason for morality.

So, either the siblings would have to be forced to mate, much against their will, or if they didn’t find it icky then God’s moral law changed radically at a later date.

Imho you either to think again or have to argue for relativism.

How many generations are you from Adam? If I am counting right you have loads of heredity.
And most normal persons have loads of heredity. So of course incest is icky because of its effects on the human anatomy and also on the human mind due to genetic heredity.

I am not talking about unviable offspring. I am talking about the first offspring who were not influenced by the heredity of mutations because there was not enough generational breeding of generations to produce genetic defects. Mathematically, this immunity from genetic defects would only exist for a short time, yet, long enough so that marriage between the first siblings would no longer be needed. With the visible effects of genetic heredity, a moral law would then come into effect to protect the offspring. Recall that the human person is worthy of profound respect from the moment of conception.

Was there a moral law against killing a human being in the Garden of Eden?
At what point in the sequence of events did death become normal for humans?

In other words, we live in a different framework from Adam. It is not a matter of relativism which exists in our world. It is a matter of God’s world in which Adam first existed.

It is not a question of God changing a moral law which technically was not necessary in the beginning of the human species. It is a question of respecting the right of the Creator to bless the founders of the human species.

Is God the Creator or is He not?

Is God as the Designer limited by His design?

 

[tonyrey]

So you do deny that living organisms are entities which have their own purposes and the physical universe is a necessary basis for living organisms?

1. Do living organisms have their own purposes?
2. Is the physical universe is a necessary basis for living organisms?

 

[inocente]

How many generations are you from Adam? If I am counting right you have loads of heredity.

I don’t know, maybe 240 since Genesis was written, surely a blink of an eye in genetics.

I am not talking about unviable offspring. I am talking about the first offspring who were not influenced by the heredity of mutations because there was not enough generational breeding of generations to produce genetic defects.

I’m not a geneticist, is there any science to this racial purity stuff? Off-hand Adam being genetically pure sounds like a mixture of that reverse-entropy nonsense that some hold dear, and General Jack D. Ripper D) in Dr Strangelove – “A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual”.

*Was there a moral law against killing a human being in the Garden of Eden?
At what point in the sequence of events did death become normal for humans? *

Either God was really surprised when they sinned and quickly had to scrub out all His moral plans, or yes, of course the prohibition was already in the moral law. I don’t believe you’ll find anything in scripture or the CCC, or in the logic of the Thomas Aquinas natural law, which allows you to turn morality on its head.

Seems like a good case for Ask an Apologist, but I think an apologist would point out that Catholics can’t argue for absolute objective morality, and then somehow make it relative whenever convenient.

*It is not a question of God changing a moral law which technically was not necessary in the beginning of the human species. It is a question of respecting the right of the Creator to bless the founders of the human species.

Is God the Creator or is He not?

Is God as the Designer limited by His design?*

I’m just pointing out problems with your current theory that you may want to consider. For instance, any yokel who wants to marry his sister will say if God made it OK for Adam’s children then the Church has got it’s morals hopelessly wrong. Your answer, that what was highly moral once upon a time is now highly immoral by act of an unchanging God, well, it’s not exactly easy to follow.

 

[inocente]

1. Do living organisms have their own purposes?
2. Is the physical universe is a necessary basis for living organisms?

Moving the words around a bit didn’t make it more coherent to me - living organisms are part and parcel of the physical universe, they can’t have a separate existence without carbon, oxygen and so on. Can you pose it without any dualities?

 

[grannymh]

I don’t know, maybe 240 since Genesis was written, surely a blink of an eye in genetics.

How does that song go? Dearie, then you are older than I.

I’m not a geneticist, is there any science to this racial purity stuff?

Nope.

Off-hand Adam being genetically pure sounds like a mixture of that reverse-entropy nonsense that some hold dear, and General Jack D. Ripper D) in Dr Strangelove – “A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual”.

Off-hand, what possible thing could Adam be genetically pure of? All the fruit in the garden were organic.

Either God was really surprised when they sinned and quickly had to scrub out all His moral plans, or yes, of course the prohibition was already in the moral law. I don’t believe you’ll find anything in scripture or the CCC, or in the logic of the Thomas Aquinas natural law, which allows you to turn morality on its head.

I believe that God is really surprised when I stop being so cranky. That is really turning morality on its head. Or is it my head?

Seems like a good case for Ask an Apologist, but I think an apologist would point out that Catholics can’t argue for absolute objective morality, and then somehow make it relative whenever convenient.

So you noticed that, too.

I’m just pointing out problems with your current theory that you may want to consider. For instance, any yokel who wants to marry his sister will say if God made it OK for Adam’s children then the Church has got it’s morals hopelessly wrong.

Personally, I think if any young yokel wants to marry his sweet, intelligent, beautiful, rich sister, that is his problem. He knows the consequences, especially when he asks friends and families for wedding gifts.

Your answer, that what was highly moral once upon a time is now highly immoral by act of an unchanging God, well, it’s not exactly easy to follow.

I know I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don’t remember hearing that genetics operating as genetics like to do is a “moral” to be reckoned with.

Seriously,
unless a person understands the story at its very beginning, its design is headed for the trash.

 

[LittleSoldier]

ID is part of God’s creation. It exists and we all know it exists. We can and should study design for it is part of creation. It is ridiculous to ignore it. The scientists working in the emerging field of biomimicry are not.

Whoa. We do *not *“all know that it exists.” It is certainly something that can be studied (although not in a science classroom) just as astrology can be studied and flower arranging can be studied but its existence is not something that we all know - not even a putative existence.

Please do not tell me that I know ID exists.

 

[LittleSoldier]

I’ve done some - written software which learns, inspired by evolution, neural networks inspired by the brain, fractals and so on.

So ID is now trying to take ownership of Leonardo da Vinci, who studied birds in an attempt to invent a flying machine? ID has never produced even one thing remotely of any use to humankind, although I fully expect the Discovery Institute will shortly claim that it is the guiding light behind the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the UDHR, and the Barbie doll. The Church and the rest of us can pack our bags, safe in the knowledge that ID will save us all.

Then there’s the real world.

Inocente, sometimes we don’t agree and I do have a few problems with what you have written in this thread but I just have to say that you make me laugh. A lot. The Barbie doll. That is a gem.

Thank you.