How can we reconcile the argument of intelligent design with supposed design flaws?

[CHRISTINE77]

The only thing perfect is God. Thus, anything else compared to him has limitations and even flaws.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Similarly your comments on biology also put the cart before the horse. Plus your “preordained” argument is unnecessary: rabbits have a trait of running away when they hear a strange sound, because those which had some alternative trait ended up as a predator’s lunch and didn’t have offspring.

Speaking of putting the cart before the horse, it appears that rabbits acquiring the rabbit trait of “running away” as explained away by evolutionary theory IS putting the cart before the horse because you are assuming (begging the question, actually) that rabbits must have acquired some particularly beneficial trait (AND that trait was subsequently passed on) purely BECAUSE the trait survived the selection process.

What you haven’t disproved (but merely dismissed by virtue of neither permitting nor considering the possibility) is that both the selective mechanisms and the genetic traits may have arisen together from the very beginning by a kind of symbiotic causal relationship between biochemistry and the laws of physics as an inherent and designed feature of the universe itself.

We have no way of knowing whether random changes to DNA could, in fact, give rise to the plethora of physical and behavioral traits which have obtained in nature strictly by virtue of random changes in the genome being selected by the environment. The possibility that random changes have the power to create consistently beneficial and improving sequences of physical and behavioural traits is merely assumed in the ruling out of all other possibilities by the very method of inquiry which ONLY permits natural mechanisms and random events to have been involved in the process in the first place.

This doesn’t prove anything. It simply turns one’s method into one’s metaphysics and assumes, by constraining what will be the only acceptable answers to what has been presupposed as the only methodologically permitted ones, i.e., the only permissible answers are decided before ANY possible answer is actually arrived at.

Ergo, the cart (the scientific method) drives the putative horse (the only acceptable metaphysical conclusion.)

The life sciences use scientific theories because “preordained” arguments tell us nothing.

As I pointed out, sciences also “preordain” answers by the very methods they use for arriving at their own set of preordained answers.

Indeed, they tell us to do nothing: if God preordained disease then under no circumstances try to find a cure because that would work against God’s plan.

Actually, this is ONLY true if you have a preordained view of God which says finding cures to diseases are against his plan.

This would be a bizarre contention since it is rarely ever proposed by Christians who actually have a reasonable sense of what God’s plan might be.

In fact, if God is omniscient and omnibenevolent then there is no reason for ruling out the possibility that he is all for humans becoming instrumental causes or aspects of his plan because by using talents, skills, intelligence, resources, etc., human beings can and are premitted to become active participants and instrumental agents in bringing about God’s plan.

No point debating misunderstandings, just look them up. But my main beef is that God is supposed to be simple (not made of parts) and unchanging, since otherwise He is contingent, yet you’ve got Him micro-managing protein sequences.

Why suppose that God must turn himself into a pretzel when he designs or creates beings? Perhaps he is so powerful and intelligent that he designs and creates universes without even batting an eyelash.

I would suppose that in creating protein sequences to begin with he must have “worked out” the role of protein sequences in biology in the very act of bringing into being energy, matter, space and time. AND all of that while remaining UNMOVED and UNCHANGED.

Perhaps for you or I sequencing proteins might mean lots of sweat, toil and hyperactivity but, it seems to me, there is no need to project such limitations or constraints onto God – I mean, if we take seriously words like omnipotent and omniscient.

You aren’t really trying to insist that God the Creator had absolutely no clue about what he was creating when he brought forth the universe, are you? God just snapped his fingers (metaphorically speaking) and, viola, the universe did its own thing completely and independently of God’s plan or design for it AND that God must have been oblivious to it all as it transpired. Is that what you think?

If not, then explain how you connect the creation of the universe by God to his final end purpose for it, absent any need for “designing” it on his part.

I just see no point in these intelligent design arguments: where we have knowledge, truth cannot contradict truth. Where we don’t have knowledge, admit we don’t rather than inventing a god-of-the-gaps. You obviously feel a need to think otherwise.

I have no clue what you are talking about here. There is no “God-of-the-gaps” involved. The truth is that all of science seeks to intelligently understand how the universe works, thus presupposing that the universe is intelligently designed. If it wasn’t, then there is no reason to assume it can be intelligently reverse engineered to understand how it works.

The fact that we use intelligence to understand the workings of the universe implies it is intelligently designed.

Continued…

 

[Peter_Plato]

… from last.

The only “gap” is the one that exists in the imaginations of atheists who accuse theists of arguing from gaps. It is a fabrication – a strawman, actually. No reasonable theist ever has made the argument, as far as I can tell.

Although, I will grant that some (present company excepted, of course) who previously argued against philosophy and reason, but who have since changed their tune, might project their own lack of philosophical acumen onto all theists as if only self-proclaimed rational skeptics and atheists have any claim to the faculty of reason – a notion which, of course, is nonsensical since even rats* traveling in packs claim to be “rational” to some degree or other.

---

*I’ll admit to being somewhat skeptical with regard to the rational capabilities of rats, but I am open to being shown, as “hopeless” as that task might appear to be, given the mangy intellectual contributions of the rat pack in these forums thus far.

 

[inocente]

Please point to the post where I said anything like this.

Post #155, the bit you wrote in bold red.

*We are not privy to how God plans his creation, or even how the mind of God works.

What we can fairly assume from Scripture is that God had a plan in creating the universe.

God the Son also had a plan when he came into this world.

If you think God is without a plan, just say so. Saying so would deny the entire Old Testaments and New Testaments. A very curious type of Baptist that makes you.

If you believe God made the world but had no idea how it was going to turn out, try finding a passage in Scripture to that effect. *

All Baptists are curious, we’re excellent fellows .

Jesus lived in historical time, but you keep speaking of God in the past tense - “God had a plan” - as if God lives in time, but you said yourself that God is outside time (also in post #155). A very curious Catholic that makes you, Yoda. God doesn’t go through phases, there’s no planning phase, design phase, construction phase. God just is. As in Teresa’s Let nothing disturb you, / Let nothing frighten you, / Everything passes, / God never changes.

You still haven’t answered my earlier question:

Why create without foreknowledge (design) of how your creation will turn out?

In your mind is God a mindless Creator?

What about that library of laws Einstein saw in the universe?

They were just created without a reason?

Keep digging that hole you are standing in.

I think I’ve answered your question three times now. You appear to have decided that God isn’t really omniscient and instead had to go through a design phase to give later times the illusion of omniscience. Like you’re taking Genesis 1 literally and believe God now has his feet up on the seventh day, or has gone away on vacation and left the world on autopilot. Try thinking of God as always in the present tense. If you think God isn’t in the e-word, or find yourself thinking God is like a human with special powers, try accepting that nowhere is God absent from his creation: “He (the Christian researcher) knows that not one thing in all creation has been done without God, but he knows also that God nowhere takes the place of his creatures. Omnipresent divine activity is everywhere essentially hidden. It never had to be a question of reducing the supreme Being to the rank of a scientific hypothesis.” - Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître (once again)

 

[Bradski]

We have no way of knowing whether random changes to DNA could, in fact, give rise to the plethora of physical and behavioral traits which have obtained in nature strictly by virtue of random changes in the genome being selected by the environment. The possibility that random changes have the power to create consistently beneficial and improving sequences of physical and behavioural traits is merely assumed…

Dear me, Peter. Stop digging, for heaven’s sake. You are already in way over your head.

Random changes do NOT consistently create increasingly beneficial traits. In the most part they are entirely neutral. But if they are detrimental, those having that particular trait will die sooner than those who don’t. Those with a beneficial trait, which doesn’t need to occur very often and doesn’t actually occur very often, live longer.

You only need a VERY slight advantage for that advantage to perpetuate through a breeding group and it then becomes fixed.

 

[inocente]

I am missing your point, then.

Are you claiming a Creator God is, therefore, a fortiori, NOT a Designer God?

Would not a Creator God absolutely have to be a Designer God?

Although a designer need not be a creator, a creator would have to be a designer by necessity?

Again, I don’t see the point you are making by invoking dictionary definitions. Help me out here.

I’m saying that if you think of effects as causes and think of causes as effects then sure you’ll get the illusion of design. But it’s only an illusion.

But also I’m saying there’s an elephant in the room. Before 1859 everyone believed in an illusion of design. After 1859, you either have to try to turn back the clock to deny the elephant, or else somehow accommodate yon elephant - try to hang on to bits of design while denying bits of science, or try to synthesize the two, or leave the old notion behind, or water it down so much that it no longer fits the definition of what is normally meant by a designer.

And I think we’re seeing flavors of all those shades of grey on this thread, with no single rigorously defined designer hypothesis, just individual preferences and opinions. Which is fine, but if there’s no agreed argument for intelligent design then that’s a pretty big flaw.

 

[inocente]

Speaking of putting the cart before the horse, it appears that rabbits acquiring the rabbit trait of “running away” as explained away by evolutionary theory IS putting the cart before the horse because you are assuming (begging the question, actually) that rabbits must have acquired some particularly beneficial trait (AND that trait was subsequently passed on) purely BECAUSE the trait survived the selection process.

What you haven’t disproved (but merely dismissed by virtue of neither permitting nor considering the possibility) is that both the selective mechanisms and the genetic traits may have arisen together from the very beginning by a kind of symbiotic causal relationship between biochemistry and the laws of physics as an inherent and designed feature of the universe itself.

We have no way of knowing whether random changes to DNA could, in fact, give rise to the plethora of physical and behavioral traits which have obtained in nature strictly by virtue of random changes in the genome being selected by the environment. The possibility that random changes have the power to create consistently beneficial and improving sequences of physical and behavioural traits is merely assumed in the ruling out of all other possibilities by the very method of inquiry which ONLY permits natural mechanisms and random events to have been involved in the process in the first place.

This doesn’t prove anything. It simply turns one’s method into one’s metaphysics and assumes, by constraining what will be the only acceptable answers to what has been presupposed as the only methodologically permitted ones, i.e., the only permissible answers are decided before ANY possible answer is actually arrived at.

Ergo, the cart (the scientific method) drives the putative horse (the only acceptable metaphysical conclusion.)

That’s all wrong but I’m not going to discuss it due to the ban.

As I pointed out, sciences also “preordain” answers by the very methods they use for arriving at their own set of preordained answers.

You just talked about DNA, now you say you believe science preordained DNA. Que?

Actually, this is ONLY true if you have a preordained view of God which says finding cures to diseases are against his plan.

So you decide when God does and doesn’t preordain?

You aren’t really trying to insist that God the Creator had absolutely no clue about what he was creating when he brought forth the universe, are you? God just snapped his fingers (metaphorically speaking) and, viola, the universe did its own thing completely and independently of God’s plan or design for it AND that God must have been oblivious to it all as it transpired. Is that what you think?

You guys keep speaking of God in the past tense. I guess deists must be very pleased with this new development in Catholicism .

*I have no clue what you are talking about here. There is no “God-of-the-gaps” involved. The truth is that all of science seeks to intelligently understand how the universe works, thus presupposing that the universe is intelligently designed. If it wasn’t, then there is no reason to assume it can be intelligently reverse engineered to understand how it works.

The fact that we use intelligence to understand the workings of the universe implies it is intelligently designed.*

So the fact that we use intelligence to understand the workings of a pile of cow poop implies it is intelligently designed.

There are flawed arguments and then there are hilariously flawed arguments.

Continued…

Noooooo!

The only “gap” is the one that exists in the imaginations of atheists who accuse theists of arguing from gaps. It is a fabrication – a strawman, actually. No reasonable theist ever has made the argument, as far as I can tell.

The only problem being that it was theologians who coined the term god-of-the-gaps, and it is theologians who accuse certain theists of arguing from gaps, because arguments from ignorance are fallacies.

See theopedia.com/god-of-the-gaps

 

[Peter_Plato]

The only problem being that it was theologians who coined the term god-of-the-gaps, and it is theologians who accuse certain theists of arguing from gaps, because arguments from ignorance are fallacies.

See theopedia.com/god-of-the-gaps

Except that Drummond wasn’t a theologian he was a preacher. Bonhoeffer was showing the error in using gaps as grounds for making a case but didn’t claim any theologians or philosophers actually did, merely that it was unwise to do so. It may have been used by some popular preachers, but those aren’t necessarily qualified theologians. AND throwing in Aquinas as an alleged user of a gaps argument merely demonstrates the writer of the article understands neither Aquinas nor the nature of philosophical arguments - kind of like when you claim intelligent design advocates are guilty of God of the gaps argumentation when what they are doing is using abductive reasoning.

The article you cited sounds like it was written by a seventh grader.

 

[Peter_Plato]

You guys keep speaking of God in the past tense. I guess deists must be very pleased with this new development in Catholicism .

Well, it wouldn’t have made much semantic sense to speak of God creating (present tense) when we were speaking of the past origin of the universe relative to us as speakers. We do happen to exist in time as part of a universe which includes time. Ergo, to speak of the beginning of the universe as a past event relative to us does not deny that relative to God, who is not constrained in time, the origin of the universe wasn’t a past event but an eternal one.

Got any more nits to pick?

 

[Peter_Plato]

That’s all wrong but I’m not going to discuss it due to the ban.

How convenient for you.

 

[Peter_Plato]

I’m saying that if you think of effects as causes and think of causes as effects then sure you’ll get the illusion of design.

I suppose you haven’t heard of Aristotle’s final cause or final causality either, then.

But it’s only an illusion.

Ah, proposing a “gaps” argument of your own, then: If we don’t understand it – a gap exists in our knowledge – whatever is proposed to explain the gap is declared an “illusion” and dismissed. What fun!

The point being that when something is proposed to explain or fill the gaps in our knowledge the act of proposing an explanatory filler of the gap, by itself, does not make the explanation a “gaps” argument. The question ought to be asked whether the explanation works as an adequate or sufficient explanation better than all other proposed explanations. You see, this is what is called making an inference to the best explanation, which you seem to confuse with arguing from a gap. Proposing a filler for the gap is not the same thing as arguing from the gap.

The author of your cited article from theopedia commits the same error when he claims Hawking is a modern example of someone committing a god-of-the-gaps argument. Now Hawking is not a very good philosopher, but in the example cited by the author of the article, Hawking doesn’t even make an argument, he asks a question of those who might propose an argument. Basically, he is asking any readers prone to presenting a gaps argument, “What happens to your argument when all the gaps have been filled by physics? Your case for God dries up if it is the only one to be made.” It is a rhetorical question. Hawking isn’t proposing an argument – at least, not there.

Maybe someday this gap in your understanding of gaps arguments may be resolved by an adequate understanding of what it takes to adequately fill knowledge gaps.

Maybe. Someday.

I don’t want to write a promissory note I can’t honour, which IS the dark side of “gaps” argumentation.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Dear me, Peter. Stop digging, for heaven’s sake. You are already in way over your head.

Random changes do NOT consistently create increasingly beneficial traits. In the most part they are entirely neutral. But if they are detrimental, those having that particular trait will die sooner than those who don’t. Those with a beneficial trait, which doesn’t need to occur very often and doesn’t actually occur very often, live longer.

You only need a VERY slight advantage for that advantage to perpetuate through a breeding group and it then becomes fixed.

Except that you still have to demonstrate that it was indeed “random changes” which CREATED those sustainable, if not beneficial, adaptations. The complexity of the genome is not well understood. To assume it merely evolved from a very basic structure merely through a series of chance alterations to that structure selected by environmental factors over a long period of time still assumes something of the origin of life-producing organic structures, it doesn’t prove or show those assumptions. The whole explanation assumes naturalistic processes all the way down, it doesn’t demonstrate them scientifically. At least admit that much, Brad.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

Post #155, the bit you wrote in bold red.

All Baptists are curious, we’re excellent fellows .

Jesus lived in historical time, but you keep speaking of God in the past tense - “God had a plan” - as if God lives in time, but you said yourself that God is outside time (also in post #155). A very curious Catholic that makes you, Yoda. God doesn’t go through phases, there’s no planning phase, design phase, construction phase. God just is. As in Teresa’s Let nothing disturb you, / Let nothing frighten you, / Everything passes, / God never changes.

I think I’ve answered your question three times now. You appear to have decided that God isn’t really omniscient and instead had to go through a design phase to give later times the illusion of omniscience. Like you’re taking Genesis 1 literally and believe God now has his feet up on the seventh day, or has gone away on vacation and left the world on autopilot. Try thinking of God as always in the present tense. If you think God isn’t in the e-word, or find yourself thinking God is like a human with special powers, try accepting that nowhere is God absent from his creation: “He (the Christian researcher) knows that not one thing in all creation has been done without God, but he knows also that God nowhere takes the place of his creatures. Omnipresent divine activity is everywhere essentially hidden. It never had to be a question of reducing the supreme Being to the rank of a scientific hypothesis.” - Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître (once again)

I have never said that God is a scientific hypothesis. That would be the point of view of the atheist who believes that the only valid hypothesis must be a scientific hypothesis.

Curiously, though, it was Georges Lemaître who opened our eyes to the possibility that time began with the Big Bang, and that therefore God must exist outside time because God is eternal. That is why, as Lemaître puts it, God is essentially everywhere hidden, both in the context of abiogenesis and evolution. Nothing happens without God’s providential design behind the happening.

You are confused here. If we followed your analysis, we could not have any knowledge of how the mind of God works. All revelation from scripture would be false because, according to you, it tells us things we cannot logically believe to be true. You think like an agnostic. You just refuse to put that word after your name.

Genesis, 1000 B.C. : "Then God said, ‘Let there be light.’”

Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980 A.D.

“Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe…. In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased…. As space stretched, the matter and energy in the universe expanded with it and rapidly cooled. The radiation of the cosmic fireball, which, then as now, filled the universe, moved through the spectrum – from gamma rays to X-rays to ultraviolet light; through the rainbow colors of the visible spectrum; into the infrared and radio regions. The remnants of that fireball, the cosmic background radiation, emanating from all parts of the sky can be detected by radio telescopes today. In the early universe, space was brilliantly illuminated.”

What Genesis says is not a scientific hypothesis. But it’s still true. Light illuminated the early universe. And it’s the atheist Carl Sagan who admits it.

The fact that Genesis said something 3000 years ago that was just discovered by modern science in the last century (thanks largely to Lemaitre) remains a marvel of the first order.

Get over it.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

inocente

Have you read John Farrell’s The Day Without Yesterday?

It is an account of Einstein and Lemairtre and the history of the Big Bang theory.

If not, the chapter titled “Cathedrals in Space” would interest you as it explains why Lemaitre was so upset with Pius XII. It was clearly not that the Big Bang theory was consistent with Genesis, but really that Lemaitre was upset that the scientific community would attack the Big Bang with greater gusto once they suspected that the Vatican was promoting it. Lemaitre was clearly conscious that atheist Catholic haters like George Gamow and Fred Hoyle ready to pounce, they would gleefully do so once they got any signal from the Vatican.

 

[Bradski]

Except that you still have to demonstrate that it was indeed “random changes” which CREATED those sustainable, if not beneficial, adaptations.

I’m not going to link to anything that will show how spectacularly misinformed you are - against the rules and I don’t want to get banned. But really, a quick Google search of any reputable site (such as, I don’t know, Berkley Uni) and the subject matter, might persuade you to stop posting such monstrous nonsense.

 

[Aloysium]

I’m not going to link to anything that will show how spectacularly misinformed you are - against the rules and I don’t want to get banned. But really, a quick Google search of any reputable site (such as, I don’t know, Berkley Uni) and the subject matter, might persuade you to stop posting such monstrous nonsense.

You say you don’t want to be banned but keep insulting people because they have a different vision, a Catholic one at that. Why are you here?

 

[Peter_Plato]

I’m not going to link to anything that will show how spectacularly misinformed you are - against the rules and I don’t want to get banned. But really, a quick Google search of any reputable site (such as, I don’t know, Berkley Uni) and the subject matter, might persuade you to stop posting such monstrous nonsense.

You don’t mean “spectacularly misinformed” – well, alright, you may MEAN it, but that is neither here nor there. The real issue is whether the prevailing view – about things that the prevailing view has no privileged insight into – permits anything like an “informed view” regarding what actually happened over the past tens of billions of years.

As far aes I can tell, there is no such beast as an “informed view” of the matter, so “spectacularly misinformed” means something like you don’t cotton much to my thoughts on the subject. Okay. I am spectacularly misinformed about things we are ALL spectacularly UNinformed about. Well, rat pack guy, that means, essentially, that I am no less misinformed than the Berkeley (note I am not “spectacularly” misspelling the word) Uni people who know about as little as anyone else on the matter.

Interesting sidebar which goes a long way to proving my point:
Neil DeGrasse Tyson apparently thinks the chances that the universe is an intelligently designed simulated environment are “very high,” which has caused PZ Myers a complete conniption fit. Such “monstrous nonsense” is not reserved to the scientifically illiterate such as -]you and/-] I. Nice when agnostic/atheists agree to disagree like this about the prevailing and “settled” informed view.

techinsider.io/neil-degrasse-tyson-thinks-the-universe-might-be-a-simulation-2016-4

 

[Bradski]

You say you don’t want to be banned but keep insulting people because they have a different vision, a Catholic one at that. Why are you here?

What Peter is talking about isn’t a ‘different vision’. Especially not a particular Catholic one. He is talking about basic science and making basic mistakes. At least I hope he is, because I’d hate to think he was intentionally fudging the facts to bolster a religious viewpoint.

There are well over 3,000 views on this thread alone so I think it’s safe to say that people are interested in it. I’d rather they didn’t get information about basic aspects of biology from someone who patently does not understand it. Or perhaps does understand it but would rather we ‘discuss the controversy’ as the idiots from the Discovery Institute would have it. I mean, all scientists don’t agree on everything (hence Peter’s facile attempt at redirection)

Again, there is a very good reason why this is a banned subject: The only people who want to bring it up want to discredit it and they know so little about it (otherwise they would realise they would be wasting their time) that it becomes embarrassing.

 

[inocente]

Except that Drummond wasn’t a theologian he was a preacher. Bonhoeffer was showing the error in using gaps as grounds for making a case but didn’t claim any theologians or philosophers actually did, merely that it was unwise to do so. It may have been used by some popular preachers, but those aren’t necessarily qualified theologians. AND throwing in Aquinas as an alleged user of a gaps argument merely demonstrates the writer of the article understands neither Aquinas nor the nature of philosophical arguments - kind of like when you claim intelligent design advocates are guilty of God of the gaps argumentation when what they are doing is using abductive reasoning.

The article you cited sounds like it was written by a seventh grader.

Drummond was a professor of theology and wrote on natural theology. Here’s one of his books at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Bonhoeffer was a theologian and pastor. The quote is from a letter he wrote from prison prior to being executed by the Nazis.

Arguments for God which rely on gaps in our knowledge are by definition arguments from ignorance and therefore fallacies.

 

[inocente]

Well, it wouldn’t have made much semantic sense to speak of God creating (present tense) when we were speaking of the past origin of the universe relative to us as speakers. We do happen to exist in time as part of a universe which includes time. Ergo, to speak of the beginning of the universe as a past event relative to us does not deny that relative to God, who is not constrained in time, the origin of the universe wasn’t a past event but an eternal one.

Got any more nits to pick?

It’s a key point. Intelligent design fans who speak of creation as a past event rather than something ongoing, have to agree an explanation for new stars and new diseases etc. Did God design the Zika virus before the big bang but only just release it, or did it evolve instead of God designing it, etc.

Intelligent design fans don’t agree on what that explanation should be: did God design in the past but not anymore, or did God design raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens but not creepy-crawlies and diseases, etc.

Whichever explanation you guys choose must be compatible with a living God, since otherwise you’re a deist, and with an unchanging God who didn’t go through a design phase then a creation phase, etc.

There is no single intelligent design hypothesis written with anything like the rigor, detail and testability as the standard scientific theory, and a major reason appears to be that intelligent design fans can’t agree on this question of time. And if you can’t even agree on the argument then that would seem to be a flaw greater than which cannot be conceived.