Intelligent design: could we do better?

[Angrboda]

One of my former lovers was infertile. She couldn't bear children. I can. That doesn't make me smarter.

I don't worry first about the explanation of apparent design first, but rather simply what it means for something to "appear" to be designed? Akincana, please point me to your definition of what it means for something to "appear" to be designed. I am aware of no useful definition of this idea. William Dembski has written volumes on the subject (and, IIRC, he's degreed in both math and philosophy), and his definitions of it are crap. (Even if you ignore the glaring non sequitur at the heart of his work.) I don't anticipate you will be capable of satisfactorily satisfying this request, as it's quite apparent that you've spent an inordinate amount of your time in intellectual sewers. But I must still ask. (And no, archeologists do not identify human artifacts by the "appearance" of design, so don't even go there.)



The problem with many beauty and design arguments (beyond the galloping logic errors, imprecise analogy and metaphor, and the frequent attempt to substitute ill thought out linguistic structures replete with self reference, ambiguity and meaningless quim in place of actual argument), is that life is like looking at things through a telescope. Not an astronomer's telescope, but akin to a Mariner's looking glass. Turn the scope around, and everything gets small. Turn it to the side, and you see nothing. Look over the top and things are neither farther nor nearer as when looking through it. This is the same with life. We can look at things one way, turn it around, and it appears exactly the opposite.

(In a recent post on another forum, someone posted Hamlet, about a play signifying nothing; I replied with what a work is man, a diametrically opposite notion, but I engaged in contextomy, as the lines that follow revert to a gloomy and pessimistic perspective on it. This took place in the context of a thread in which we were talking about Atheism-Plus — mocking it to be sure — and the Hamlet quote was a pessimistic remark about how the worst in people is always waiting to come out.) For every thing that you find good and noble, there is your mirror who finds it bad and terrible. And visa-versa.

The Tao Te Ching has many powerful meditations on this theme. (Zhuangzi does as well, but he kicks it up a level; it seems a bit early in the tradition, but I suspect the authors of the Zhuangzi were reacting to a nascent legalism school of philosophy.) There's a Franglish saying that one man's fish is another man's poisson. It is indeed.

And it's true, there is no consistency in thought or ideology across the spectrum. How is this possible? We're all looking at the same reality, so why do these divergent reactions arise? Is it a part of the deep nature of the world that things are both good and bad simultaneously, and just timing, exposure to others' thought, and some mathematical oddity coalesce to make our views on its goodness or badness merely contingent? I don't think so. I think the better explanation is that the mind itself is the telescope, and its ability to look at things backwards or forwards, is not a flaw, but a strength. Our minds are powerful enough to extract both sides of the coin from the same experience, so that each view on reality can yield different, but still useful truths. The mind is the telescope or looking glass. And if someone asks you to see beauty, or design, or order, ask them which end of the telescope they're looking in.