Intelligent Design is Self-refuting

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Aquinas11 said:
You’re conflating
(A) an entity changing with
(B) a cause brought about by the entity changing.
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If the cause is not always acting then the cause had to change from not-acting to acting. What caused that change? Was it uncaused, or was there a meta-cause switching the cause from inactive to active and back to inactive?

Changes that start and stop in time imply further changes back up the line of meta-causes. If changes are caused then all changes can be traced to a change in one or more of the causes.

An always on, or always off, cause does not change over time, not does its effect. If the effect is changing then we can trace that change back to a change in one or more of the causes. Rinse and repeat.
 
IWantGod said:
What do you mean by “Specified complex intelligence”.
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I follow the ID definition of CSI: Complex Specified Information, but I apply it to intelligence.
And what do you mean by the idea that it can appear without intelligent design?
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Use any reasonable synonym you want. How about: “be caused without intelligent design.”
 
looskanal said:
Evolution favors diversity even if it means that some of us won’t survive.
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Evolution doesn’t favour anything. Evolution is just the mechanism for biological diversity, but it isn’t intentionally creating diversity for the sake of biological survival. You are now taking a leap and saying that evolution is the reason we have a diversity of beliefs about reality.

When you use evolution to explain everything it just becomes a pseudo science.

The reason there are different God’s in our belief systems is because they are different ways of explaining or understanding the same thing - the object of our experience. But they cannot all be correct.

However some belief systems like Christianity claim that they are in possession of divine revelation from the true God, Christianity thinks that it has received genuine information from the creator. I agree with them.
 
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rossum said:
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Wesrock:
Yes, we do have to be careful when we read the Bible, which is why we have the Church as a guiding and interpretive authority.
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And when the Catholic Church expounds authoritatively on the nature of God, it uses words. Whoops, looks like we have th same problem all over again. God being “beyond words” causes a huge philosophical problem. See the eighth Ox Herding Picture for one possible solution.
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You can be smart if you want. I said we had to be careful and mindful with words, not that we couldn’t use them.
 
Aquinas11 said:
But your critique of ID requires one to concede Iphones have a designer yet that humans (more complex than Iphones) do not, which defies all logic.
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Humans evolve, iPhones do not. We can easily observe the designers of iPhones; we cannot easily observe the designers of humans. Or have you have observed Amaterasu at work?

ID has tried, and failed, to show that evolution cannot increase both information and complexity. There is an observed source of the complexity in humans. There are no observations of Vishnu creating that complexity.
 
rossum said:
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buffalo:
Right, infinite regress is not tenable. We agree. The uncaused cause is.
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An uncaused cause is not designed. If the uncaused cause is God, then ID has failed as science. If God is omniscient then He is also complex and ID fails on its own terms, because something more complex than Wikipedia exists and is not designed.

As my OP says, ID has failed on its own terms.
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Again, why must that which is omniscient be complex?
 
rossum said:
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Aquinas11:
You’re conflating
(A) an entity changing with
(B) a cause brought about by the entity changing.
Click to expand...
If the cause is not always acting then the cause had to change from not-acting to acting. What caused that change? Was it uncaused, or was there a meta-cause switching the cause from inactive to active and back to inactive?

Changes that start and stop in time imply further changes back up the line of meta-causes. If changes are caused then all changes can be traced to a change in one or more of the causes.

An always on, or always off, cause does not change over time, not does its effect. If the effect is changing then we can trace that change back to a change in one or more of the causes. Rinse and repeat.
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Unless God touches all points in time in an unchanging way from his eternal now. You’re argument assumes God also has sequential moments, which we would just reject.
 
Wesrock said:
Unless God touches all points in time in an unchanging way from his eternal now. You’re argument assumes God also has sequential moments, which we would just reject.
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The effects of God’s actions, such as parting the sea, do have sequential moments. My criticisms probe the link between the non-sequential God and the sequential effects.

I am following a standard Madhyamika Buddhist criticism which goes back to Nargajuna here.

However, it is not directly relevant to the logical failure of ID. An undesigned God as First Cause breaks the ID logic, however He acts.
 
rossum said:
They have tried to come up with a way to objectively detect design, but have failed. Instead they have fallen back on asserting design: “It sure looks designed to me.”
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Please read the posts. ID has proposed a way to objectively detect intelligence. Design, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

ID argument:

If beings exist that store digital information and store the instructions to manipulate that information then those beings are intelligent.
  1. We observe such intelligent beings in every living cell (DNA, m-RNA).
    Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology | TED Talk
    (Note: This intelligence even has a detection and error handling routine!)
  2. The level, complexity and specification of information necessary to replicate (code and instruction) in every living cell mathematically determines that randomness and natural selection are improbable causes.
  3. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know generally that specified information — whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal — always arises from an intelligent source.
  4. We conclude that living cells come from an intelligent source.
I think designed as well but not necessary to the argument.

The claim is easily falsified: Evidence one intelligent being that is an effect of an non-intelligent cause.
 
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Wesrock said:
Again, why must that which is omniscient be complex?
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He thinks this because the human brain is complex and intelligence has appeared within that physical construct. It’s easy to assume from this that all intelligence is the direct result of complexity. But it doesn’t follow necessarily that all logically possible kinds of intellect is a result of complexity or that any degree of complexity can be the sufficient cause or origin of intelligence.
 
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rossum said:
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Wesrock:
Unless God touches all points in time in an unchanging way from his eternal now. You’re argument assumes God also has sequential moments, which we would just reject.
Click to expand...
The effects of God’s actions, such as parting the sea, do have sequential moments. My criticisms probe the link between the non-sequential God and the sequential effects.

I am following a standard Madhyamika Buddhist criticism which goes back to Nargajuna here.

However, it is not directly relevant to the logical failure of ID. An undesigned God as First Cause breaks the ID logic, however He acts.
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The parting of the sea occurred sequentially in our reality, but there was no moment God started and stopped on his end. But like you say, that’s another topic.
 
What ID really is, when you peal back the layers, is a fallacious argument from incredulity.

In reality, as I’ve said before, detecting design is an extremely tricky thing. When the first pulsars were detected, radio astronomers briefly thought they’d discovered intelligent signals, until the more mundane explanation of fast-rotating neutron stars came along.
 
niceatheist said:
What ID really is, when you peal back the layers, is a fallacious argument from incredulity.

In reality, as I’ve said before, detecting design is an extremely tricky thing. When the first pulsars were detected, radio astronomers briefly thought they’d discovered intelligent signals, until the more mundane explanation of fast-rotating neutron stars came along.
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This here is why I think the ID argument is very weak/unhelpful.
 
To my mind, it serves neither a scientific or theological purpose. Theologically, it’s like declaring “there’s God’s fingerprint!” which means what ID advocates are really seeking is a means to get rid of faith as a justification for belief. For science, it’s utterly worthless. You can’t have a scientific hypothesis where one of the variables is “God’s hand”. You might as well not have science at all.
 
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