The Watchmaker: my fav argument

[Belacqua]

We can discover what is designable by simply designing it. It is this attempt at replication that constrains designability, just like graspability is constrained by our inability to grasp a wall.

Sorry I'm slow to respond to this. These are new ideas to me and require a certain amount of pondering. 

There's a word I can't remember right now for when people take existing technology and take it apart to find out how it works. (Reverse engineering, maybe?) It's kind of the opposite of designing, in that somebody else has designed it and the engineers are looking at the results. Once they know how it works, then they can re-do the process of manufacture -- designing the steps to manufacture the thing. 

So I'm thinking that if we look at a tree, for example, and we ask "is this designable?" the process is along those lines. We can figure out how the tree got that way, and then recreate that system. Cook up DNA in a lab, maybe, and tweak it so it grows into a viable tree. 

I think it would be stretching things to call what we do there designing. We know that we can recreate what has already happened, but that doesn't necessarily prove that the thing is designable in the first place. Anything will seem designable, once we already know how it's made. 

Then there's the much larger question of the whole shebang together. The tree is never an independent thing, but something integrated into a full ecology and evolutionary process. So more than just the tree, we might need to wonder whether that whole thing is designable. 

2. And specifically, is simulation a valid form of testing? This is important because we cannot create matter, but we can simulate it. Is that enough?

That's an important distinction. I think when most people talk about intelligent design, they are thinking of a new construction out of existing matter. This is more something I can imagine testing and reproducing. 

But obviously, human beings are incapable of creating matter itself. Or space/time, or matter/energy, or whatever they're calling Aristotle's Prime Matter these days. So any simulation that we run would have to begin with the idea that matter is already extant. Or maybe another way to say it is that we'd have to start some small amount of time after the Big Bang. 

I think that given enough computer power it would be possible, theoretically, to simulate extremely primitive conditions that evolve into complicated living things and societies. We could design stuff in this sense. 

I still don't see where falsifiability is possible, though. Because even if we run a zillion simulations and fail to come up with some particular item, that doesn't falsify it in Popper's sense. It might allow us to conclude that it's extremely unlikely, but wouldn't show it's impossible. 

And then there's the assumed gap between human abilities and God's. Just because we can't design a particular thing ever even in theory, doesn't mean that a God couldn't. 

So I think we could make certain things more or less credible, more or less easy to believe given the laws of nature, but I don't see yet how we can falsify designability.