Karlmarx
Member
• Rebuttal: Design Arguments
Claim:
Complexity indicates intelligent design.
Response:
1. This is an argument from incredulity. Complexity usually means something is hard to understand. But the fact that one cannot understand how something came to be does not indicate that one may conclude it was designed. On the contrary, lack of understanding indicates that we must not conclude design or anything else.
Irreducible complexity and complex specified information are special cases of the "complexity indicates design" claim; they are also arguments from incredulity.
2. In the sort of design that we know about, simplicity is a design goal. Complexity arises to some extent through carelessness or necessity, but engineers work to make things as simple as possible. This is very different from what we see in life.
3. Complexity arises from natural causes: for example, in weather patterns and cave formations.
4. Complexity is poorly defined.
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Claim:
Intelligent design has explanatory power. It accounts for a wide range of biological facts. This makes it scientific.
Response:
1. Merely accounting for facts does not make a theory scientific. Saying "it's magic" can account for any fact anywhere but is as far from science as you can get. A theory has explanatory power if facts can be deduced from it. No facts have ever been deduced from ID theory. The theory is equivalent to saying, "it's magic."
2. "Intelligent" and "design" remain effectively undefined. A theory cannot have explanatory power if it is uncertain what the theory says in the first place.
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Claim:
Life looks intelligently designed because of its complexity and arrangement. As a watch implies a watchmaker, so life requires a designer.
Response:
1. Nobody argues that life is complicated. However, complexity is not the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and complex things that originate naturally. Complexity does not imply design; in fact, simplicity is a design goal in most designs.
2. In most cases, the inference of design is made because people cannot envision an alternative. This is simply an argument from incredulity. Historically, supernatural design has been attributed to lots of things that we now know form naturally, such as lightning, rainbows, and seasons.
3. Life as a whole looks very undesigned by human standards, for several reasons:
In known design, innovations that occur in one product quickly get incorporated into other, often very different, products. In eukaryotic life, innovations generally stay confined in one lineage. When the same sort of innovation occurs in different lineages (such as webs of spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners), the details of their implementation differ in the different lineages. When one traces lineages, one sees a great difference between life and design. (Eldredge has done this, comparing trilobites and cornets; Walker 2003.)
In design, form typically follows function. Yet life shows many examples of different forms with the same function (e.g., different structures making up the wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls; different organs for making webs in spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners; and at least eleven different types of insect ears), the same basic form with different functions (e.g., the same pattern of bones in a human hand, whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing) and some structures and even entire organisms without apparent function (e.g., some vestigial organs, creatures living isolated in inaccessible caves and deep underground).
As mentioned above, life is complex. Design aims for simplicity.
For almost all designed objects, the manufacture of the object is separate from any function of the object itself. All living objects reproduce themselves.
Life lacks plan. There are no specifications of living structures and processes. Genes do not fully describe the phenotype of an organism. Sometimes in the absence of genes, structure results anyway. Organisms, unlike designed systems, are self-constructing in an environmental context.
Life is wasteful. Most organisms do not reproduce, and most fertilized zygotes die before growing much. A designed process would be expected to minimize this waste.
Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of parts that were used for another purpose. These are what we would expect from evolution, not from an intelligent designer. For example vertebrate eyes have a blind spot because the retinal nerves are in front of the photoreceptors. Orchids that provide a platform for pollinating insects to land on, the stem of the flower has a half twist to move the platform to the lower side of the flower.
Life is highly variable. In almost every species, there is a spread of values for anything you care to measure. The "information" that specifies life is of very low tolerance in engineering terms. There are few standards.
4. Life is nasty. If life is designed, then death, disease, and decay also must be designed since they are integral parts of life. This is a standard problem of apologetics. Of course, many designed things are also nasty (think of certain weapons), but if the designer is supposed to have moral standards, then it is added support against the design hypothesis.
5. The process of evolution can be considered a design process, and the complexity and arrangement we see in life are much closer to what we would expect from evolution than from known examples of intelligent design. Indeed, engineers now use essentially the same processes as evolution to find solutions to problems that would be intractably complex otherwise.
6. Does evolution itself look designed? When you consider that some sort of adaptive mechanism would be necessary on the changing earth if life were to survive, then if life were designed, evolution or something like it would have to be designed into it.
7. Claiming to be able to recognize design in life implies that nonlife is different, that is, not designed. To claim that life is recognisably designed is to claim that an intelligent designer did not create the rest of the universe.
8. As it stands, the design claim makes no predictions, so it is unscientific and useless. It has generated no research at all.
Sorry, but your design argument is just as plausible as saying the universe is only a few thousand years old..
Claim:
Complexity indicates intelligent design.
Response:
1. This is an argument from incredulity. Complexity usually means something is hard to understand. But the fact that one cannot understand how something came to be does not indicate that one may conclude it was designed. On the contrary, lack of understanding indicates that we must not conclude design or anything else.
Irreducible complexity and complex specified information are special cases of the "complexity indicates design" claim; they are also arguments from incredulity.
2. In the sort of design that we know about, simplicity is a design goal. Complexity arises to some extent through carelessness or necessity, but engineers work to make things as simple as possible. This is very different from what we see in life.
3. Complexity arises from natural causes: for example, in weather patterns and cave formations.
4. Complexity is poorly defined.
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Claim:
Intelligent design has explanatory power. It accounts for a wide range of biological facts. This makes it scientific.
Response:
1. Merely accounting for facts does not make a theory scientific. Saying "it's magic" can account for any fact anywhere but is as far from science as you can get. A theory has explanatory power if facts can be deduced from it. No facts have ever been deduced from ID theory. The theory is equivalent to saying, "it's magic."
2. "Intelligent" and "design" remain effectively undefined. A theory cannot have explanatory power if it is uncertain what the theory says in the first place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Claim:
Life looks intelligently designed because of its complexity and arrangement. As a watch implies a watchmaker, so life requires a designer.
Response:
1. Nobody argues that life is complicated. However, complexity is not the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and complex things that originate naturally. Complexity does not imply design; in fact, simplicity is a design goal in most designs.
2. In most cases, the inference of design is made because people cannot envision an alternative. This is simply an argument from incredulity. Historically, supernatural design has been attributed to lots of things that we now know form naturally, such as lightning, rainbows, and seasons.
3. Life as a whole looks very undesigned by human standards, for several reasons:
In known design, innovations that occur in one product quickly get incorporated into other, often very different, products. In eukaryotic life, innovations generally stay confined in one lineage. When the same sort of innovation occurs in different lineages (such as webs of spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners), the details of their implementation differ in the different lineages. When one traces lineages, one sees a great difference between life and design. (Eldredge has done this, comparing trilobites and cornets; Walker 2003.)
In design, form typically follows function. Yet life shows many examples of different forms with the same function (e.g., different structures making up the wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls; different organs for making webs in spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners; and at least eleven different types of insect ears), the same basic form with different functions (e.g., the same pattern of bones in a human hand, whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing) and some structures and even entire organisms without apparent function (e.g., some vestigial organs, creatures living isolated in inaccessible caves and deep underground).
As mentioned above, life is complex. Design aims for simplicity.
For almost all designed objects, the manufacture of the object is separate from any function of the object itself. All living objects reproduce themselves.
Life lacks plan. There are no specifications of living structures and processes. Genes do not fully describe the phenotype of an organism. Sometimes in the absence of genes, structure results anyway. Organisms, unlike designed systems, are self-constructing in an environmental context.
Life is wasteful. Most organisms do not reproduce, and most fertilized zygotes die before growing much. A designed process would be expected to minimize this waste.
Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of parts that were used for another purpose. These are what we would expect from evolution, not from an intelligent designer. For example vertebrate eyes have a blind spot because the retinal nerves are in front of the photoreceptors. Orchids that provide a platform for pollinating insects to land on, the stem of the flower has a half twist to move the platform to the lower side of the flower.
Life is highly variable. In almost every species, there is a spread of values for anything you care to measure. The "information" that specifies life is of very low tolerance in engineering terms. There are few standards.
4. Life is nasty. If life is designed, then death, disease, and decay also must be designed since they are integral parts of life. This is a standard problem of apologetics. Of course, many designed things are also nasty (think of certain weapons), but if the designer is supposed to have moral standards, then it is added support against the design hypothesis.
5. The process of evolution can be considered a design process, and the complexity and arrangement we see in life are much closer to what we would expect from evolution than from known examples of intelligent design. Indeed, engineers now use essentially the same processes as evolution to find solutions to problems that would be intractably complex otherwise.
6. Does evolution itself look designed? When you consider that some sort of adaptive mechanism would be necessary on the changing earth if life were to survive, then if life were designed, evolution or something like it would have to be designed into it.
7. Claiming to be able to recognize design in life implies that nonlife is different, that is, not designed. To claim that life is recognisably designed is to claim that an intelligent designer did not create the rest of the universe.
8. As it stands, the design claim makes no predictions, so it is unscientific and useless. It has generated no research at all.
Sorry, but your design argument is just as plausible as saying the universe is only a few thousand years old..
