Overwhelming evidence for Design?

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Peter_Plato said:
The arguments that are being used to counter the intrinsic purpose concept are classic logical fallacies. Yours is a fallacy known as the “thin edge of a wedge” fallacy, meaning that we cannot have distinct entities if there is a series of small steps that distinguish them. Since there is no exact point to establish the difference does not entail there is no difference. (Slippery slope, thin edge of the wedge or camel’s nose fallacy)

You are, in principle, denying that your internal world corresponds in any way with the external one. We have no reason to deny any of the reality of the external world just because we have an internal concept of it. Our concept may in fact correspond quite nicely with the external reality. You haven’t shown that it necessarily doesn’t, except as an assumption.

This together with your first quote, are nonsense, they are like claiming that in order for a concept of a hammer to be meaningful, each hammer must be made up of millions of little hammers or the concept hammer has no meaning. This is an example of the composition fallacy.

Your assumption is that our internal world can have no correspondence with the external world and that any concept we have cannot correspond with the external reality of what is. That is just a flat out assumption. You have no way of knowing the external world is not comprised of universals. Our projecting concepts onto the world may in fact be correct because there may be universal concepts there to derive our internal concepts from. The premise for your world view is your preference but not one that needs to be accepted for any compelling reason.
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👍 The success of science is overwhelming evidence that our concepts of external reality are not only correct but also incredibly accurate.
 
Purposes, a.k.a. final causes, are the sources of order in nature. It is by relying on this order that the mind is entitled to make those generalizations concerning those regularities which we call scientific laws: such as, for example, Coulomb’s law in electrostatics; Ohm’s law governing the flow of current; the gas laws of chemistry. And though such laws may be only approximations, they could not be formulated in quasi-universal scope unless nature were ordered and unless nature were following out that plan or pattern which is purpose. Induction, or the procession to a universal truth grounded upon our experience with only a relatively few particulars, depends on purpose. It is precisely because because of purpose that we are provided with a framework within which more specialized investigations can logically proceed. It is only in the knowledge that there is order and purpose, that inductive generalizations, properly tested, can be logically justified. Unless there is necessity in natural events, and hence some assurance that these events will always tend to happen in the same way, there is no basis for inductive generalization.

God bless,
jd
 
prodigalson2011 said:
Am I making straw men, or is your house just built of straw? 🤷

And your argument against it has been that hammers are composed of smaller things that do not possess that essence.
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I never said that a hammer is not an essence on the grounds that it is made of smaller things.

Like i said strawman.

I am saying that a hammer is a concept that we apply to a suitable object.
 
tonyrey said:
All materialism can do, and ever has done, is assert, prematurely and without support, that everything is in principle accessible to science, and therefore must fall under the auspices of inscrutable matter. Until unequivocal evidence of the identity and **direct action **of this purposeless force is presented, Unintelligent Design, as a theory of reality, has nothing going for it - unless one is prepared to declare that everything is fundamentally absurd, thereby destroying the validity of one’s conclusion…
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Repeating my argument with your own substitutions doesn’t do anything for your case in this regard - scientific investigation will continue as long as reality demonstrates itself to be susceptible to scientific explanation. Unequivocal evidence of the existence and direct action of blind, impersonal forces has been presented, in every field of scientific endeavour. What has never, ever been demonstrated is that these forces are directed or controlled by any personal entity. The entirety of the ID assertion is based upon the existence of gaps in scientific knowledge.

If there is actual evidence of design, scientific investigation will uncover it. What won’t uncover it is the assertion made by ID ‘theorists’ that such-and-such a phenomenon “can’t” be explained by science, before thorough investigation has even been undertaken. It’s almost as if such people don’t actually want anyone to find out how all these supposedly “irreducibly complex” phenomena actually came about. If nobody knows, the ID proponent can assert his or her pet supernaturalist theory.

At the end of the day, there is no necessity for the universe itself to have a purpose. It simply is. Purpose, from everything we have thus far been able to discern, requires the evolution of intelligent, subjective, self-directed beings who can develop and imagine their own purposes.
 
ReapReason said:
I never said that a hammer is not an essence on the grounds that it is made of smaller things.

Like i said strawman.

I am saying that a hammer is a concept that we apply to a suitable object.
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That is pure nonsense. Again, I can say the same of atoms, which you claim have an objective essence. “Atom” is a concept we apply to a suitable object, I.e. one that has the properties of an atom. But that’s just another way of saying an atom is an atom.

You are attempting to reduce a reality to its corresponding concept. Yes, we do have a concept of a hammer, in the same way we have concepts of atoms, God or anything else. But for the hammer as well as the atom, there are external realities that correspond to those concepts.

Let me try this another way. There are objective criteria for defining a hammer:
  1. it is a man made object.
  2. it consists of 2 perpendicular sections
  3. the top section is shorter and wider and more dense/heavy than the lower section
  4. the lower section is much longer but lighter than the top section
    5)the bottom section is thin and long enough to be gripped by a human hand
  5. just for emphasis, it is a man made object clearly intended towards the end of creating a fulcrum of concentrated force
If it meets these terms, it is a hammer.
 
ReapReason said:
Whatever achieves the pushing of nails in to wood.
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That is a faulty, incomplete, partial, reductive definition of a hammer. That is as if I were to say that the definition of a dog is something that walks on 4 legs. There is more to a dog than its quadripedality and there is more to a hammer than its ability to drive nails.

You can eat rice with a fork or a spoon, but there are still clear physical (objective) distinctions between the two.

Once again, this is a glaring example of the kind of absurd reductionism that has been fueling your arguments.
 
prodigalson2011 said:
That is pure nonsense. Again, I can say the same of atoms, which you claim have an objective essence. “Atom” is a concept we apply to a suitable object, I.e. one that has the properties of an atom. But that’s just another way of saying an atom is an atom.
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An atom is not just a concept that we apply to a suitable object. The nature of Atoms are known by their natural activity, in so much as we discover them according to their natural behaviour. The existence of this nature makes sense of the effects that we discover.

The natural behaviour of the object that you call a hammer is not the pushing in of nails. That activity you ascribe to the object is merely your imaginative implementation; and nothing else. Unlike the natural behaviour of an atom, your are imposing that activity on the object. The object Itself does not have that activity by its own nature or natural end, or final cause.

Saying that there is a specific essence in reality that has the intrinsic nature of hammering nails into wood is ridiculous. You have desired goal, and you found an object that can you can use to achieve that goal efficiently. That doest mean that the objective final cause of that object is pushing in nails.

Nothing you have said has proven otherwise.
 
tonyrey said:
  1. The belief that nothing is intrinsically purposeful is based on materialism - which maintains that everything is composed of purposeless elements.
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False. I base my belief that there is no intrinsic purpose in anything on Buddhism, Madhyamika Buddhism to be precise.

You will need to find a better argument. This one falls at the first hurdle.

rossum
 
Peter_Plato said:
The arguments that are being used to counter the intrinsic purpose concept are classic logical fallacies. Yours is a fallacy known as the “thin edge of a wedge” fallacy, meaning that we cannot have distinct entities if there is a series of small steps that distinguish them. Since there is no exact point to establish the difference does not entail there is no difference. (Slippery slope, thin edge of the wedge or camel’s nose fallacy)
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I am Buddhist, and I do not accept the existence of “entities” in the same way that I suspect you do. Here is a quote, not Buddhist, which illustrates the issue:

Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).
  • Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes the Memorious”.
Are those dogs the same? No they are not, one is older than the other. Some cells have died while other cells have grown. There are changes between the two dogs, and we are in principle able to distinguish between them. Buddhism emphasises change over continuity. What appears to be a continuous dog, is in face a series of different dogs, linked in a chain of causation. A bit like the series of still images in a film gives the illusion of motion. The motion is an illusion, nothing in any of the images is actually moving. Similarly the unchanging dog is an illusion, there is only a series if brief instantaneous dogs, all different.

The fixed unchanging dog is the model in our brain. It is a reasonable working approximation of reality, but it is only an approximation. Properties of the model may or may not apply to the real world. Both have four legs, but only one does not change.
You are, in principle, denying that your internal world corresponds in any way with the external one. We have no reason to deny any of the reality of the external world just because we have an internal concept of it. Our concept may in fact correspond quite nicely with the external reality. You haven’t shown that it necessarily doesn’t, except as an assumption.
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Our internal model is a reasonably good approximation of reality. It is not exact. There are things present in reality that are absent from our model, and vice versa. For example, we cannot smell the dog as well as it can smell itself. Our model of the smell of the dog must be lacking. Because we are limited by our senses, our models of reality have to be imperfect and limited.

Think about the process of seeing the dog. Light reflects from the dog and enters our eyes. There some of the light (we cannot sense ultra-violet or infra-red) is converted into electrical impulses in our optic nerve. Those impulses reach the brain, where they are matched with previously observed patterns of impulses and our brain recognises a match to the “dog” model. Also to the “quadruped”, “mammal”, “animal” etc. models. It may also recognise a model like “spaniel” within the general “dog” model. Our brain constructs a great many models in multiple hierarchies. The sensory process maps external reality onto our internal models. However, it is always a mapping between two different things. We do not have real dogs inside our brain. The real dog is unknowable because we cannot sense the real dog. Our imperfect senses give rise to imperfect models. We cannot actually observe the differences between the dog at three fourteen and the dog at three fifteen.
Your assumption is that our internal world can have no correspondence with the external world and that any concept we have cannot correspond with the external reality of what is. That is just a flat out assumption.
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I do not assume that. Our internal models have an approximate correspondence with external reality; close enough to enable us to function and survive in the real world. It is an error to think that the models are exact, because our senses only give us imperfect information. Eagles would probably see a fuzzy blur if they looked through our eyes. Our sense of smell is grossly inferior to that of dogs. Bees can see ultra-violet while we cannot. Our models have to be approximate, they cannot be otherwise.
You have no way of knowing the external world is not comprised of universals.
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I can observe change in the external world. Do universals change? Do the “universal hammer” or the “universal dog” change? Real dogs change. Real hammers change. As I said above, Buddhism emphasises change. Since the real world changes, then any correct analysis of the real world must include change. It seems to me that a lot of Western philosophy sees the world as fundamentally unchanging with a veneer of apparent change overlaid on top. Buddhism reverses that. Change is fundamental, while any apparent stasis is mere appearance. For convenience, our internal models of slowly changing things tend to be static, rather than changing, which is I suspect the source of the error. We handle slow change by using different static models: “puppy”, “adult dog”, “old dog”. As I said, our models are an approximation to reality, which is continuously changing.

One function of Buddhist meditation is to work at distinguishing between what is actually coming in through our senses, and what is being overlaid onto the raw sense data by our brains and their internal models.

rossum
 
rossum said:
Are those dogs the same? No they are not, one is older than the other. Some cells have died while other cells have grown. There are changes between the two dogs, and we are in principle able to distinguish between them. Buddhism emphasises change over continuity. What appears to be a continuous dog, is in face a series of different dogs, linked in a chain of causation. A bit like the series of still images in a film gives the illusion of motion. The motion is an illusion, nothing in any of the images is actually moving. Similarly the unchanging dog is an illusion, there is only a series if brief instantaneous dogs, all different.

rossum
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This assumes that a single dog in order to be the same dog over time cannot change, which is merely a metaphysical assumption dressed up as some esoteric mystical truth. Who says the dog must be the same down to the very last atom or it becomes a different dog rather than being the same dog with slight modifications? That would mean having a different idea has made you an entirely different person.

Your philosophy is reminiscent of Kant’s “thing in itself,” but there is nothing to compel us to make a philosophical commitment to the radical unchangeableness of things in order to retain the identity of what they are in reality. That is imposing a concept of your own on reality in the same way you claim western philosophy does. It’s just a different concept, one that says things must be immutable to remain the same. I reject that concept. A dog is the same dog because it persists through time with expected changes. A few changes in atomic structure do not make it a different dog. Its “dogness” is inherent in the intelligibleness of the universe, which may not be fully known, but enough is to make our knowledge functionally correct.
 
Peter_Plato said:
I am glad hardware stores do not share your philosophy. The hammer aisle would by cluttered with functionally inelegant solutions.
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The efficiency of a solution is irrelevant to the question of whether or not there is a being that has the objective teleological essence of pushing nails in to wood.

You simply do not understand what it means for something to have an objective teleology.
 
ReapReason said:
  1. We know atoms exist because we have measured the activity intrinsic to their nature and being. We have then labelled that particular kind of activity with the word atoms.
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We know hammers exist because we have measured the activity intrinsic to their nature and being (size, weight, momentum, impact force). We have then labelled that particular kind of activity with the word hammer.

Ergo a hammer has status en par with atoms in the real world.

In fact the definition of hammer is so tight as to allow distinctions between different types. We could not do that if the concept of hammer was so open as to allow anything used to strike another object to be called a hammer, except loosely speaking.

*The essential part of a hammer is the head, a compact solid mass that is able to deliver the blow to the intended target without itself deforming.
The opposite side may have a ball, as in the ball-peen hammer and the cow hammer. Some upholstery hammers have a magnetized appendage, to pick up tacks. In the hatchet the hammer head is secondary to the cutting edge of the tool.
The claw of a hammer is frequently used to remove nails.
In recent years the handles have been made of durable plastic or rubber. The hammer varies at the top; some are larger than others giving a larger surface area to hit different sized nails and such.
Popular hand-powered variations include:
Ball-peen hammer, or mechanic’s hammer
Carpenter’s hammers (used for nailing), such as the framing hammer and the claw hammer
Construction hammers, including the sledgehammer
Cross-peen hammer, or Warrington hammer
Drilling hammer - a lightweight, short handled sledgehammer
Gavel, used by judges and presiding authorities in general
Geologist’s hammer or rock pick
Knife-edged hammer, its properties developed to aid a hammerer the act of slicing whilst bludgeoning
Lump hammer, or club hammer
Mallets, including the rubber hammer and dead blow hammer
Soft-faced hammer
Splitting maul
Stonemason’s hammer
Tinner’s Hammer
Upholstery hammer
From Wikipedia entry on hammer
*​

A bowl of jelly is not a hammer even if I try to use it as such.

Whether an object is a human made artifact or occurs naturally in the world, is not a deciding factor as to whether it really exists or not. Whether an object’s teleology is human contrived or part of the natural order does not make a difference as to its verifiable teleology.

This thread has wandered off into a territory called Irrelevant Nebulocity.
 
Peter_Plato said:
We know hammers exist because we have measured the activity intrinsic to their nature and being (size, weight, momentum, impact force). We have then labelled that particular kind of activity with the word hammer.
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This is just fallacious word play posing as a rational argument. You are simply ignoring what I have said. The idea of a hammer is conceived according to what we want to “use it for”. Nothing more. The materials that constitute the objects you use for “hammering” in nails are used for the efficiency of what ever particular project we define as being pragmatically rewarding. The object by itself, does not naturally act to the end of hammering in nails; it is not an objective or intrinsic essence or identity. You merely impose the activity of hammering in nails upon it, because you find it useful to do so. It is not by itself a hammer.

Like I said in the last post: "*The natural behaviour of the object that you call a hammer is not the pushing in of nails. That activity you ascribe to the object is merely your imaginative implementation; and nothing else. Unlike the natural behaviour of an atom, your are imposing that activity on the object. The object Itself does not have that activity by its own nature or natural end, or final cause.

Saying that there is a specific essence in reality that has the intrinsic nature of hammering nails into wood is ridiculous. You have a desired goal, and you found an object that can you can use to achieve that goal efficiently. That doest mean that the objective final cause of that object is pushing in nails.* "

End of story.
Ergo a hammer has status en par with atoms in the real world.
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Rubbish. An atoms activity is a natural and intrinsic function of its nature and being. We do not impose its activity upon it. We do not give it its essential nature or identity. We are not God.
 
Peter_Plato said:
This thread has wandered off into a territory called Irrelevant Nebulocity.
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Teaching you the difference between Gods creativity and man’s creativity is not irrelevant to the question of teleology. However, it is perhaps a waste of time if the student is either incapable of understanding or too full of pride to see his or her own mistake.
 
ReapReason said:
Rubbish. An atoms activity is a natural and intrinsic function of its nature and being. We do not impose its activity upon it. We do not give it its essential nature or identity. We are not God.
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We don’t need to be God to have an objective effect on reality. We are part of the natural world so any way that we change reality is a real change on it, that includes adding objective teleological function into the natural world. A hammer, conceived and manufactured by human activity is as real a part of the natural order as any object or particle that was there before. It does not become “unreal” merely because it was made by a human being. Aye! There’s the rub(bish)!
 
ReapReason said:
Teaching you the difference between Gods creativity and man’s creativity is not irrelevant to the question of teleology. However, it is perhaps a waste of time if the student is either incapable of understanding or too full of pride to see his or her own mistake.
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Human creativity may be an instrument for God’s creativity. After all, we are here, creative capacities and all, as part of God’s fiat. Humans are not a figment of your imagination with no connection to the creativity of God. We are real and part of the natural order. Who gave you the right and power to divorce us from that? Are you God to overrule what God has done? Speaking of pride… Or do you think we are God’s mistake?
 
A hammer, conceived and manufactured by human activity is as real a part of the natural order as any object or particle that was there before. It does not become “unreal” merely because it was made by a human being.
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The object we use as a hammer is real. However a hammer is merely a functional concept, it is purely abstract; it is not an objective nature or essence. I made this irrefutably clear in the part of my post you conveniently left out of your quote.
 
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