Overwhelming evidence for Design?

[tonyrey]

Metaphysical and epistemological evidence:

1. The success of science is based on the power of reason and the intelligibility of the universe.
2. The power of reason is not necessary for survival.
3. The universe need not be intelligible.
4. Each of these facts require a separate explanation.
5. To attribute either fact to chance is an inadequate explanation.
6. To attribute both of these facts to chance is a hopelessly inadequate explanation.
7. The most adequate, economical and compelling explanation is Design.

Historical evidence:

1. Life need not exist.
2. Life is immensely complex.
3. Immense complexity is not necessary for survival.
4. Immense complexity requires a explanation.
5. To attribute immense complexity to chance is a hopelessly inadequate explanation.
6. The most adequate, economical and compelling explanation is Design.

Personal evidence:

1. Persons are conscious and purposeful.
2. Impersonal objects are neither conscious nor purposeful.
3. The origin of consciousness has never been explained.
4. The origin of purpose has never been explained.
5. To attribute both consciousness and purpose to chance is a hopelessly inadequate explanation.
6. The most adequate, economical and compelling explanation is Design.

Moral evidence:

1. A purposeless universe is valueless.
2. The universe is valuable because it sustains life.
3. Life is valuable because it is a source of opportunities.
4. Rational existence is immensely valuable because it is a source of opportunities for moral development.
5. To attribute both rational existence and moral development to chance is a hopelessly inadequate explanation.
6. The most adequate, economical and compelling explanation is Design.

 

[Sister_Terese]

When one sees a beautiful building or a monument such as Mt. Rushmore, one thinks, “This is man-made.” This is natural. That is called design. When we see beauty in nature, such as flowers, trees, stars, and other life forms, we know that these are not man-made, but we still recognize design. We don’t look at a beautiful building such as a cathedral and say, “Oh, somehow that building came into existence by chance–by an act of chaos–those bricks somehow found each other and, after billions of years, managed to come together into this beautiful structure.” That is absurdity to the point of ridiculousness. Yet, this is exactly what we are told to believe (an act of faith, mind you!) regarding the universe and how it came into being.

I’d rather put my faith into an Omnipotent Designer than some random, chaotic theory. For me, it would take a greater act of faith to believe that life and the universe came into being by some act of chaos than an Awesome Designer Who created all things from nothing. But, that’s just me.

 

[itullian]

please excuse my lack of scholarship on all of the above.

i really want to make that leap of believing in a designer. from there is another story.

why can’t it be true that

ok, its billion to one chance that we’re here. but on that billion to one shot planet, of course its gonna look like design because we’re here.
it just looks like its designed because the billion to one shot is us.
of course its gonna look like that,

i dont know if im getting my meaning across as im not so good with words like you.

but we could just be the odds working out, couldn’t we?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Scientism is a great hiding place for atheists.

Although not an atheist, Neil Degasse Tyson has an interesting argument (see video link below) where he looks at the thinking of great scientists from Ptolemy through Newton, Huygens, LaPlace and others and attempts to show how their belief in intelligent design acted as a “stopper” to their scientific thought.

As an example, highlighted by Tyson, when Newton talks about the things he understood, there is no mention of God, but when he realizes that he cannot account for the stability of the universe, he invokes God. The inference Tyson makes is that God or intelligent design “stopped” Newton from figuring it out. In effect his invocation of intelligent design stopped Newton from trying to figure it out.

Tyson then concludes that ID is a philosophy of ignorance whereas science is the philosophy of investigation and explanation. If God is responsible for what we can’t discover then the issue is about scientific progress and discovery. At the end of the video Tyson makes the statement that he is deeply concerned about what lost brilliance may have expressed itself in the past, but did not because of belief in God.

By way of rebuttal, we might make the observation that Newton and presumably the other theist scientists, to be consistent, must have believed in the God hypothesis for everything in the physical universe. Their belief as Christians was in the God who “spread out” the earth and heavens, who creates and maintains all the universe. So, if, as Tyson maintains, belief in God stopped Newton from trying to understand, then why didn’t this belief act from the very beginning of his career, when he “didn’t understand” the things he came to understand. If Tyson’s hypothesis is correct, then Newton would have been stopped from the very beginning and would not have even begun his scientific career.

I think a better of understanding of “God did it” in a typical worldview is as a benign placeholder to demarcate what is not known from what is known and does not causally “stop” investigation, merely marks it as beyond current state of understanding.

Tyson is fear mongering here in an attempt to denigrate religious belief.

It is possible to turn the argument around and make a claim that Tyson’s opposition to intelligent design serves as a filter to analyze past events from a particular materialistic perspective rather than in a completely unbiased way.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ti3mtDC2fQo&feature=related

 

[Regular_Atheist]

Your reasons are nice. I like them. They’re cute, and I mean that in a nice way. You have a nice outlook on the world. I don’t, however, find any of them very compelling.

 

[tonyrey]

When one sees a beautiful building or a monument such as Mt. Rushmore, one thinks, “This is man-made.” This is natural. That is called design. When we see beauty in nature, such as flowers, trees, stars, and other life forms, we know that these are not man-made, but we still recognize design. We don’t look at a beautiful building such as a cathedral and say, “Oh, somehow that building came into existence by chance–by an act of chaos–those bricks somehow found each other and, after billions of years, managed to come together into this beautiful structure.” That is absurdity to the point of ridiculousness. Yet, this is exactly what we are told to believe (an act of faith, mind you!) regarding the universe and how it came into being.

I’d rather put my faith into an Omnipotent Designer than some random, chaotic theory. For me, it would take a greater act of faith to believe that life and the universe came into being by some act of chaos than an Awesome Designer Who created all things from nothing. But, that’s just me.

I’m happy to add that it’s not just you but a view shared by the vast majority of persons on this planet for thousands of years. Thank you for the aesthetic evidence for Design! Beauty is not only in the mind of the beholder but also in nature.

Over the tomb of the great German philosopher Kant there is an inscription:

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing admiration and awe - the sky above me and the moral law within me.”

These words are taken from his Critique of Practical Reason which with theCritique of Pure Reason marks the beginning of modern philosophy. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy his ideas are described as “stunning”:

His practical ideas, such as the Categorical Imperative and its implications (1785), informed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Political and Economic Covenants (1966), and the International Criminal Court (2002)…

Kant gave the first account of the evolutionary reciprocity of space-time and momentum-energy, and formulated the first general law of free field radiation (1747). He suggested the conceptual solution of the three body problem, which emerges in the interplay of Earth, Moon, and Sun (1754). He was the first to construct a detailed evolutionary cosmology (1755). His ideas on biospherical dynamics allowed him to predict the rhythms of the monsoon and the oscillation of coastal winds (1755-1757). He suggested that the building blocks of matter are energy bubbles (1756)—an idea that is useful today in superstring theory in the guise of Calabi-Yau manifolds.

plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-development/

But his supreme achievement was in philosophy:

“The highest formal unity, which is based on concepts of reason alone, is the systematical and purposeful unity of things, and it is the speculative interest of reason which makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated in the purpose of a supreme wisdom. Such a principle opens to our reason in the field of experience quite new views, how to connect the things of the world according to teleological laws and thus to arrive at their greatest systematic unity…
For the purely speculative use of reason, therefore, the Supreme Being, remains, no doubt, an ideal only but an ideal without a flaw, a concept which finishes and crowns the whole of human knowledge and the objective reality of which, though it cannot be proved can neither be disproved in that way.” - *Critique of Pure Reason

 

[tonyrey]

Your reasons are nice. I like them. They’re cute, and I mean that in a nice way. You have a nice outlook on the world. I don’t, however, find any of them very compelling.

Thank you for your appreciative comments. Do you have a more compelling explanation?

 

[tonyrey]

Tyson then concludes that ID is a philosophy of ignorance whereas science is the philosophy of investigation and explanation.

He is obviously unaware that science is based on philosophical principles, e.g. :

1. The universe is intelligible.
2. Reasoning is capable of discovering and understanding facts about the universe.
3. The laws of nature will remain constant.

If God is responsible for what we can’t discover then the issue is about scientific progress and discovery.

With greater cogency one can say that if purposeless matter is responsible for what we can and can’t discover we only imagine that we are purposeful!

At the end of the video Tyson makes the statement that he is deeply concerned about what lost brilliance may have expressed itself in the past, but did not because of belief in God.

By way of rebuttal, we might make the observation that Newton and presumably the other theist scientists, to be consistent, must have believed in the God hypothesis for everything in the physical universe. Their belief as Christians was in the God who “spread out” the earth and heavens, who creates and maintains all the universe. So, if, as Tyson maintains, belief in God stopped Newton from trying to understand, then why didn’t this belief act from the very beginning of his career, when he “didn’t understand” the things he came to understand. If Tyson’s hypothesis is correct, then Newton would have been stopped from the very beginning and would not have even begun his scientific career.

It is possible to turn the argument around and make a claim that Tyson’s opposition to intelligent design serves as a filter to analyze past events from a particular materialistic perspective rather than in a completely unbiased way.

Precisely!

 

[tonyrey]

please excuse my lack of scholarship on all of the above.

i really want to make that leap of believing in a designer. from there is another story.

why can’t it be true that

ok, its billion to one chance that we’re here. but on that billion to one shot planet, of course its gonna look like design because we’re here.

You’re assuming we could be here without Design. You need to explain **how **purposeless things can become purposeful persons.

it just looks like its designed because the billion to one shot is us.

of course its gonna look like that,

but we could just be the odds working out, couldn’t we?

It’s not a question of improbability but impossibility - unless you can explain how things that can’t think succeed in becoming able to think! No one has ever succeeded in performing that miracle.

 

[rossum]

You’re assuming we could be here without Design. You need to explain **how **purposeless things can become purposeful persons.

You are reifying purpose. Since this reification is an error, there is nothing to explain. An early embryo, a zygote, has not brain. Without a brain, is cannot form any purpose.

The purposes comes later as its brain develops. Plural purposes, since during our lives we have many different purposes at different times.

It’s not a question of improbability but impossibility - unless you can explain how things that can’t think succeed in becoming able to think! No one has ever succeeded in performing that miracle.

Every human zygote performs it. It is not that difficult. Billions of people have done it. You perception of the difficulty is incorrect.

rossum

 

[tonyrey]

*You’re assuming we could be here without Design. You need to explain **how ***

Design is not an abstraction but an activity. You go on to state “form a purpose” thereby contradicting yourself!

An early embryo, a zygote, has not brain. Without a brain, is cannot form any purpose.

The purposes comes later as its brain develops. Plural purposes, since during our lives we have many different purposes at different times.

You are assuming that purposeful activity is derived solely from brains - which is inconsistent with your belief in spiritual development.

It’s not a question of improbability but impossibility - unless you can explain how things that can’t think succeed in becoming able to think! No one has ever succeeded in performing that miracle.

Every human zygote performs it. It is not that difficult. Billions of people have done it. You perception of the difficulty is incorrect.

You are assuming that purposeful activity is derived solely from brains - which is inconsistent with your belief in spiritual development.

 

[ReapReason]

You are reifying purpose. Since this reification is an error, there is nothing to explain. An early embryo, a zygote, has not brain. Without a brain, is cannot form any purpose.

The purposes comes later as its brain develops. Plural purposes, since during our lives we have many different purposes at different times.

You are merely describing the sequence involved in the emergence of intelligence and then assuming that because a particular quality emerges as a result of that sequence that therefore the the effect can be reduce entirely to the nature and processes directly involved with the function of any emergent quality.

But Science stops with merely describing measurable events and does not speculate on the philosophical question of whether mind and matter are essentially the same thing. Science says no more of the matter; because it can’t say anything else. But you go further than science by implying that a correlation between things means that an effect, in terms of cause, is necessarily and entirely reducible to the “nature” of the processes by which a quality has activity. This is a philosophical argument, going beyond the bounds of what science actually tell us; and therefore you do have a responsibility to answer those philosophers who argue that a correlation between things is not evidence that they are the same thing or that an effect can be sufficiently reduced to only one type of cause.

The problem is, since there is an intrinsic logical distinction between intelligent activity and non-intelligence, and that the emergence of intelligent activity involves a correlation with non-rational activities, the legitimate question arises to how non-rational objects can form a relationship that has the effect of rational self knowledge and is capable of freely following its own goals and purposes. It is not enough to point out a correlation between two activities since that does not in any way address whether it is logically possible for non-rational objects to be the intrinsic cause of rational self-knowledge.

It seems to me that once you understand the logical distinction between the two activities and their qualities, the answer becomes self evident.

It is not logically possible for non-rational objects to be the intrinsic cause of the existence of self knowledge and its rational activity; despite any functional correlation between the two natures. It is impossible because it would involve getting something out of absolutely nothing given that an intrinsically non-rational object is always a non-rational object regardless of its relationship with something else or whether it forms a functional part of an entire being.

 

[prodigalson2011]

You are reifying purpose. Since this reification is an error, there is nothing to explain. An early embryo, a zygote, has not brain. Without a brain, is cannot form any purpose.

This actually only serves to further the design argument. In the absence of a brain, the embryo still acts towards a very definite and incredibly complex development. The entire point of “design” is that the possibility of such things emerging in the absence of an intelligent and purposeful “plan” is vanishingly small, and bordering on the ridiculous.

The purposes comes later as its brain develops. Plural purposes, since during our lives we have many different purposes at different times.

The zygote/embryo is already working towards the purpose of becoming a person. You are conflating objective purpose with subjective purpose. The former is the end towards which a thing is geared towards in and of itself (what is, in Aristotelian thought, known as a “final cause”; for example, the “final cause” of an embryo is to create a functional organism) and the latter are ends or goals determined by independent intellects (what we would call “will.”) Just because an individual human purpose is not present in the earliest stages of the human being does not mean purpose is absent all together. To the contrary, it is working towards the purpose of creating such a being as can have a will.

Every human zygote performs it. It is not that difficult. Billions of people have done it. You perception of the difficulty is incorrect.

This is like stating that because any calculator can solve any equation in a matter of microseconds, no equation is difficult. Yet a lot of thought and programming went into developing the software of that calculator to enable it to perform such functions. Can you design a calculator from scratch?

Now, would designing a calculator or, more to the point in this case, something as intricate as an organic cell or DNA be difficult for an omnipotent and omniscient being? Of course not. But we still cannot deny the breathtaking intricacy of such a design and must admit that it is beyond our ability to replicate so far. For simple human beings (and by human beings I mean the conscious and willful “entities” that identify themselves as persons, not the self-regulating processes that create their bodies), these things are indeed “difficult.”

 

[rossum]

Design is not an abstraction but an activity.

If design is an activity, then you have to show evidence of the existence of actor performing that activity.

You are assuming that purposeful activity is derived solely from brains - which is inconsistent with your belief in spiritual development.

No. I am talking in this case about human beings. We disagree on the different forms of non-material beings that exist: devas, asuras, kinnaras etc. That would only distract from the argument. Remember also, that the Buddhist analysis of a human being differs from the Christian one. There is no soul, and all the constituents, both material and immaterial, change.

The constituents present in an early embryo are not sufficient to form a purpose. Consciousness is lacking, for example.

rossum

 

[rossum]

In the absence of a brain, the embryo still acts towards a very definite and incredibly complex development.

In the absence of a brain, hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine to form H2O, not H6O or HO2. When you calculate the odds of a few billion atoms behaving in exactly that way, you get the usual hugely improbable number. Chemistry does not require design, all it requires is valency.

The entire point of “design” is that the possibility of such things emerging in the absence of an intelligent and purposeful “plan” is vanishingly small, and bordering on the ridiculous.

So, what is the probability of the existence of your proposed designer? If that probability is smaller than the first probability, then you still lose. A probability of one in 100 million is less unlikely than a probability of one in a billion. You cannot compare probabilities if you only have one side of the comparison.

What is the probability of your proposed designer existing?

rossum

 

[grannymh]

You are reifying purpose. Since this reification is an error, there is nothing to explain. An early embryo, a zygote, has not brain. Without a brain, is cannot form any purpose.

The purposes comes later as its brain develops. Plural purposes, since during our lives we have many different purposes at different times.

Every human zygote performs it. It is not that difficult. Billions of people have done it. You perception of the difficulty is incorrect.

rossum

Personally, I see “design” everywhere. I am visited by a female cardinal, the first one I have ever identified. She is an elegant design!

I do wish to add a bit of clarification about the zygote. From the moment of conception due to two loving humans, human nature is present. It needs a lot of development, but right from the start there is human nature. Human nature, per se, has a purpose which is to share in the life of the Divine Creator Who is more than an intelligent designer. Note: this is the Catholic teaching.

 

[prodigalson2011]

In the absence of a brain, hydrogen and oxygen atoms combine to form H2O, not H6O or HO2. When you calculate the odds of a few billion atoms behaving in exactly that way, you get the usual hugely improbable number. Chemistry does not require design, all it requires is valency.

Valency itself is not self-explanatory. As one of the functional principles of our universe, it, too, makes up a part of the “design.” There is no self-evident reason that the forces that create the property of valency should exist.

So, what is the probability of the existence of your proposed designer? If that probability is smaller than the first probability, then you still lose. A probability of one in 100 million is less unlikely than a probability of one in a billion. You cannot compare probabilities if you only have one side of the comparison.

What is the probability of your proposed designer existing?

Calculating exactly such a probability requires material data. As God is understood to be an immaterial being, such a calculation, in its purest sense, is impossible. Nevertheless, since I don’t have time right now to elaborate in my own words I’ll quote a leading theistic authority on the matter:

“So let’s talk first of the existence of contingent beings. Here I explained that contingent beings are more probable given God’s existence than on atheism. Dr. Krauss will have to say that the existence of contingent beings is just as probable on atheism as it is on theism. But that seems incorrect because atheism has no explanation for the existence of contingent beings.”

“…given the absolute beginning of the universe, the beginning of the quantum vacuum, God’s existence is obviously more probable than it would have been without it.”

“As to the fine-tuning of the universe, all Dr. Krauss said was that the universe is not fine-tuned for human life. I agree completely. It is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, embodied, interactive agents, but not necessarily human beings. And the chances of that happening are so infinitesimal that it’s far more probable to think that this is the result of design.”

"In tonight’s debate I’ve tried to show you that God’s existence is more probable given certain facts, than it would have been without them. And that is, by definition, what it means to say that there’s evidence for God’s existence.

First of all, we looked at the existence of contingent beings, and I explained that given the existence of God, it is more probable that contingent beings would exist than on atheism because on atheism there is no explanation for the existence of contingent beings. And to try and say that there need not be an explanation for the existence of the universe is arbitrary and unjustified. It commits the Taxi-Cab Fallacy. So I think the very existence of contingent beings makes God’s existence more probable than it otherwise would have been.

Secondly, what of the origin of the universe? I used both philosophical arguments and scientific evidence to show that the universe began to exist. Dr. Krauss dropped his objections to the philosophical arguments. We saw that while the infinite is a useful mathematical concept, when you try to translate it into the real world, it results in self-contradictory situations and, therefore, the past must be finite. And we saw, secondly, that this is indeed what science has confirmed. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem shows that the quantum vacuum out of which our material state has evolved cannot be eternal in the past but must have had a beginning. The Hartle-Hawking model itself that Dr. Krauss has appealed to involves an absolute beginning of the universe.

He says, however, that this universe explains how it came into existence from absolute non-being. And I contradicted that by saying that the point from which the universe quantum tunnels is not nothing on these models. Listen to what Hartle and Hawking write in their scholarly article on this. They say,

The volume vanishes . . . at the north and south poles, even though these are perfectly regular points of the four-geometry. One, therefore, would not expect the wave function to vanish at the vanishing three-volume.

In the case of the universe, we would interpret the fact that the wave function can be finite and non-zero at the zero three-geometry as allowing . . . topological fluctuations of the three-geometry.17

So there they’re clearly not talking about something from nothing. Indeed, I mean, think about it, folks: there is no physics of non-being. That’s absurd! There’s only a physics of things that exist, that are real. So it’s impossible for physics to explain how being could arise from non-being. There is no physics of non-being. And, therefore, given that the universe did have an absolute beginning, I think it fairly cries out for the existence of transcendent cause of the universe, which is most plausibly identified as God, rather than some abstract object.

What about the fine-tuning of the universe? Here Dr. Krauss attacked one example of fine-tuning, the low entropy condition, and he says that this is explicable by a mechanism that determines the fine-tuning. I beg to differ. Robin Collins, who has occupied himself extensively with this, writes, “The universe started in a very low entropy state. . . . It is enormously improbable for the universe to have started in the macro-state necessary for the existence of life. . . . The various ways of avoiding this improbability are all highly problematic.”18 And, in particular, he looks at Penrose’s suggestion that the low entropy is the result of a special law and says that Penrose’s proposal has not been accepted by the majority of physicists today.

So, look, we’ve got this universe that in multiple ways is fine-tuned for our existence. And that obviously, I think, makes the existence of God more probable than it would have been without them.

It is highly improbable that this fine-tuning is going to go away. Ernan McMullin of the University of Notre Dame says, “It seems safe to say that later theory, no matter how different, will turn up approximately the same . . . numbers. And the numerous constraints that have to be imposed upon these numbers . . . are too specific and too numerous to evaporate entirely.”19 So fine-tuning is a physical feature of the universe, and I think it’s better explained by God.

Quickly then, what about moral values and duties? Here Dr. Krauss said you can define “kind” and “compassionate” independent of God. Of course, you can! That is a question of moral semantics. Mine is a question concerning moral ontology, that is to say, not the definition or meaning of terms but their grounding in reality. Apart from God there is no foundation for objective moral values and duties. Therefore, if you believe they exist, then you should believe in God.

Finally, the resurrection of Jesus. He’s never denied those historical facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. And that gives us good reason to believe that the best explanation of these facts is that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. And that entails that God exists."

Read more: reasonablefaith.org/the-craig-krauss-debate-at-north-carolina-state-university#ixzz23NSPTT31

 

[oval]

No matter what if a bio entity exists, that which allows the entity to exist is going to seem purpoesful…relative to the entity’s existence.

So with the reasoning, birds would say we are the fight masters, God exists and flys. Humans cannot fly, is there any evidence which shows birds feel superior? no and there are parrots with huge vocab’s…and they do not behave aloof to man and recognize territory in keeping with provisions which allow the cycle of nature as we know it.

Design arguments seem to boil down to convenience for bio-consciousness in being allowed to exist and assume human style reason to be at the helm. We could say logically that everything purposeful requires something purposeful in premise…but that is not the found design argument…the design argument always wants to mesh in human consciousness into the picture because within it, reason allows for the comprehensions and sophistication in environment allowing the full human package to exist…how do we know the survival advantage reason rests in the premise or God figure…we can say mathematics is the common ground language which establishes a nature to the premise in creation and there-bye a reasoning God…but other then human surviving capabilities what other sign is there in order to maintain this wild philosophical humanistic declaration? IOW how can a philosophical point be made which assumes reason is the sole premise and not…something else unimaginably different…even if a rational which is assorted in nature…perhaps a perception in awareness similar to compound eyes in a critter compared to the single eye and restricted in part to the moment to moment happening in a participating realism…this would fit in very nicely with probability and a possible need which m,ay be interfering allowing the order in the universe…determinism may be a reality in each moment for the moment…but collectively non-deterministic…this allows a consciousness to order in all at the moment only. Another layer of time yet entirely multifaceted with infinite compound eye-god participation

I can buy a car or make a car…it is determined that I will drive the car but…the experience is not determined…at each moment we have, the premise just before the moment is determined and all thats left is time…where is consciousness or will for the exact present moment…? it is in fact absent in reality, yet thought generated the exact doing in the moment…we cannot look at a whole vase of flowers at any given moment in detail…but with compound moment to moment reasoning with no restriction on time we could consciously take in all…all at once. Is this the God-mind I wonder…can we prove that it is not…can man show a realistically human-god mind while also trying to show a purposeful creation? I think this is a matter for looking at how, order does what it does and so on. If nothing is added to knowledge other then hope and flourish ect, whats the use of any philosophical idea at all…the philosophical in its nature is supposed to add to inquiry in the whole investigative…thats ultimately what its for…we already know a peace initiative. It seems to me the design idea can only revv up tired engines because there is zero dots to be joined with acquiring a better grasp in our origin ( scientific-product-anything?). So how could contemporary philosophy be even close to being on the right track…it goes no where.

 

[Sister_Terese]

You are merely describing the sequence involved in the emergence of intelligence and then assuming that because a particular quality emerges as a result of that sequence that therefore the the effect can be reduce entirely to the nature and processes directly involved with the function of any emergent quality.

But Science stops with merely describing measurable events and does not speculate on the philosophical question of whether mind and matter are essentially the same thing. Science says no more of the matter; because it can’t say anything else. But you go further than science by implying that a correlation between things means that an effect, in terms of cause, is necessarily and entirely reducible to the “nature” of the processes by which a quality has activity. This is a philosophical argument, going beyond the bounds of what science actually tell us; and therefore you do have a responsibility to answer those philosophers who argue that a correlation between things is not evidence that they are the same thing or that an effect can be sufficiently reduced to only one type of cause.

The problem is, since there is an intrinsic logical distinction between intelligent activity and non-intelligence, and that the emergence of intelligent activity involves a correlation with non-rational activities, the legitimate question arises to how non-rational objects can form a relationship that has the effect of rational self knowledge and is capable of freely following its own goals and purposes. It is not enough to point out a correlation between two activities since that does not in any way address whether it is logically possible for non-rational objects to be the intrinsic cause of rational self-knowledge.

It seems to me that once you understand the logical distinction between the two activities and their qualities, the answer becomes self evident.

It is not logically possible for non-rational objects to be the intrinsic cause of the existence of self knowledge and its rational activity; despite any functional correlation between the two natures. It is impossible because it would involve getting something out of absolutely nothing given that an intrinsically non-rational object is always a non-rational object regardless of its relationship with something else or whether it forms a functional part of an entire being.

Wow…I’m sure you understand what you just wrote, but I sure didn’t. It seems that a very simple concept is made almost unintelligible. I guess you know what you’re talking about, though!

 

[Peter_Plato]

If design is an activity, then you have to show evidence of the existence of actor performing that activity.

rossum

In Stephen Meyer and William Dembski’s formulations of the intelligent design argument there is no need to demonstrate the actual existence of the “actor” performing as designer, instead they rely on demonstrating that an activity itself can be shown to be impossible without an agent.

Both rely on demonstrating their claim using the idea of information as having either specified or functional complexity or both. They both demonstrate that in the case of the origin of life the insufficient probabilistic resources available to bring about the event (the origin of biological information in the cell that has highly specified and functional complexity) make the event impossible without some kind of intelligent agent.

As an example to demonstrate their reasoning, suppose you spend an afternoon observing the behaviour of ants milling about an anthole. After some hours you notice the dark colour and positioning of the ants on the light concrete appears to resemble the letter R. There is in some sense, a complexity in the shape of the letter R that makes it highly improbable, however, given the time you have spent observing them and all the random arrangements the ants have produced with their bodies, there is some degree of probability that the R appeared by chance, despite the fact that it has somewhat of a complex shape. No need to infer intelligence.

Now suppose you keep watching the ants at work and after a few minutes their bodies have taken the arrangement of the letters ROSSUM. This becomes more intriguing to you because the shapes of the letters are not merely complex but also specific because, you notice that the letters match precisely and specifically the letters of your name. This specified complexity of the letters, makes it highly improbable that the event happened by chance. Are you justified in inferring some kind of intelligence behind the action of the ants? Is there a better explanation? Do you need to have evidence of the agent before being justified in claiming there is “some kind” of intelligence at play here? Doesn’t the degree of the specified complexity in the letters warrant an inference to an intelligent agent?

What if, as the afternoon continues, you watch the ants continue to build new letters on the sidewalk. As they work you recall that you tried to eradicate this anthill a week before using a pesticide that wasn’t as effective as you had hoped. An hour later the complete message from the ants comes through. It states, “ROSSUM WE WILL INVADE YOUR HOUSE AT MIDNIGHT!”

Notice this complete message is not only complex, not only highly specified as it uses many letters from the English alphabet but it has taken on a new quality in that the letters precisely match a functional and intended purpose, I.e, to communicate with you in response to your failed attempt at destroying the anthill.

Would you not agree that any explanation not entailing some kind of intelligence would fail despite the fact that you have no evidence for an “actor” other than the message itself?

Dembski and Meyer would both argue, I think, that this event, having specified and functional complexity to a degree that the probabilistic resources available - time, nature of ant brains and ant behaviour, would make an inference to intelligence “of some kind” behind this event not merely highly probable but definite. You would have to conclude there is some kind of intelligent agent behind this event even though you have no idea who or what the agent is.:banghead:

This shows that there are times that we are justified in inferring an intelligence, contrary to your claim, despite the fact that we have no independent evidence of the existence of the agent. The event itself is the evidence.

In his book Signature in the Cell, Stephen Meyer, develops a very cogent argument of precisely this kind to show that the complexity of the highly specific and functional information contained in cells could not have arisen without intelligence of some kind given the probabilistic resources available and the state of prebiotic chemistry and the laws of chemistry and physics. He provides strong biological, chemical and physical evidence throughout the book for a very difficult to deny conclusion.:newidea: