Intelligent Design: Did you design yourself?

[Angrboda]

A) We differentiate designed from not designed by experience. If in our experience a kind of thing is always the result of intelligent design and never the result of natural processes, we can categorize those kinds of things as being intelligently designed.

This is not how we identify design. This is an inductive argument that if things are like those things that are designed, then there is a probability that those things also were designed. Yet the only way that you've identified a designed lineage is by knowing its history. If that's what you mean by "experience" then it's a dry well, as we don't know the history of the seemingly naturally occurring lineage of life on earth. Can we look to similarity of construction? No we can't, as all artificial lineages of life created so far, and likely to be, are copies of the existing lineage, so what the artificial life looks like tells us nothing about what a lineage created de nuovo would look like. All artificial lineages created on the model of "natural" life would also be thus tainted. So your first premise doesn't lead to where you want it to go.

Moreover, this is just the abiogenesis / evolution dichotomy in cloaked form. No, I don't know where this current "natural" lineage came from. I never claimed I did, despite your asserting that I have. What I do know is that the development of life in this lineage can be explained by natural processes, even if its origin has not been explained.

Besides the problems with your first premise, judging which origin a lineage has based on the origin of known created lineages again is merely an inductive argument that most X are Y, therefore a new X is also likely Y. Yet there may be reasons why all X are Y that doesn't hold for this other X, and being purposely created as an imitation of the X is one such reason. You don't know that life created de nuovo would have any of the characteristics of life as it exists because nobody is coming close to accomplishing that feat, and may never be able to do so given that we are tainted by knowledge of this lineage.

You've constructed a clever argument to cloak the abiogenesis problem in new robes, but at the end of the day that's all it is. And your claiming that we know something is designed by "experience" by knowing that all things of its "kind" are also designed is a claim which doesn't ring true. We identify the "lineages" you've identified by knowing the history. We identify stone tools by a variety of factors, but them only being created by artifice isn't the main or only one. You're simply wrong. For more on why your argument from "experience" is wrong, see my previous thread debunking this line of reasoning.

On the appearance of design