(March 11, 2021 at 12:23 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: The universe is designable—that's the claim that needs to be falsified.
I don't see how that could be falsified.
We could certainly argue that certain concepts of a designer are unlikely. If we set up the usual literalist, anthropomorphic demiurge as our concept of what a designer is, then the lack of evidence for such a thing gives us no reason to take it seriously. This is what most people who oppose the concept of design are thinking of, probably. Even so, it isn't falsified.
(We've seen before that some people on this forum are fuzzy on the concept of falsification. To be clear, what I mean is simply what Popper said. Falsification is showing that a thing is definitely absent or impossible. It is not a simple lack of evidence. So for example there is no evidence that the Loch Ness monster exists, and no reason to believe in it, but it has not been falsified. Because theoretically it could be hiding somewhere.)
The reason I think we can't definitively rule out a designer is that the human mind is limited. It may be that all the patterns we perceive in nature as design are not really design. I think that's likely. But that doesn't falsify design. It merely means we aren't seeing it correctly. An omnipotent and omniscient God would not be understandable in total to a human mind. Therefore its means and goals (if any) might well be unknowable.
God as the Ground of Being, who "designs" by emanating, or simply being, the Logos, is not a falsifiable proposition. It's neither provable nor falsifiable by science.
